Does Your Business Need 24/7 Live Chat Support?

Many small businesses are seeing benefits from live chat and can take that to the next level with 24/7 live chat support.

Of the many benefits of adding live chat to your website, one of the most exciting is the concept of “making money while you sleep.” Maybe not truly making money for most, but still, the idea of waking up the next day to seeing transcripts of chats with warm leads would be a nice dream for many businesses.

For this reason, small businesses are adding 24/7 live chat to their websites so that their leads and customers are getting responses all hours, every day. Live chat is a way to serve potential customers, and answer questions without devoting your staff’s time. So why not keep live chat open even during off-hours?

If you are thinking about 24/7 live chat, there are a few options to think about.

What Does Support Look Like During Normal Hours?

First, how smooth is your lead generation process during peak hours? If you have a dialed-in system that doesn’t rely on micromanaging from staff, you are more likely ready to explore off hours.

Live chat is a powerful tool and part of your existing sales process. You should be able to analyze how users are interacting with your website. Do they prefer to jump into a chat? Or do many still pick up the phone?

If you are getting significant use out of live chat already, you may want to extend the hours you have it available as an option.

How Hands-On is Your Live Chat?

Live chat is a broad term that has a wide variety of methods for execution. Some teams use live chat simply as a way to communicate with visitors on their website.

Other companies are hands-off, using outsourced chat agents and AI chatbots to communicate with the visitors.

Obviously, going to 24/7 live chat support requires you to be hands-off with your use of live chat, at least to some extent. It either means using bots for answering questions, qualifying and capturing information, and scheduling appointments. Or, it means using chat agents that are available during off-hours. In Smith.ai's case, we use both, combined, for the best possible experience.

Is 24/7 Chat Support Necessary?

Ultimately, the decision to go to 24/7 should be a given. What's the point in risking losing even one lead late at night, when you can have the opportunity to capture it. And if your live chat service charges flat per-chat prices, you'll only pay if someone on your site is interested anyway (note that Smith.ai Live Chat doesn't charge for spammers or sales chats).

If you have a global business, with many international customers, 24/7 live chat isn't just a bonus, it's essential. Take a look at your web traffic using Google Analytics. If you have spikes in traffic during what you consider off-hours, it could mean that you have an overseas audience, and they should expect the exact same service as someone in your time zone.

Live agents combined with AI technology can truly help your clients, day in and day out. Furthermore, truly excellent live chat agents can turn inquisitive web visitors into qualified leads by capturing contact information while guiding them in the right direction.

Smith.ai offers 24/7 fully staffed live chat service, with costs ranging from $5-7 per relevant chat.

Get started with Smith.ai Live Web Chat risk-free

It's time to try live chat on your website. Just one new client captured via chat can pay for a year (or more) of Smith.ai's live web chat service. We provide fully staffed live website chat with professional agents. Outsourced live chat is best for small businesses like law firms, e-commerce businesses, IT consultants, financial planners, property managers, realtors, and marketing agencies (to name just a few!).

Our live agents are highly skilled and can answer common questions about your business, qualify new leads, schedule appointments, take payments, and more. You stay in the loop when chat transcripts are sent to you after each conversation and logged in your CRM. There's no setup fee, services are month-to-month, and there's no annual contract. Plans start at just just $140/month and are risk-free with our 14-day money-back guarantee.