Five Live Chat Mistakes to Avoid When Chatting With New Sales Leads Online

Live chat is a great way to connect to your customers. At every stage of the buying journey, live chat is an invaluable tool for giving your customers the best journey possible.

However, done wrongly, live chat can cause you to lose your prospect and fail to seal the deal.

While much has been said about live chat best practices, little has been said about live chat mistakes to avoid when chatting with new sales leads online.

That’s why we have created this resource – to help you and your live chat agents avoid some potentially disastrous mistakes when chatting to sales leads.

Let’s get to it then, shall we?

5 Live Chat Mistakes to Avoid When Chatting with New Sales Leads Online

So what 5 live chat mistakes should you avoid when chatting to new sales leads?

1. Taking too long to respond

One of the main reasons your customers prefer to communicate with you via live chat is that they get help fast. Research shows that long waiting times is the biggest customer service. Over 30% of your customers don’t expect to wait at all.

Keeping your new sales lead waiting too long can frustrate them and lead them to turn to your competitors for help.

So how do you ensure your customers are taken care of in a timely manner? Here are a couple of suggestions:

• Keep frequently asked questions at hand
• Have dedicated live chat agents available 24/7

Every second you keep a sales lead waiting for a response paints a bad picture of your customer support and overall service delivery. So, avoid this live chat mistake at all times.

2. Failure to follow-through

Another disastrous live chat mistake to avoid when chatting with new sales leads is to live them hanging. When conversing with a sales lead on the phone, the end of the conversation is obvious. However, with live chat, it can be a bit tricky. The best way to make sure your lead understands that the conversation has ended is by following through and making sure your customer is satisfied. Always try to ensure that yours is the last message in the conversation.

3. Being reactive as opposed to being proactive

Many people cringe at the thought of selling. Some even use live chat as a crutch not to be proactive, after all the prospects will initiate the conversations, right?

Wrong.

Live chat services like Smith.ai have powerful analytics algorithms that are very useful for scoring leads. Leverage these and proactively reach out to warm prospects and increase your chances of closing sales. After all, sometimes all a visitor needs to make a buying decision is a gentle nudge in the right direction.

4. Not analyzing data

It’s a common occurrence for a lead to leave a live chat agent hanging and return later (even after weeks) to pick up the conversation. Besides checking up on chat history, it’s important to check all the data you have on the prospect. This will help you tailor personalized responses and offer relevant recommendations.  

5. Being too robotic

Finally, avoid being “robotic” in your responses. Even if you have a script to work with, infuse some personality into your conversations. Remember, people want to do business with other people. Therefore, by conveying your brand’s personality and showing empathy will help prospects feel more comfortable doing business with you.

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.

And if you want some extra sales support, try our Outreach Campaigns where we can call your lead lists and qualify the leads for you.