How to Get Started with Live Chat

As with all new technologies, live chat can be daunting to start. When considering implementing live chat, it’s easy to get distracted and never move forward. This article will cover the basics on what you need to think about to get started right away.

Getting Started with Live Chat - 5 Crucial Elements 

So how do you go about getting started with serving your customers via live chat? Let’s look at the 5 most important things you need to put in place.

1. Create a manual

One of the first things you need to consider before launching your live chat service is to create a manual that your live chat agents will follow.

While it’s easy to tell your live chat agent to study your website and products, it’s not good enough. For the sake of uniformity and conveying your business's personality, you need to design a manual that all your agents will follow.

Here are some things you can include in your manual:

Answers to the most commonly asked questions. Giving your live chat agents the answers to the most commonly asked questions helps them respond faster to queries without having to think about what they will say.

Customer support hierarchy. There are some situations that your live chat agents may not be able to handle. In such instances, they need to know who to bring in to help the customer.

How to be personable and approachable. It’s important for you and your agents to know how to answer questions in a warm and personable tone. This encourages customers to interact more freely with you. 

2. Get your branding right

Another important aspect of live chat you need to make sure you get bright is the branding. It’s important that your chat box fits in seamlessly with the rest of your website. It needs to blend in yet at the same time it must easily be discoverable.

To achieve this, make sure to use your brand colors for your chat box, but with a little contrast.

3. Craft an impactful greeting

The way you greet your customers online has as a great an impact as it would in the physical. You need to craft a greeting that disarms your customers of any fears or insecurity that they may have. Your greeting must be:

• Friendly
• Polite
• Empathetic

Infusing these qualities in your greeting will make your customers feel like they are talking to their best friend. The result, for you, will be high customer satisfaction rates. It will also increase the chances of your customers referring you to their friends.

4. Establish your brand’s tone

While tone is mainly associated with sound, it has come to become much broader with the advent of the different chat mediums we have today. When it comes to live chat, tone refers to the way in which you portray your brand’s personality. 

For example, brands that mainly serve a younger generation may decide to be “hip” and savvy in the way they communicate with their customers. On the other hand, brands that deal with the older generation usually choose a communication style that’s more formal. 

5. Use a relevant avatar for your chatbot

One thing customers don’t enjoy, it’s talking to a robot. Using a robot as your avatar discourages conversations. Instead, use human a face (with a smile) as this lets your customers know that they are chatting to a real human being who understands them.

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.