How to Add Live Chat to Your Website (Quick Guide)

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There are potential customers on your website as we speak; those people will surely have questions about your product, its features, use cases, and more (if they haven’t already). Is your sales team trained to answer those questions efficiently?

By using live chat, you can do just that – it can help you increase the effectiveness and efficiency of all communications with prospects and customers. Live chat allows your sales reps to address the right questions at the right time, ultimately increasing your sales and your ability to deliver an enjoyable customer experience.

Before we dive into the steps to add live chat to your website, you might be wondering what the difference is between live chat and chatbots. Let’s first cover the answer to that question.

Difference between live chat and a chatbot

So what is the difference between live chat and a chatbot?

A chatbot is an automated robot that can talk to your website visitors through planned or artificial intelligence-driven conversations. On the other hand, live chat takes place between the customer and a human representative of your company.

Both live chat and chatbots have a place in your strategy, and it’s best to find software that can do both. These strategies often work together. You can have a chatbot collect visitor information and send those leads to a live chat agent who can answer your visitor’s questions.

Live chat is a great sales strategy that you can implement so that you can generate new leads for your sales reps. Sales reps can answer questions quickly, while also having more time to discuss deals that are further along in the process.

Now let’s walk through the steps required to add live chat to your website:

1. Research and choose your live chat software.

There are many tools that allow you to chat with potential customers online in real time through live chat.

To identify your ideal tool, start by determining which live chat features are most important to you. Look for tools that have the features you’re most interested in (and at the price you’re looking for).

• Get your live chat up and running quickly and without the need for any code thanks to the built-in, easy-to-use chat builder.

• Customize the live chat widget to be branded and complement the rest of your website.

• Automatically save all live chat conversations with your contacts in the tool’s conversations inbox, as well as in the timeline of the contact you’re talking to, for easy record keeping and sharing.

• Create and add targeted welcome messages to your web pages (for example, when specific audience segments open your web pages), so you can connect with visitors when they’re already engaged with your website; this will increase the chances of a conversion.

• Carry out different types of interactions with prospects and customers ; specifically, you can reply to chats, schedule meetings, make calls, send emails, and schedule follow-up messages, all from the Conversation Inbox.

• Add chatbots to your web pages to save reps time: Chatbots can qualify leads, answer FAQs, book meetings, and more for you. (Chatbots can be customized as they can pull or reference contact information from your CRM’s contact database)

• Share your team’s online hours in chat if you don’t have representatives working 24/7 so visitors know when to return to your site for support.

• Integrate with your CRM to keep all customer interactions and records organized in one place.

2. Install live chat on your site and place it strategically on your web page.

Once you’ve selected your software, setup should be a breeze. Usually the live chat software you have chosen will give you a code snippet to copy and paste into the backend of your website. Most live chat programs will have step-by-step instructions that you can refer to as well.

Then strategically place your live chat widget on your web page(s). Do you want live chat on your blog and on your pricing page? Do you want it to appear when someone has been to a page right away or after a certain amount of time? Or do you want your live chat to exist on all your web pages with different greetings? Remember, your site visitors are at different stages of the buyer’s journey and require different things depending on the web page they’re on. For example, the live chat greeting on your Pricing page should be different than the greeting on your Contact Us page.

By tailoring your live chat strategy to the buyer’s journey, you’ll improve chat’s ability to effectively support the needs of visitors on that specific page.

3. Customize your live chat widget.

After your software installation, customize the appearance of the chat widget to match your website and be visually appealing.

Here are some aspects of your live chat widget that you can customize.

• The appearance of the widget.

• Widget welcome message.

• Widget language options.

4. Integrate live chat with your CRM (and other business tools).

When you’re researching live chat software, look for options that integrate with your other tools, including your CRM or sales software.

This will make all interactions more efficient (no jumping between tools and screens). The resulting communication logs, transcripts, and recordings are then automatically saved (and therefore easy to access, organize, and share).

5. Add sales reps to your live chat.

An important part of your process should be adding sales reps to your live chat. Once live chat is set up, it will automatically assign chats to sales reps. Once the sales reps are onboarded, it’s time to teach them how to use the software and how leads will be routed via live chat.

Depending on your live chat tool, you may be able to manually classify these incoming live chat messages, or they will be automatically assigned to your team members.

6. Plan sales conversation flows.

Once your live chat software is integrated with your CRM, plan the conversation flows your sales reps will have. You can use a chatbot at the beginning of live chat to gather information about the prospect that slightly qualifies them for a specific territory or representative designation.

7. Collect and analyze customer feedback via live chat.

After your prospects talk to you through live chat and get the answers they need, send a follow-up survey to ask about their experience.

Did you enjoy using the live chat? Did it help you in your decision-making process? Did you have a pleasant experience chatting with one of your representatives? Implementing a survey right now allows you to understand the live chat customer experience and improve your live chat strategy as needed.