Do you have a chat facility on your website? Does it increase sales and customer satisfaction?
We asked Marta from Userlike what difference a live chat service can make, how easy it is to install and use and what would it cost for a typical Tamebay reader to get started with Userlike.
What are the benefits of live chat
Marta told us that the big benefits according to their own customers’ data and industry information are:
- Increased Conversion Rate/Diminished cart abandonment: Userlike have seen conversion rates increase between 3 to 5 times for websites using Userlike live chat
- Increased Loyalty: Before implementing Userlike, visitors stayed on average 4 minutes on the site, and returning visitors 6 minutes. After implementing Userlike: visitors that engaged in live chat contact stayed an average 17 minutes. Furthermore, visitors that used the chat were 25% more likely to return.
- Improved Customer satisfaction: Customer Satisfaction increases for two main reasons a) a feeling of personal attention and b) speeding up the buying process and resolving inquiries
- Lower Costs per Customer: Adding live chat to pages has enabled a reduction in telephone hotlines by 50%
How easy is it to use Userlike live chat?
Userlike is a browser based software and using their Chat Panel you can chat directly with your website visitors.
The Userlike chat panel is intuitive to use and adds up many features for a holistic support of the customer.
From the chat panel, you can see information about your visitor (location, device, browser, referral URL, among others with data privacy applied accordingly to the EU law) and easily use chat macros or chat functions such as forwarding chats to different team colleagues, requesting screenshots from customer screen or send current chats (or offline transcripts) to your CRM system at a distance of a click.
Userlike say that you can be up and running in just 3 minutes!
How easy is it to install Userlike live chat?
That’s some pretty convincing reasons for adding live chat to a website but how easy is it to do? With Userlike it’s as simply as cutting and pasting a single line of code into your website’s HTML. They have plugins for different platforms such as Prestashop, Magento, WordPress, Shopware, Joomla and for others such as EKMPowershop, Bigcommerce and Shopify full instructions on where to place the code.
How much does it cost to use Userlike?
Userlike offer a free 14-day trial for any of their products. After the free trial you can continue to use their free product (1 operator, 1 widget, 20 chats per month) or opt for one of their paid plans team (€29/mth), corporate (€79/mth) or custom (POA).
Userlike is easy to customize, you can build your own buttons and style the chat window to your website; set up proactive customizable invitations to your website visitors and set and measure your live chat goals. Userlike is also easy to scale: From a “one-man-band” website to a large multinational, Userlike have a solution for you which can grow side-by-side with your business.
Over 10,000 small businesses currently use Userlike, if you’d like to try it you can sign up for their free trial and after the trial continue to use the free version indefinitely.
6 Responses
Live chat is only good if there is a good operator who is able to resolve any customer queries and issues.
There would also need to be adequate staffing so that live chat is available.
The best live chat I had was with Amazon customer services who had the power to completely resolve an issue (the live chat was a bit easier than using the phone because they already knew my username and I could copy and paste in order numbers etc).
A live chat with Sky customer services was useless as their main response was to tell me to fill in a (non live) support ticket. In this case the live chat was pointless.
It seems really effecient and best alternative, but I have recently integrated eAssistance Pro live chat with my business website.
OK, live chat is good for all the mentioned reasons. But telephone is better because that is personal. Issue with telephone is keeping calls short whilst still giving your buyers a personal service experience and if done right then your customers will love the fact that they can speak with you and (presumably) you will tailor your service to meet their exact requirements. Far better than the “Live Chat” halfway house, or email which is even less personal.
The two main issues with using the telephone are:
1) Call time – you have to provide a great customer experience in a minimum amount of time as long calls are costly in terms of your own time.
2) Ability to use the telephone as an effective communication tool – don’t assume that is easy – most people use the telephone very poorly and therefore benefit far less than they could from it.
Unfortunately most people are generally unable to meet the above criteria in an efficient manner and by failing to meet this criteria effectively you are probably better off not opening your business to the telephone. This is usually because most people don’t understand telephone technique and communication psychology and therefore have little knowledge of how to use the telephone as an effective sales tool.
If however you are able to use the telephone effectively then……..
Training courses available. Apply within. 🙂
We use Purechat – its a free livechat facility and works brilliantly. easy to install and we use the iphone app so it is manned at all times.
I has helped convert enquires into customers from day 1
Pop to our website http://www.bayacademy.co.uk and try it out if you like
George
Live Chat is great for hearing impaired people and there seem to be lots of them.
I think telephones have had their day. You phone up and get… press 1 for this, 2 for that etc. Then you are speaking to someone in New Delhi or Glasgow and you don’t understand a word they say. With Live chat both ends can relax while communicating with each other, no frustrated abusive voices etc.
Bring on Live Chat!
Another advantage of live chat is that the system can email a log of the conservation to both parties at the end. While phone systems can record calls it would be more effort to replay the call.
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I would prefer a decent (email) ticket system to a bad phone or live chat system for most enquiries. Unfortunately a lot of companies do not provide a decent response time to non-live communications.