There's a new feature on this website: live chat. We will be online during our business hours, 09-17h (UTC+1).
Live chat has become a must-have for B2B companies. At first, companies used live chat to increase the level of service they provide to their existing customers. Then it turned out that it's not just the existing customers who need answers fast. It's the new website visitors who may need your help even more.
Sounds like an opportunity to differentiate yourself from competitors!
Live Chat Has a Noticeably Positive Impact on Business
There's a lot of research available online that backs up this fact. Most research was made for B2C companies, but there is no reason to think that there's much difference in the B2B segment - at least not until new research comes up. After all, it all comes down to helping people buy what's best for them.
In Boldchat's research (direct link to a 23-page PDF), it was found that 25% of website visitors are more likely to make a purchase if they see a live chat on a website. Seeing a live chat shows that help is easily available and encourages visitors to make a purchase.
Look at the first bar on the chart above: see those 14% of people who would be less likely to purchase if there was a chat on the website? We bet that these 14% of visitors had previous bad experiences with how live chat apps behave on websites. We're frustrated when live chat windows bug us and pop up uninvited. That's why it is crucial to make live chat on a B2B website unintrusive.
According to the same research, 75% of respondents rated live chat's waiting time to reach an agent as positive. A phone had 59% positive reviews and email 70%. Fast answer to a question is one of the most important features live chat provides. Live chat is a channel with the most satisfactory wait times, compared to the phone, Facebook, Twitter, texting and email which has the least satisfactory wait time.
Emarketer.com e-commerce survey found that 63% of respondents who engaged in a live chat were more likely to return to the website, while 62% were even more likely to buy.
According to Zendesk report, in Q1 2015 live chat led in customer satisfaction at 92%, over all other channels. Downloadable version of this research can be seen here: Zendesk report PDF (354 KB, 16 pages).
One of the most important benefits that visitors get from live chat are the following:
- Instant answer
To give an instant answer to any question about anything present on our website is why we installed live chat. This is especially useful on key website pages such as the landing pages where our services are described, the client pages, and the blog.
- No commitment
Website visitors do have many questions. However, they don’t want to create a commitment or enter into any kind of relationship with an unfamiliar company before they get their answers.
We want to enable you to receive answers without forcing you into a relationship with us. To talk to us while we're online, we don’t ask for any personal information such as your email or your address or your phone number. If you wish to send us a message while we are offline, we are going to send a reply to your email.
This is how our live chat looks like while we are online and while we are offline.
If, however, you do decide during the chat to share your email address with us, you can. If you do, we won't subscribe you to any mailing lists unless you give us your explicit permission (you can subscribe to our newsletter if you want to get our tips and special offers). We know your inbox is already overflowing with emails and we know you're intelligent enough to decide for yourself whether or not you want to hear from us over email.
- Improved content
We've gone out of our way to answer as many questions on our landing pages as we could. There will always be questions that we forgot to answer, or simply did not know that you're asking them. Live chat is a wonderful app for discovering unanswered questions. Our plan is to update our website with new answers so that we better serve the new visitors.
How Your Company Can Implement Live Chat on Your Website
Live chat is a web application which web developers implement by inserting a certain code in the website.
Ask your dedicated web development agency to install the chat for you, preferably by using Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM is not technically necessary, but if it's already present on your website, it’s easier to install the chat and later maintain it.
We use Google Tag Manager on our website and we'd recommend it to you as well. GTM is part of what we consider to be the foundation of digital marketing in the 21st century. If you're not sure whether or not you have GTM installed on your website, contact us and we'll check it out for you (at no charge).
We've implemented the live chat in two steps:
- installing the code on the website: a basic level of technical expertise is needed for this.
- configuring live chat. After the installation, you need to configure your chat app. Its default settings may or may not be suitable for your company. For example, it may have been pre-configured to annoy your website visitors to pop up uninvited.
How to Choose the Right Live Chat
There are certain criteria that we used to choose the suitable live chat. The live chat we chose had all the features that were essential to us:
- it can be used on mobile phones,
- it can be configured to be unintrusive.
According to this Komarketing research, live chat is only useful on a B2B website when it’s not frustrating the visitor (e.g. by popping up unexpectedly or covering parts of the content). We chose Zopim chat because it’s so easily configurable to sit quietly in the background and wait until the visitor initiates the conversation.
Which Benefits We Expect from Live Chat
- We expect to increase trust in our company by letting visitors get to know us without forcing them to commit to any obligation with us.
- Increased trust always increases the number of leads. We don’t expect overnight results here.
- We expect to increase the quality of service. The visitors can expect to get an instant answer from us.