The Right Way to Customise Your Website's Live Chat

Live chat is a great tool for offering fast, reliable and convenient customer support straight from your website. Live chat is far more effective than traditional e-mail and phone customer support. It can even increase your site’s conversion rate. However, the many benefits of live chat are only available to those who know how to implement the tool correctly. Your live chat software should be customised properly in order for the feature to work. Here are several tips on how you can effectively customise your live chat application:

Keep the Design Simple

The chat window should be designed simply in a very minimalist manner. There should not be any heavy graphics or plugins that may hinder performance of the window. Also, the design should be optimised to allow users to type in a query without a problem. You can take inspiration from simple chat box designs like Facebook’s for your company’s live chat feature as well.

Chat Window Should be Available on the Homepage

The live chat support window should be available from your business homepage. It should be visible above all other components. Even when a client is scrolling down, the chat window should remain accessible. Live chat is not the same has having an online inquiry form. Don’t let your customers search all over for your live chat support. Make it available on all pages if necessary.

No Automated Replies

Do not use automated replies for your live chat feature. The person replying to customer queries should be a person, not a bot. If your business live chat only offers automated replies, your service will not be any better than a FAQ page. In order for your company to benefit from live chat support, you must offer organic replies to questions.

Show Availability Hours

Ideally, live chat should be available 24/7. If this is not possible for your business, you should show availability hours in the chat window itself. During offline hours, show a message on the chat window saying that the service is currently offline. Also, say when the service will be back online again.

Make Chat Window Mobile Responsive

The chat window must be mobile responsive. The majority of your buyers will be using live chat on their smartphones. Mobile users are more likely to shop online, so most of your buyers will be using phones. Therefore, customise your chat window so it’s responsive on mobile devices as well.

Do not forget to offer social media buttons within or in the immediate vicinity of the live chat window. Enable Facebook and other social media-like features for the chat window. Customers are highly likely to “like” your company soon after getting a satisfactory answer to a query.

Use the above methods to customise your website’s live chat feature, and to reap many benefits later.