We have previously shared a blog post with you all that stated the benefits of live chat support for e-commerce business. However, it is not just the e-commerce sector that relies on live chat support. In fact, there is hardly any business that can do without it these days. Chat support is no longer only about providing customer service. It has become an important tool for customer acquisition as well. There are always visitors that will engage with your chat support agents. At the same time, a huge chunk of your online visitors remains idle on the site, ignoring the chat window.

Agents that handle chat need to find ways that they can proactively engage these second kinds of visitors. In this post, we will discuss the ways that this can be achieved.

• Customized Invite

Most online chat software that you use on your website has a generic chat invitation or greeting. To really capture the attention of your visitors, you must customize a chat invite. A good chat invite is can be hard to ignore and will psychologically cause them to interact with your agents. This will give your agents a chance to pitch your services to them and hopefully convert them into customers.

• Placement of the Chat Button

After the invite, the next important thing that helps in proactive chat support is placing the chat button in the right place. The most common and effective place in the bottom right corner of the screen. This way, the chat box does not obstruct the content on the page.  It also makes it easier for your visitor to browse through the page while chatting with you. Also, you must ensure that the chat button or chat window is present on all pages of the website for maximum engagement.

• Study User Analytics

Every chat dashboard gives insights through user analytics. This data can be very useful for the purpose of future reference in the case for returning website visitors. If you have the chat history of a visitor available to you, it will help in proactively having useful information ready that will help serve that visitor better. Also, this data can come in handy for various remarketing campaigns you may choose to run.

• Know where they came from

Using the user information available to you on your chat dashboard, it easy to track where your customer came from.  By this I mean whether they came to your site through organic search or via one of your articles or blog posts. You can even identify which blog post they came from. All this information gives you a little background on your visitor. This information can help your proactive chat efforts. You would have the information that can be used to send a customized chat message like “hope you enjoyed our blog” for a better response from the customer.

What is next for chat support services?

There is a lot of buzz about the use of artificial intelligence in customer service and customer engagement. Chatbots that are programmed to proactively engage website visitors and answer all their basic and advanced queries will come into effect on a large scale. These bots will not only help with customer satisfaction but also customer acquisition by pitching services and products to web visitors.