How Can I Select Live Chat Software for My Website That Helps
This article will guide you on how you can select an effective live chat software for your website. Learn how to choose the best live chat service provider.
Introduction
Live chat software has become a practical and effective tool for online customer management. It helps to increase customer retention, increase the average order value from your website, and build a good brand image in the market. So, choosing the right live chat software for your website becomes crucial. Live chat can help you provide customer support cost-effectively and efficiently to your website visitors. Having live chat support on your websites assures your website visitors that someone is always there to help.
What Are the Benefits of Live Chat?
Implementing the live chat feature can benefit you and your business in many ways.
1. Cost-effective
Live chat software are less expensive and comparatively easier to manage than traditional customer support solutions. They are the best solution for customer support for small-sized businesses.
2. Efficient
Live chat software provides customer support and handles workload more efficiently than traditional methods. They reduce the response time drastically and help to provide accurate solutions with the help of a click. With the help of live chat software, agents can connect with multiple customers at once, thus improving the efficiency of the support system.
3. Engaging and Convenient
Live chats are more engaging the traditional phone call support or email support. You can get answers to your questions instantly, and the conversation can go on, leading the customer to purchase a product or service from your website. Your customers can get answers to their questions while browsing, making it more convenient for the users, just like they are chatting on Facebook messenger while working.
4. Data Collection
Live chat software can collect useful data through chats that the different departments of your business can use to analyze customer behavior, market, and develop products according to the customers’ needs. You can also use this data to get a review about your products and how customer behavior is impacting your business.
What Factors to Keep in Mind While Selecting Live Chat Software?
Before selecting any live chat software, you need to keep a few factors in mind:
1. Business Size
The most important factor while deciding on a live chat software is your company or business size. For example, a startup’s requirements and goals differ from a well-established business.
2. Live Agents vs. Chatbots
When you are embedding live chat software in your website, you need to check if you will deploy chatbots on the website or appoint live chat agents to provide customer support.
Live chat agents can be more efficient than chatbots as they can look into the customer queries with a human perspective and provide a personalized touch to the live chat.
3. Use case
Various live chat services are available in the market depending on your business’s use case scenario. You need to decide for what purpose you are going to use the live chat software. You can use it for:
- Engaging customers and solving their short queries on the website,
- Providing full-time customer support through live chat, or
- Using live chat as CRM (Custome Relationship Management) tool to collect useful data for your business.
4. Cloud Software Vs. Self-hosted
Both methods of implementing live chat have their pros and cons.
Cloud-based chat software is supported by software vendors, which means you might have less control over the chat software, and your data and privacy might be at risk. However, cloud-based live chat software helps you to reduce the hassle of maintaining and upgrading the live chat software and they can be accessed from any device, thus improving connectivity.
Self-hosted chat software allows you to have complete control over the chat software, and you can customize them according to your business needs, reducing the risks of data leaks and cyber-attacks. However, since you are the one hosting the software, you are responsible for maintaining and upgrading the software from time to time.
5. Chat Routing
If you are planning to provide full-time customer support, you need to have a chat routing feature. It allows your live chat agents to redirect the chat to another expert to answer the queries. This feature can come in handy when your live chat agent is unable to solve the query and can thus they can redirect it to the best available chat agent who can answer that question. It can save time and help to increase the credibility of your company.
Which Is the Best Live Chat Software?
Most of the live chat software comes with a free version that provides all the basic features to its users. However, one live chat software stands out from the crowd, Skylink Cube by Temasys.
The free version of the software allows you to access multiple useful features like canned responses and chatbot support to your live chat service, making it suitable and convenient for businesses of any size. It even allows you access to the live chat software on mobile devices, ensuring that it is accessible across all devices.
The paid support of the software starts at less than $1 a month, making it pocket-friendly. Depending on your business size, you can choose one that suits you the best of the three different paid services.
Wrapping Up
We hope this article helps you choose the best live chat software for your business. Remember the above points when purchasing a chat service for your web-based platform. Skylink Cube is an expert in the live chat field and provides excellent services at minimal costs. You can try a free demo right away.