Have you ever visited a website and been frustrated because you didn’t get the information you wanted? Often potential customers arrive at a website with the intention of making a purchase but leave because they can’t find exactly what they want, can’t choose between two or more products or had questions that the website’s content just could not answer.

Introducing live chat support to your business’ website can help solve these problems by bringing potential customers directly into contact with your sales and/or technical teams.

Live help support offers a more engaging interaction for the customer and it’s also more likely to boost sales conversions. Like walking into a store, customers can now ask as many questions as they need to make their final purchase. Either they can initiate the discussion, or your sales team can!

Installing live help or live chat software on your website also brings additional tracking benefits. The software can provide you with a great deal of information about your customers such as when they are on your site, whether they were referred from another website, whether they have been to your site before, what geographic location they come from, and what search engine keywords they might have used to locate your website. It can even tell you which pages or products they were the most interested in!

If you see someone stalled on a particular page you can initiate a chat and ask if they need help. You may be surprised how may people take you up on the offer as we frequently are.

Getting Started – with free live chat software

To get started, there are a number of free live chat software options available for download that are fast and easy to install, easy to use and importantly, work really well.

Two great live help products are Livezilla (www.livezilla.net) and Zopim (www.zopim.com – this is what we use, check it out on this page). Unlike Livezilla, Zopim is a hosted service and only requires a small bit of code added to your website and you are up and running in minutes making it our choice of Live Chat. It’s also easy for you to trial the live chat software and ask as many questions as you like at the same time. Livezilla leaves the customer to initiate a chat whereas Zopim’s online customer service team takes a more proactive approach by initiating a chat window soon after a visitor arrives at their website. Zopim also has great videos showing how their live chat software works to convert sales.

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What happens when I’m offline?

The great thing about Zopim is that it can be run through your instant messaging client. This means you can respond to chats on your website via your mobile phone! IPad or IPhone apps such as Meebo make this a breeze. You can be almost anywhere and still be attending to customers and generating leads. However, if you are completely disconnected from the Internet, your customers can leave you an email message that you can respond to on your return to work. Zopim live chat also has a basic CRM functionality that records notes against the visitor’s information and displays them for the sales team when the visitor returns to the website.

Live chat support benefits for the tourism business

Travelling is great fun. Planning travel, however, can be an overwhelming task for many people. There are simply so many things they need to think about and arrange that a little advice goes a long way. As a tourism operator, live chat software could help you assist visitors to your site by:

• Guiding them through each available tour or attraction;
• Making activity suggestions based on personal travel experience;
• Answering any questions they might have about their destination, planned itinerary, tours or even types of available accommodation;
• Helping them to make flight, car, hotel room or tour bookings; and
• Supporting the choices the customers have already made for their holidays.

By offering this valuable customer service, you might find that visitors not only make the decision to purchase faster, but they may actually purchase more from your range of product and service offerings if they have the opportunity to talk about their plans and needs.

How else might the live chat software benefit my website?

Live Chat software provides you with lots of information about your website. It can pinpoint your best selling products, most attractive web pages, and highlight your customers’ most frequently asked questions. This information can help you to improve your website’s content by re-writing less frequently visited pages, advertising related products on the top selling product pages, or even adding a few more questions and answers to your FAQ section.

With so little investment required, why not give Live Chat support a try? It’s easy to install, and if it’s not converting sales as quickly as or faster than conventional methods, you can always remove it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained!