We need to talk: Ultimate guide to live chat for businesses

Live chat is quickly becoming a must-have for businesses that need to meet and exceed their customer’s expectations of fast, real-time, convenient support. 

As adoption rates soar, new use cases for live chat are emerging and the potential to retain, engage, and convert more users is becoming apparent. 

In this ultimate guide, we’re going back to basics to explain what live chat really is and how it works. Plus, we’ll share examples of live chat in use across the customer journey and best practices for success. 

What is live chat? 

Live chat allows website visitors, leads, and customers to ask for help via an instant messaging platform, usually through a chat box on your website. Businesses typically use live chat software and embed the chat on their site as a widget. 

While live chat is predominantly used by customer support teams to help existing customers solve problems, it is increasingly becoming an important tool for sales and marketing teams who want to generate, engage, and convert leads. 

How live chat works today

Traditional live chat differed from a chatbot in that it would always connect a customer with a human support agent. It also differed from a messaging service in that once a conversation was closed, the customer could no longer see the exchange unless it was emailed to them directly.

Now, much of this has changed and the best live chat offerings combine elements of live chat, chatbots, and messaging. For example, a conversation could start with an automated message designed to engage a website visitor. If the visitor engages in the conversation, they may continue to receive support from the bot or could be directed to a sales or support agent. 

Your team can set specific automations and rules to ensure that customers are escalated to the right teams. For example, customers making inquiries on the pricing page seen above would naturally be routed to sales. If, however, an existing user starts an in-app conversation with a support agent, but their inquiry is related to an upgrade or contract re-negotiation, there may be an escalation process in place to ensure they are directed to a success or sales agent. 

On the ‘backend’ support, sales, and other human agents will use integrations, AI features, and automations to resolve queries quickly and effectively. For example, when live chat software is integrated with your customer data platform (CDP), your team can enter conversations with full context to avoid unnecessary back-and-forth with a customer and create a personalized experience. Live chat that is underpinned by AI can do things like auto-generate responses to speed up response time. 

On the front end, all the customer sees is a frictionless conversation with your company and a quickly-resolved query. 

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Benefits of live chat 

We’ve touched on the major benefit of live chat — providing your customers with a more convenient and frictionless support experience. But there are plenty of other benefits for businesses that implement live chat, including: 

• Build personal relationships with your customers

Conversations are a key component of human relationships. Customers, visitors and leads who are able to converse with your team in real-time feel more connected to your brand and engaged with your products and services. When live chat is connected to your customer data and agents are able to personalize conversations, this relationship is strengthened. 

• Deliver right time, right place support 

When you consider where most of your personal and professional conversations happen today — via messaging services like Slack and WhatsApp — it’s not surprising that customers are happy to engage with a business via live chat. It’s another way to meet customers where they are, and give them the information they need, when they need it. 

• Create efficiencies and improve documentation 

When you are using live chat that includes AI and automations, you can create incredible efficiencies for your business. Not only will your teams be able to respond to more queries, faster, but you will be able to quickly access reports that show you things like where and when the most questions are being raised and what the focus of those questions is. This allows you to staff up in the right timezones and create additional support documentation to help more users self-serve. 

• Increase revenue

When marketing uses live chat to engage visitors, you can generate more leads and qualify them earlier. When sales use live chat to respond to leads, they can close deals more quickly and deliver the kind of sales experience customers want. When support and success teams use live chat, they can resolve more queries to reduce churn and nudge existing customers to upgrade. All of this helps your business grow, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Once your live chat is up and running, you’ll quickly spot new opportunities to use it for growth. 

Live chat best practices

The aim of live chat is to deliver an exceptional experience to every visitor, lead and customer. Doing this effectively and efficiently requires your whole team to get on board with a few best practices: 

1. Use customer data to support your conversations

If you are using a live chat that is connected to your CDP or CRM (if you’re not - consider a change of platform), you’ll have information about the customer’ and their actions and behaviors at your fingertips. Make a habit of checking this data as you say your hellos in a chat window to familiarize yourself with the information there, then enter the chat with full context and the ability to have a personalized conversation, just as you would with an acquaintance. 

2. Speak like a human (because you are one)

Conducting yourself professionally is important, but there’s no need to be overly formal in your chats. Context is everything, and people expect a more casual tone than they might receive over email. Plus, you’ll have a better chance of differentiating the bots from the humans. 

3. Be upfront about your availability

It’s tempting to tell customers they will have 24/7 support, but if that’s not reality your customer will only feel let down. Be direct and transparent about when real, human support agents are available and what customers can do to get support in off-hours. And remember to show your availability based on timezones — 24/5 in Australia looks very different for someone logging on from New York! 

4. Embrace saved replies and suggested responses

You’re going to get a lot of the same questions, it’s an inevitability of support and sales. Instead of typing out the same thing day-in-day-out, save a reply and share it with your team. If your live chat offers AI-generated responses, use these as is or as a base for more personalized responses. 

5. Make use of automations

If you find yourself doing something over and over again, like heading to Slack to ask your Sales or Success team to step in on a request or sending a note to your technical writers for a docs update, find a way to automate it. The more you can automate admin tasks, the better you can serve your customers — and that’s what live chat is really all about. 

6. Match messaging to pages

If your live chat pops up with an automated message for visitors or customers, think carefully about what it says. You want something quick, clear, and relevant to the page they’re on. For example, on your pricing page you might want to ask if they have any questions about your pricing models. If they’re in-app using a new feature, you could say something like ‘Hey, hope you’re loving our new feature. I’m here to help if you have any questions!’ 

7. Don’t neglect your other support types

Just because you have live chat, doesn’t mean your other support platforms like knowledge base and social platform messages should be ignored. In fact, live chat works best in conjunction with other support types to give your customers the best possible experience without overwhelming your team. 

8. Run reports and learn from them

One of the advantages of live chat is that you can quickly and easily run reports to see things like the volume of conversations and resolutions, how quickly questions are answered, the timezone you are serving most frequently, how support is impacting customer expansion, and so much more. Use reports to learn about the experience you're delivering, and better it. 

Examples of live chat across the customer journey

Live chat is no longer just about answering questions for existing customers. We see marketers using chat in a myriad of ways right across the customer journey. Here are some examples: 

1. Website visitor 

If a visitor is browsing feature pages or your homepage, you can engage them right away with a simple ‘welcome’ message. At this stage, the best-performing messages are more open than specific — for example: 

• Welcome! Let me know if you have any questions

• Happy you're here. Got questions? Our team is available on live chat now to help! 

  • OR Happy you're here! We’re offline right now, but if you have any questions, leave them here and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours

• Hi! Can I help you find what you’re looking for? 

When a visitor responds to this message, they could be assisted by a bot or routed directly to marketing or sales with the goal of nudging them towards lead status. 

2. High-intent website visitor

Some pages, like pricing pages or case studies, show intent. On these pages, you can afford to be a little more straightforward in your approach. Your automated opener could look something like this: 

• Need some help with pricing? 

• Hi! Would you like to set up time for a personalized demo?

From here, your sales team can go on to have a conversation with the lead and can even ask a few more questions to qualify them then and there. This will streamline the experience for the visitor, and can reduce the sales cycle. 

3. Free trial user and onboarding 

We all know a free trial user in the onboarding phase needs to get to that ‘aha’ moment as soon as possible. Your live chat can be the perfect complement to your other onboarding channels, helping nudge your users from one step to the next to ultimately experience value realization. For example, if a free trial user logs in for the first time and the first step in your onboarding process is to complete profile information, you could send a message like this: 

• Welcome! If you have any questions about customizing your profile, just let me know 

• Hi! I’m here to help you get onboard fast. Do you have any questions about editing your profile?

4. Customer expansion and loyalty 

Live chat is a great relationship-builder. Every time a customer engages with your support team over chat, you have an opportunity to help them solve a problem, ultimately reducing churn and increasing the chance of loyalty. Beyond this day-to-day use case, you can go one step further by using chat to make customers aware of products, features, or services they’re not currently using. For example, if a customer has not used a new feature yet, you could try a message like:

• Hey! Have you seen our new feature? Check it out here

• Hi! I noticed you haven’t checked out our new feature yet. Do you have any questions about our capabilities? 

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. When live chat is a part of your greater omnichannel customer experience, it becomes a valuable tool for every initiative in your organization. 

Final word 

Live chat is a natural part of our day-to-day lives, so it just makes sense that a business would offer this as a communication platform for their customers. When live chat with your team is combined with automations and AI, you can deliver an exceptional customer experience at scale, worldwide while creating efficiencies and improving your bottom line.