The advantages of having chat is really based on how society has now decided to communicate with one another. Certainly 5 years ago having someone call your office or even fill out a form was prevalent but now communication is different. We sent text or message our friends through platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. Knowing this how do we take advantage of the situation?
Choose to Have Chat
While you may not use a chat feature specifically, your potential customers do. They may be reaching out to you during their work hours. They may be of younger demographic and texting or chatting is their normal style of communication. In any case the advantages of having chat are there. So step one will always be to recognize that chats are being done with your competitors and to stay abreast you should have chat on your website too.
Which Chat Should I Choose?
Depending on how your website is setup there are several chat services to choose from. There are plugins available for platforms like Wordpress and Wix that allow for chat functionality to exist on your website. There are also monthly subscription that allow for seamless integration on any platform. How your website is built will really dictate what service you use. Also understand that you aren't married to one service. Perhaps you start with Facebook Messenger to take advantage of chat. You may find it's not ideal for what your trying to accomplish and switch to something else as you learn more about what chat service makes the most sense for your website.
Try to Find a Service with SMS
If you truly want to take advantage of chat then we would absolutely recommend a service that provides SMS. This will ask for the user to provide a name and phone number at the very least prior to being able to initiate the chat. You want to have this functionality for two reasons:
Having a chat running all the time is recommended though we understand someone is not there to tend to the chat 24/7. By getting a phone number you can send an SMS to the customer well after they have left the website.
The open rate of an SMS is staggering: around 98%. This is greater than email or even chat so being able to send an SMS during the conversation will be critical to continue the conversation.
Credit Card Processing
The last advantage of chat is the ability to process credit cards one a choice has been made. This is especially helpful on big ticket items. Let's say you have chat with a client about a product and they are now ready to buy, being able to process the credit card right then is key and you might not have a buy now feature on your store. The ability to send an invoice then which the client pay for all within the chat is a powerful feature.
We hope this information was helpful on the advantages to chat. If you have any questions about this subject matter or perhaps driving people to your website through SEO please reach out and we'll be happy to help.
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