How to get your Live Chat Going
Host: Billy Bateman – Billy Bateman is the co-founder and VP of Operations for ChatFunnels, the digital conversation analytics, and optimization solutions provider. He has a background in digital marketing, operations, and entrepreneurship. Billy grew up in Idaho and graduated from Brigham Young University and has a Masters of Business Administration from Boise State University. While at BSU, he completed Boise State’s Venture College Entrepreneurship Program and became a mentor and entrepreneurial lead on a technology commercialization project. He is an avid outdoorsman and enjoys fishing and hunting. He currently lives in Springville, Utah, with his wife, Chelsea.
Overview: Billy Bateman gives some pointers to implementing live chat into your company. He addresses quantity vs quality and some tactics to creating quality conversations.
Reference:
Billy: All right everybody, Welcome to digital conversations. So today we want to talk about one thing which was how to get your live chat going. Had a lot of conversations with people that chat is obviously very hot right now. We’ve got Drift, we’ve got Intercom, we’ve got Live Person. There’s a myriad of options we have to use in the moment and regardless of which platform you’re using. There are a few tactics that we always encourage our customers to use and help them implement.
The first thing you’re going to ask yourself is what am I after? And what do I have capacity for? So if you’ve got a large sales team, you’ve got a lot of traffic on your website and you’re just getting going with chat. You can go, you really have a lot of options. You can go for quality of chats or quantity and there’s trade-offs to both if you just getting going and you go for quantity what it does is it helps your sales guys get into the mood and the habit of hey, I’ve got a lot of chats. I’m used to responding to them. They’re going to learn to get there’s response times down. They’re going to get a lot of at-bats. You’ll find out who’s good. Who’s not so good and then what’s working for you, where what pages are having quality conversations on? Which pages aren’t leading to good conversations. The trade-off is you’re going to get a lot of conversations that go nowhere, especially if you just engaging everyone right off the homepage and allowing anyone to chat in. You’re going to get a lot of conversations for people looking for other departments and your company customer service accounting. Whatever there is you’ll probably your sales team will probably get it and the sales guys usually get tired of that after a little while. You’re always going to have some of that but they’ll get a lot if you just kind of open the floodgates and have them feeling everything. But you do find out who’s good and who’s not very quickly and then you can move into more of a quality versus quantity mindset.
And when you’re going for that the quality of conversations, if you haven’t gone with just like let’s open the floodgates and find out where, what locations and what’s working. We and you’re just like I don’t have capacity for that. I only have a couple sales guys, but we do have a lot of traffic so I can’t really just open everything up. So there are few places that we’d encourage you to stop. One would be a pricing page or your solutions page. Whatever is your your high-end 10-page somebody’s come here. They are seriously thinking about buying your product and comparing plans. Even if you’ve got a page that compares you against the competition, I would put it there. Those you got high in 10 pages and you’re going to have quality conversations. You want anyone that gets to those pages you want to give them the opportunity to engage with somebody and ask more questions. So make it easy for people on those pages to engage with your team via chat.
Second one, second level would be product pages. If you just got one that’s a description of single products that you offer, get the chat on to those pages give them an opportunity. Maybe it’s not giving them chat right as they land on a page. Maybe they have to you know, spend 10 to 30 seconds there or scroll down 50% of the page. Another one would be landing pages. If you got good landing pages that are working already for just people completing forms, doesn’t hurt to put a live chat on there. Or better yet if you really want quality conversations, don’t put it on the landing page itself. But if you’ve got a completion page afterwards definitely put it there. If they’ve already downloaded a piece of content from you, try to engage them. You’ve already got their email that point they are obviously interested, make it easy for them to ask more questions and engage your team.
The next thing is, okay my sales reps we’re getting chats. But how do I help them be successful. So we help all of our customers implement scoreboards and grayed out their sales guys. This we found to be really useful in getting high engagement from the sales team, but give them a few benchmarks to work for. Now, the first thing is response time, like they got to get to the chats. So if you, it depends on where you are, but under 1 minute is great if they’re averaging under 1 minute on that response time and they’re getting a good amount of chats a day and it’s not their only thing they’re doing they’re having to come back to chat then they’re doing great. If their average response time is under a minute. Now if they’re under two minutes that’s in the realm of being acceptable. You’ll still get so get good results. Just make sure when you’re setting up the chat on the website that you manage those expectations.
If your team usually gets to them within a minute, have them say that like once they’ve requested chat just have the bot say hey, we’re getting somebody give us a minute they’ll be there. If it’s usually two minutes set that same expectations say hey usually takes one to two minutes to get somebody just hold tight. If you’ve got a platform that allows you to possibly send them some content in the meantime such as video or another like a Blog article or something why they wait do that to help keep them engaged. But once you’ve got them and you engage them in the chat window, first thing you want to do is usually people chatting with a question jump right into doing two things. One ask for their name, if they don’t if you don’t already have it and to just answer that question. Be helpful, a tendency that we see a lot is for especially traditional, sales guys it’s your inside sales team manning this they want to get people on the phone because that’s what they’re good at and that’s what they’re used to don’t go right for the phone. Answer this question, answer the questions, then you can try to get their phone number get them on the phone after you provide a little bit of value. You got to remember that somebody’s come to you on chat if they really just wanted to talk somebody they probably would have called in. Everyone’s got their phone number on the website. If you don’t you probably don’t have a phone and you don’t want people to call in, but just remember they engaged you over chat. So keep them there and provide value to him via chat. Then you can easily track once you provide some value. It’s easier to transition that into a follow up call for later. Just hopping on the phone then, scheduling up scheduling another meeting.
The second big thing is if you’re a sales rep, be human and have fun. Show your personality a little bit. People are already, even myself unless I know this company man’s it with like people usually slightly suspicious that this is a bot I’m engaging with. Especially if it comes off as robotic. That’s just masquerading as a person. So let him know you’re a person just say hey, I’m John. I’m a real person. I’m here to help you. See you’re in Georgia. How’s the weather here. Makes some small talk that goes a long way towards establishing some report. Don’t be afraid to show your personality via chat. It will help you be more successful, be helpful. If you’re manager you just got to make it a priority for your team when you’re putting in something new it’s changed management. So you’ve got to just remind everybody every day if you work with an agency or Consultants like Chatfunnels. They can help make that pretty easy for you, usually have some techniques and can just be your backup and reminding the team of what’s going on seeing how they’re doing.
That’s everything we have for you today. We want to keep it short. Thanks for listening. We’re going to be bringing you more content more actionable tactics and interviews with people on how to engage your customers. Feel like chat, chat Bots automated messaging. Let us know what you think send me messages. You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn and then also just subscribe, rate and review. Some more people can find us and we keep bringing you great content. And with that I will sign out and we will talk later.