As technology has rapidly evolved over the recent decades, so have potential customers’ broad experiences and expectations for any online business. Customers want, even expect, some level of real-time engagement concerning product support and overall buying decision-making.

The aforementioned market trends have led to online businesses incorporating front-line applications like live chat and service bots to assist their teams in providing a more well-rounded and immediate customer experience. However, installing live chat on your Avada website is not enough to guarantee a successful customer experience. You must ensure that your support team and tools are aligned to ensure that live chat is efficient and impactful to your business.

In this post, you’ll learn everything you need about live chat, how it works, and how to implement it to meet customer needs successfully.

Live chat is a website tool that connects customers with real human support reps, allowing your team to address and resolve customer queries in real-time and in a timely manner. In many cases, live chat can be considered a confidence mechanism for customers in an age where customer contact is limited or restricted. Live chat is analogous to a chatbot because both are real-time support communication tools; however, this is where the similarities end.

Live chat connects customers directly with human support representatives and is typically embedded within your website as a widget. The widget loads an icon or link on your website, typically at the bottom of the browser window. A chat window will open when clicked, allowing you to start communicating with the support representative. Most software will allow you to select which pages you’d like the live chat to appear on and customize the chat widget’s design.

A chatbot is an automated software program that simulates human conversation using predefined communication. Nevertheless, chatbots can be very helpful in beginning the customer support conversation before escalating to live chat communication with a human support agent, for example, during out-of-hours periods and during longer customer queues.

Utilizing live chat for your online business cannot be understated. Simply put, more and more customers are reaching out via live chat channels because it reduces wait times and prioritizes urgency in special cases. Some key points are:

A customer’s experience is a primary differentiator between your business and your competitors. For example, customers claim long wait times as a negative customer service experience, according to a survey conducted by HelpScout. Live chat support will help decrease the average handling time and is viewed as an available communication channel over and above a traditional website contact page and email.

Live chat ensures that customers don’t need to wait for very long for the answer to questions. And they can quickly ask follow-up questions which are particularly valuable with presales or technical assistance. In addition, there’s no need to escalate follow-up cases to get straightforward questions answered.

Because live chat is embedded directly into your website, and can be readily integrated with customer service tools such as a CRM, a Knowledge Base, VoIP Calling, Chatbots, and more. These tools automate specific processes for your sales and service departments, creating a more pleasing customer communication experience.

Chatbots are commonly integrated with live chat to funnel customer attention and automatically respond with pertinent information. In particular, for recurring and common customer questions, allowing your customer service and sales teams to focus on more complex or time-consuming cases.

It’s essential to keep your customer’s focus targeted when they visit your website. Suppose a customer needs to navigate away from the current page unnecessarily. In that case, there is a good chance might not return despite providing world-class customer service.

Live chat creates an omnichannel experience for prospective and existing customers. HubSpot’s Live chat’s seamless integration with many tools allows customers to connect directly with service or sales teams. Providing live chat as a service can reduce your website’s bounce rate, improve the customer experience, and develop opportunities to upsell and cross-sell products and additional services.

Suppose traditional email and phone calls are your business’s primary communication or sales channels. In that case, live chat will decrease the overall volume and improve the customer experience. All the while, you are freeing up team members to focus better on closing sales and following up on leads.

Now that you’re familiar with some of the benefits of using live chat on your Avada website let’s take a closer look at how to get set up using live chat.

Setting up HubSpot’s FREE live chat on your website is pretty straightforward. It will engage your customers, drive sales, generate leads, and provide real-time product and service support.

Before creating a live chat for your website, you must connect a chat channel to the conversations inbox. The chat channel allows you to customize your team’s availability and the widget’s style and appearance. To connect:

There are five simple steps to follow in preparation for launching your first HubSpot live chat instance.

For a detailed walkthrough of each of the five steps, please refer to this detailed HubSpot article. In addition, you can revisit each of these steps at any time to adjust or change your customer’s live chat experience.

Once you are done setting up the FREE live chat, in the top right, click Preview to view how your live chat will appear on your Avada website. Click to toggle the switch on to add it to your website pages.

The FREE HubSpot live chat is one of Avada’s recommended plugins and can be included with the import of any of the Avada prebuilt websites or installed on your website at any time; it is up to you to decide when you are ready. Click here to view and interact with a working live chat and Avada example.

We also have additional resources on how to get set up. So please go ahead and watch this detailed YouTube video tutorial.

Avada + HubSpot is everything you need to launch a successful marketing website that will attract customers to your business, generate leads, and improve your customer experience. We will be expanding on and detailing all of the plugin features when activated with Avada in subsequent Blog posts, so stay tuned.