How to install live chat on your website: step by step guide

TLDR: Setting up live chat software simply requires placing a small piece of code on your website. Then you will need to come up with an engagement strategy, conversation flow, and train your chat agents.

Setting up your live chat software can seem a little daunting, but installing it on your site is actually incredibly simple. The tricky part comes with training a chat team, coming up with an effective live chat strategy, and ensuring proper integration into your business.

• Software & channel choices – Before installing, you need to consider which channels you want to use for chat, whether that’s an AI bot, live chat, Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. You decide which provider you want to go with, whether that is a free or paid tool.

• Set up departments – You may need to consider setting up different groups for your needs, for example customer support and sales.

• Design your chat window – Many chat providers enable you to customise your chat window to match your brand and fit in with your website, blending it seamlessly into the page rather than looking like a spammy popup.

• Decide what you need in terms of pre and post chat survey forms – You can decide whether to allow the user to simply click on the window and chat, or whether you would like to add a pre-chat survey to take information such as names and emails. You can also add post chat surveys to check user satisfaction and generate ratings or comments.

• Create agent profiles – Creating agent profiles on your chat software needs to be done before agents can start chatting. Don’t forget to use real names and faces to help with the human connection.

• Proactives and reactives – Choosing how to balance using reactive and proactive chat is a key part of any chat strategy. So much so, that we’ve written a whole article just on this, check it out here.

Reactive chat is user-initiated, meaning that the window will not pop up without engaging with it first, it will simply sit in the corner of your website, waiting for them to interact with it.

Proactive chat is a strategy where you use data-driven methodology to find where most customers are leaving your site, or any popular pages, and you create a message to actively show to the user, inviting them to chat.

• Resources – decide what resources your agent team will need and create them, e.g. a knowledge base, conversation flow and canned responses.

Coming up with a conversation flow and a knowledge centre for live chat agents is the best way to achieve this. By creating a flow of key questions to ask, you can ensure the agent is guiding the customer through the chat process, without missing anything or appearing too scripted.

A knowledge base ensures that all of the information they would need is in one place, on hand at all times so they can quickly pull up whatever they need and give customers the information they require.

• Integrations – be sure to integrate chat with your CRM, Google Analytics and any other systems in use

• Tracking – ensure a proper tracking system is setup, including the use of tags for categorising the types of chat you get through, e.g. sales, support, lead

• Installation – next you need to integrate live chat with your website or staging site. This often requires just adding a small piece of code.

• Testing – One of the most important steps that cannot be overlooked is simply testing your live chat in its entirety. From the agent side and the chatter’s side, make sure you completely test every aspect of chat before using it.

Final thoughts

Installing live chat technology can be very simple, but ensuring that you get things right and that your strategy is carefully designed to drive the best results is a bit trickier. A proper setup requires careful planning and consideration, but makes for a much more successful chat operation.

If you’re not sure where to start and could do with some expert advice to develop your live chat strategy or manage your chat, talk to us.

Looking for experts to develop your live chat strategy or manage your chat? Find out how we can help.

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