Live chats are an excellent resource to help you assist users almost instantly. They also provide an avenue to direct them to the end goal of your site, making conversions more likely.

For one of our clients, we focused on improving their Live Chat feature in order to improve their UX (user experience). We did this in 5 main ways:

 

We added a face to the name

Changing the avatars from robots to human faces helped add more of a personal touch to the chat. Users are more likely to feel comfortable talking to someone they can see that looks friendly and welcoming, as is the same with most customer service.

 

Set up a greeting that pops up after 10 seconds on the page

We have all experienced entering a shop and a staff member asking us if we are okay the second we walk through the door. You feel like you haven’t had time to have a look around to have any questions to ask! 

This is why we set this greeting to come up after 10 seconds. This way, it isn’t in the face of users who aren’t interested who would instantly click away. Those interested will have had time to process what they are looking for and know if they need the help. This greeting offered a quicker route for the user to get the answers to the questions they needed and also offered a reminder in case they missed the fact there was a live chat option.

Added clear CTA’s

These allowed users two clear options; to either start a chat or go straight through to booking. This meant there was another route straight to the booking form which would ultimately increase the likelihood for conversions.

 

Styled the live chat to match branding and avoid collisions with mobile elements 

Instead of looking like a separate plugin, matching a chat’s branding with the site helps create more trust with the company. It reassures the user that it is part of the company they are looking at, making them more likely to get in touch as they will have the information they need on hand. 

Typically live chats float above the page which may impede access to other elements of the page itself. We made changes to the page so that the information was accessible across all devices, which is something often overlooked. 

 

Personalised live chat messaging

Depending on the page the user was viewing, the live chat’s greeting was changed in order to fit the content and make the wording more appropriate. For example, if the page was for Boiler Services, the live chat would say: ‘Hi, got a question about your boiler? Let’s chat, or book an expert today’. The idea was that the user would be more likely to use the live chat facility if they were asking questions that were better aimed at what they were searching for. 

Results

One week after these changes, we found that:

For their second site, there was a:

 

From the results, it is clear that optimising the live chat pop up helped increase conversions by improving the UX. We find it is often the small changes that make the biggest difference. 

Is it time that you looked at the live chat on your site too? If you think you need help improving your UX, get in touch today.