Without a doubt, the goal of your website is to help your business reach a wider audience. With your site, you can get your message across to clients and customers all over the world. As long as they know what you have to offer, you can sell to them, offer them services, provide them with customer support, and more.

With your website, you can talk to the world! But don’t forget, this shouldn’t be a one-sided conversation. Just like you would love to reach all your clients, they all want to reach you, too. Shutting them out and closing yourself off to questions and feedback is a big mistake.

One way you can make sure you have a two-way conversation is by including live chat prominently on your site. In case you haven’t noticed, any website that is worth its salt makes sure it uses all the means available to stay in contact with its visitors. The fact that there are many live chat software platforms to choose from, some even free, means there shouldn’t be anything holding you back.

1. Create a Brand Personality and Not Just a Business Entity. Your business shouldn’t appear to be cold or robotic. If you want people to warm up to you and your products, you should approach them, go to them. And how do you do that when you’re online? You create a place where they can come to talk to you or someone else in the company, helping create an intimacy that could help pave a great relationship and increase customer satisfaction.

2. Resolve Issues Quickly. Trying to troubleshoot problems via email works, but can be a long and tedious process. The best way to understand and resolve any problem quickly and efficiently is through a live chat session.

3. Address Your Customers on a Personal Level. While your website delivers your products en masse, you can approach your clients on a one-to-one basis. This will make them see they really do matter to you. Any message you have for them – even if it is a sales pitch – will get across much more effectively. It may be more widely accepted because clients will see it is a unique solution for their particular problem.

4. Gauge Your Performance. People only go through the trouble of posting reviews or providing feedback when they’ve had a negative experience. An angry customer is much more likely to contact you, while a dissatisfied one or even a slightly satisfied one would simply choose to remain silent. With a chat engine on your site, you will be able to not only read more of your customer feedback in real time, but calm some of their more fiery concerns. This can also help you pinpoint a problem in your sales funnel or manufacturing, which can save you a lot of grief long term.

5. Avoid Backlogs. One bad thing about customer support using emails or even phones is that you will, at one time or another, end up with a backlog of issues. Chat engines allow you to handle issues right then and there. Unless you decide to resolve it at a later time, once you sign out, you will have reached the end of the issue.

6. Allow for Constructive Feedback. Talking directly to your visitors will be a good way to find out about any new ways with which you will be able to make them happy. If you’re lucky, you might even discover an innovative way of doing things that you had never even thought of.

7. Out-Smart Your Competition. If you are the only one among your competitors who has chat functionality, you will stand out and your clients will notice. Being the first to use a new technology always has its advantages.

8. Cut your Costs. Your support staff will be able to handle more than one client at a time. While a person can only handle one email or phone call at a time, they can have several chat windows open and have simultaneous conversations. You pay less for customer service agents and address more issues with a minimum number of employees.

Chats also have their downsides; after all, you do need the staff to install, troubleshoot, and operate your chat platform, but it can add up to huge savings over time if you’re willing and dedicated to ensuring they meet your business’ needs.

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