Live Chat. Is it worth it? In one word: Yes! What was once a marketing gimmick now holds substantial value for Return on Investment through your website. Here’s the lowdown.
You’re interested in a service. You find a business that seems to match. You have questions. You need answers before spending money with the company. You email them, and nothing comes back for days – if at all. We’ve all been there. And when this happens, you always head off to a competitor.
Offering your website visitors multiple ways to engage with you is essential. Otherwise, you are most likely missing opportunities to help people and to acquire new patients. Profit is passing you by, and your rivals grow fat on what should be yours.
Other Blogs from DRPT on this subject:
- If You Are NOT Using This On Your Website You Could Be Losing $$$ Every Month!
- Live Chat Greetings and Triggers: Why You Absolutely NEED to Use Them!
Even if your website is healthy and ticks all the SEO boxes, you must not forget that gaining clients through your website is all about user experience.
Perhaps your website is loaded with calls-to-action and easy-to-fill-out forms? Maybe it’s simple for people to call you with a single click?
Perhaps your content is engaging enough for new clients to queue up for that free phone consultation?
Great!
But, guess what?
Some people don’t WANT to talk on the phone. And some people can’t talk right now because they’re at work and browsing your website during their morning break.
Some people are just nervous about talking to a specialist because they think they might get “railroaded” into something they’re not quite ready for once they start a conversation. And some people prefer instant messenger style communication over email. And so on and so on. You get the idea.
So, what is the best course of action? Well, you need to do your very best to offer each of your visitors a way to engage with you that suits THEM. Some will call, some will fill out a form and wait to receive a callback or an email from you. And some will thank you for giving them the option of using Live Chat.
Here’s the zinger. Basically, if you’re not offering live chat to your visitors then you are losing money. It’s THAT simple.
The Benefits of Live Chat For Your Website
Let’s be frank about this. People exhibit an online demand for wanting things quickly. And that includes finding the answer to their questions. Live chat is the platform that allows an almost immediate response to their queries.
By installing live chat, you can grant potential new clients with a way to reach you. This feels more intimate than just sending an email. A one-on-one connection so early in the first-impression process usually ensures further correspondence, rather than the person walking away.
As the sender of the email, it’s hard to know when you may get a response. However, live chat brings immediacy to proceedings and helps build satisfaction right from the start. With such a positive first experience, client acquisition and onboarding are more likely.
By giving the website visitor confidence from your correspondence, you are not just installing trust and belief in your professional conduct and ability, but also giving people the confidence to spend money with your business. Clients will want a return on their investment, too!
The whole process builds faith in your business, not just for the conviction aspects, but also for proving that you are real. That may sound a bit silly, but with the digital world taking a progressively ‘bot-based’ approach, speaking with an actual human being feels somewhat reassuring.
Live chat helps build rapport with newcomers by reducing those repeated phrases that automated-response bots churn out. By engaging with one-on-one discussion, the visitor doesn’t have to explain who they are – or ask their questions – over and over again.
At the end of the day, live chat increases customer engagement. By making live chat readily available, you can feed that increase in interactions. Even if that result of conversion doesn’t come right there and then, the seeds will have been sown for future engagements and outcomes.
Then there is the edge you gain over your competition. If your closest rivals don’t offer live chat – or offer low-grade ‘bot’ chat – then you can rightfully vie for clients.
Most people are likely to ask questions over chat, rather than picking up the phone. Especially when seeking professional healthcare information. We are in the ‘Google it’ generation now. So, it would be detrimental not to flow with the times.
Live chat is the tool of choice, and can help gain contact details for your customer base in the process. As a bonus, any questions that are asked could be crafted into blogs for assisting your SEO and form the cornerstone of your digital marketing campaign. The possibilities are endless!
How Easy Is It To Install Live Chat?
It’s VERY easy! And it doesn’t matter whether your website has been built with WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or any other builder. There’s a live chat solution to suit your platform!
Now, I’m not going to go into the details of every live chat system and which one is best suited to which type of website – you can research that quickly enough yourself on Google (e.g. “live chat Wix”).
All I need to tell you is that adding live chat to your website should take no more than a few minutes (certainly adding Live Chat Inc to WordPress takes only a couple of minutes).
It’s actually the configuring that takes the time. Even so, we’re still only talking minutes (under an hour) to get the color scheme set, the avatar image added, the notifications working (so you know when you have a visitor who wants to chat) and get yourself or your admin person familiarized with the system.
How Does It Work?
You may have used live chat on a website before, maybe you were looking for a product or service, and you needed some help? I want to talk about it from the point of view of you, the business owner and how live chat can work for your business.
You DON’T need a Physical Therapist to answer questions on live chat all day long, so don’t worry about that or use it as an excuse not to get live chat installed on your site! Here’s an overview of how it should work for you.
1. You switch live chat to “available” whenever you/your admin person/admin team are available to answer chats (and even if you’re a solo PT with only a few hours per week at your desk it’s still worth giving this a try!)
2. You (or whoever is the designated live chat agent) get a notification when someone arrives on your website – it can be an audible alert, an on-screen alert or both and YES, you get this when someone arrives on your site, even if they don’t use the live chat facility, so you can see which page they are looking at.
And… bonus: you can also see where in the country (or world) they are!
3. You get a notification if the person starts typing in the live chat window (which is permanently and easily visible on your website).
Your live chat system can also automatically invite them to start chatting with you (more on this another day) without you even having to do anything.
4. You answer the person’s questions and encourage them to arrange a telephone consultation or discovery session. And if you (or more likely, your admin person) is unable to answer a specific question because it requires a trained PT to answer it, you can simply offer to have a PT give them a call as soon as one becomes available.
The goal is NOT to keep the visitor chatting. The goal is to build trust and help the person move along their journey towards becoming a patient.
Giving your website visitors this extra way to engage with you is easy, and you will reap the rewards – you will be able to help more people, and they will thank you for doing it, so don’t delay – get it set up today!!!
We recommend Live Chat Inc and the price is just $19 / month.
You can get an extended free trial (60 days free instead of 30) plus $10 credit with this link »
No excuses! Click the link above or the badge below and get set up right away before you forget! You will add $$$ to your bottom line 😉
Get in touch with us!
Like the concept, but struggling to work with live chat? Don't suffer in silence. We can help!
You can get in touch with us through our contact page or, better yet, why not try out our live chat and get a feel from the other side of the computer?
Whatever your preferred communication method, we can walk you through the set-up and get you up to a proficient knowledge level. You'll be reaping the rewards in no time!
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We've previously covered this topic. Some of this article's content was originally published in this article written by Flemming back in September 2017.
Flemming Arnott
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