Going for the best practices

Delay

In terms of delay, if you want to go from an average user satisfaction to a super high user satisfaction, we recommend you to answer as fast as you can. Answering in less than 1 minute is good, answering in less than 3 seconds is EXCELLENT. If this is too much resources for you, just make sure your widget is Off.

Tone

About the best tone to adopt, it is depending of your business. Generally, if you are in the banking or insuring industries (= if you have a very corporate business) stay "corporate" in your answers. If you have a very small / small business we recommend you to adopt a familiar tone with your users because it's what they are looking for working with you as a small business. Be familiar but professional and fast. We believe corporate answers are not for our current world any-more. Also, if you really want to create complicity: listen to your users and go for what they ask you. As you may know, here at Xeno, if our users are asking for a specific feature we are usually implementing it quickly (if not over the night). Listening and answering your user needs is key to complicity.

Broken windows theory

In addition to that, we are recommending you to apply the "Broken windows theory". The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signalizing effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments to prevent small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking, and toll-jumping helps to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, thereby preventing more serious crimes from happening. In other words: give importance to weak signals / unsatisfied users and take care of them as fast as you can!

Here are a couple of extra tips for you!

• Use real faces, or avatars of your real faces.

  When setting up your live chat, make sure to use real faces, or avatars of your real faces. It’s important to keep in mind that your company’s online presence should reflect that of a real retail business. In a good brick and mortar business, you see the smiling faces of real people welcoming you, and offering you their help.

• Define a specific message to trigger for your main landing page.

  For example, in successful retail stores, sales staff are always welcoming you in the store and are always making sure they are available to answer any of your questions. Why not go for the same approach on your website? It really works well, and your visitors will feel welcome!3. Make sure to customize your widget.

• Make sure to customize your widget.

  So that it is in line with your website’s look and feel. It is great when you can customize anything you want, even down to the text to make sure your widget expresses your company culture, but also your live-chat catch phrase, to really make it relevant to your customers. Your live chat colors should also be in line with your site colors and CSS.4. Address your visitors and customers individually.

• Address your visitors and customers individually.

  As personally and friendly as possible! In other words, if it fits your corporate culture and activity, try to avoid answering with a generic screen name such as “Acme, Inc. Support”. Instead, use your first name, and try to make sure when anyone from your team answers a customer through live chat, that they answer with their first name as well. The best would be to address your users and customers using their first name (using an automatic identification system, and also manually while chatting with them).5. Identify your most valuable products / services.

• Identify your most valuable products / services.

  Through your existing analytics, identify (or make some hypotheses if you don’t have any analytics in place at the moment) your most valuable products / services in terms of turnover and margins, and define specific triggers for these products / services. Open a conversation by giving more information about these products / services in the message triggered, or by offering discounts with a countdown for a specific type of customer (specific “personas”), or by focusing on a “limited” aspect of your product to create a sense of urgency.6. Identify one specific trigger for your pricing page (or cart page).

  Make sure this trigger shows that you are “open” about your pricing and not “limited” to the numbers as shown on your site pages. Take some time to really think about this trigger, as it is an important one.

• Define a social canned response.

  When one of your visitors is very satisfied with one of his live chat conversations, we recommend you push a canned response that focuses on your social links and offers them to like, tweet and / or follow your service. In that very moment, they will be very pleased to share your brand / service / product over the web with their network. It is a great way to use this timing to your advantage to encourage your visitors and users to be more engaged with your brand.

• Make simple surveys at the end of your conversations.

  To make sure your business is becoming smarter over time, and improve your process continuously thanks to the survey results.

Hope this is helpful!