If you’re a SaaS startup, a lawyer, car dealership or any other small business, you don’t really care whether you should use live chat or click to call on your website. What are their features, which is better, and more importantly, which one is better for you? You don’t really care, do you? Well you should, because website marketing is a cutthroat business. The only way you get to crash into the top 10 in Google for a specific keyword is when someone else gets chucked out.
The only way to improve your conversion rate is to engage your site visitors as best as you can using the right tools. If you are using the wrong tools, then you can forget about visitors and conversions.
Most live chat software and platforms do have all these 8 features. Every single one of these is a function or feature that click to call can do way better than live chat.
What are these top 8 live chat features?
1. Real Time Notifications
2. Setup
3. Customization
4. Chat Tool
5. Customer Engagement
6. Web and App
7. Team Management
8. Reports And Analytics
But the truth is that – you have been using the wrong tool. Here’s why:
1. Real Time Notifications
You don’t really want to leave your customers unaccounted for on your site for too long. They might never find what they are looking for. Even worse, they might not be able to find a way to reach out to you. Live Chat could be a great tool in such situations – if it works. But isn’t live chat dead?
Sometimes there’s nobody to respond back, and chat windows that ask customers to come back later (only during business hours) are the worst. If it’s a prospective customer interested in your product or service, they probably have already signed up with a competitor, and are never going to return.
If you want to nail it down 100%, click to call can do it far better with instant response. You get an instant notification on your phone, and can respond to it in anywhere from 60 seconds to 5 minutes. The point is that the visitor is called back on the phone, so the race to start talking before a website visitor closes your window and moves on to the next site is entirely eliminated.
2. Setup
Implementing any tool to your website can either add value or completely screw up your website. By adding value, I mean it can help you convert more people coming into the website by lending them a helping hand to address their pain points better. By screwing it up, I mean making people leave even before they have gone through less than half of the page on which they landed.
Setting up such tools can be challenging especially when you don’t have a developer in your team that can set up live chat and enable all of its features.
Setting up click to call is simple and easy. You just copy paste a few lines of code to install the callback widget on your website. Read more here – How to implement click to call on your website. Heck, read this article to do it without paying a dime – Implement free call back on your website. Leaving that aside, the other most important thing you’ll notice by installing a click to call tool like Lucep on your website is that users see a 48% or more jump in lead generation and up to 72% more conversions.
3. Customization
Customization becomes important when people start noticing the layout and design of your website including all popups and widgets present on it. Literally, it takes no more than 0.05 seconds for them to decide whether they like what they are seeing. In that small fraction of time, if they see something alien on your website, then you are in trouble.
So there are three things you can look at when you break down the things that you can actually customize on a widget.
1. Appearance
2. Fields and CTAs
3. Notifications
Live chats today let you work on the design part and also gives you the freedom to change the number of fields and create eye catching CTAs that can attract a lot of traffic towards the widget. But click to call takes the customization feature to a whole new level when it gives you authority to create and send out customized notifications to select teams.
For example, depending on the enquiry, regular support can be customized directly to be sent to the customer support team, whereas an important sales lead can be directed towards the right sales rep who is available and knows how to handle the call.
4. Chat tool
One quite popular live chat feature is that it allows its operators to feed in canned responses. While this might help reduce time to type in your answer, it also comes off as an impersonal to the person at the other end. Just imagine that you keep getting the same responses 2-3 times when you ask a query. Won’t it make you believe you are talking to a robot than to a human? In fact, it could actually be a chatbot who is providing the answers.
Another thing to remember is a feature that lets customer service reps see what people are typing even before they send it to you. This is a privacy breach and most live chat users are unaware of it.
A click to call tool, on the other hand, lets your customers talk to you person-to-person, and only when they have chosen a particular query to which they need the answer to. Once connected, they only have to say what they wish to share, and the rep at the other end of the line hears only that much.
It’s also hard to keep documentation of live chat. Indeed, many live chat interfaces today offer an email copy, but that doesn’t help the customer much if they want to continue their engagement with the brand. It’s only a backup to pull out if something goes wrong. It’s not a thread they can continue, and it does not create further engagement or foster loyalty.
5. Customer engagement
Live chats often display “automatic greetings” as a feature that works the best. But then you often get automatically greeted by a chat program that blocks up the entire website. Chats can easily become a pain that you wished you never had on your website.
Sometimes the “Eye-catchers” provided to chat users tend to distract the visitors from the main agenda of the website. Live chat software developers tend to design their applications in such a way that they want people to forget about the rest of the site, and click on the chat first. Chats are a bit too selfish as they forget that they are tools to enhance the site for better, and not take away from it.
Click to call, on the other hand, is a thin strip with a phone number that lets visitors know they can use it if needed. Only when they hover over the app that it expands and is fully visible.
6. Web to phone app
A first time visitor is the most expensive visitor to your site and it is extremely difficult to convert these first time visitors in their initial contact with your site. In fact, in most industries, first time visitors convert into sales or leads at less than 3%. But installing a perfect app and web combo that works in unison will work wonders on your site, especially to attract first time visitors.
Most live chat is ill suited for mobile, and with more than 50% of browsing occurring on mobile (according to Google), live chat no longer makes the cut. The screen is much smaller, customers get distracted from their browser much faster, and network access is required.
Some click to call solutions, like Lucep, on the other hand, have website widgets and app that lets you take care of your website visitors without even having to open a browser and load your website. You can easily install the Lucep app from the App Store or Google Play, and have the people that want to reach out to right in your palm. Also with instant push notification systems in place, you don’t have to constantly worry about visitors anymore. Whenever there is a callback request, a push notification will let you know instantaneously.
Cloud capabilities wired into click to call services will keep track of your data, store your settings and let you access it from anywhere in the world.
7. Team performance management
Both live chat and click to call have tracking abilities that lets your sales members in on visitor information such as time spent on the website, number of times they have requested for a chat or call and so on. You can also track your sales team’s activity with the help of this data and find out which is the one sales rep that picks the maximum number of leads, in how much time and the one who closes the most.
But leads can only be seen till its on your site. There’s no accountability for that lead once it’s offline, and it is considered as a fresh lead again, especially if it comes through a different channel the next time.
Live chats come under this category when they track people online, but if it’s a customer coming back again after a week through, say a call, they might not be able to recognize or back track that lead since the chat’s tracking powers are limited only to chats. One of your sales member might have given almost all the necessary information for that lead to close. However, now it goes to a completely new sales rep, who without any effort gets to keep the prize.
On the other hand, with click to call you get to track both online and offline interactions as a single lead.
8. Reports and Analytics
Live chat analytics are rather restricted to chat itself. As seen before, chats are selfish and it becomes apparent when it comes to analytics. Live chat tool will talk only about itself. You will definitely get analytics on chat summary, chat goals, chat satisfactions, queued visitors and chat surveys, and that’s great.
But a callback solution does not think just about itself, and can give you summary reports that include info on website visitors, number of leads generated, average response times and can even give you analytics data on the number of engaged visitors that have come to your site.
For more details on how Lucep does this, you can go through our blog on traffic analytics.
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