26th Jan 2017
Live chat on a retail site can increase sales and customer satisfaction, while also giving an edge on your competition. Allowing customers to engage with your customer service team will also give a boost to your conversion rates. In many cases, you will also increase customer service efficiency. How? By reducing the communication times often associated with email. So live chat is win win win win win.
I’ve recently come across a free live chat platform which I rate highly. I thought I’d introduce it to you, as well as show you the process to install within around 10 minutes. For the record, I am not being paid to write this. In fact, the platform won’t know I am until it’s been released.
The platform is called tawk.to, and they let you “monitor and chat with visitors on your website”. Within 10 minutes, you can have live chat set up on your site, with a great set of analytics to boot. On with the process:
1. Sign Up
Head to tawk.to and fill out your details. You’ll need to activate your email address, so click the link which was sent there. You’ll then be sent to step 2. Not a bad first step, eh?
2. Enter Details
tawk.to will now prompt you first for your site name and URL:
Then you’ll be asked to invite agents. Use this time to add anyone who will currently be answering chat requests. If that’ll just be you, you can hit “skip this step”.
3. Install The Widget
The platform now gives you some code to paste if you’re that way inclined. If you have a web developer, click the button below the code to email the code directly to them. You can also download a ready-made plugin for many of the popular retail platforms out there. Personally I’d just copy and paste the code, though.
…and that’s it.
Seriously. You’ve now got live chat enabled on your site! Visitors with queries will be directly in contact with any of your agents who are online. Have an explore around the tool and you’ll see that there are analytics of the chats which have happened. There are also mobile apps available, which is handy. In the admin section you can set a ‘pre chat form’ to collect email addresses if you’d like to.
How easy was that? If you’ve got any questions, do feel free to drop me a line.
