If you want your website to draw in customers, one thing you’ll need is a website chat widget.
The average attention span of a website visitor is roughly eight seconds, so you don’t have much time to grab these potential customers’ attention and keep them on your site long enough to place an order or schedule an appointment. Because of this, a good chat widget is more likely to keep them on your page a bit longer.
What Is a Website Chat Widget?
A chat widget is simply something you add to your website so that visitors can communicate with someone in your company. The widget can be designed in a number of ways, meaning you can direct it to either a chat bot or a live operator.
Nearly 80% of all visitors to websites admit that they are much more likely to remain on a company’s website if there is some way to get their questions answered quickly, and this is what a chat widget does best.
There’s little doubt that a widget dedicated for chatting increases the odds of conversion with most types of websites. The thing is that a lot of the solutions you research are expensive and are tied to CRM tools that can make the whole deal complicated.
Simplicity is always best when you want to spice up your website and choose the right tool to increase your conversion rate. Ideally, you should be able to integrate a chat widget with chats that a lot of people already use, such as Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, and others.
Before we get to exactly how to do this, let’s first take a look at why a good website chat widget is so beneficial to your site. They include the following:
It Enables Fast Communication with the Company
As mentioned earlier, visitors to your site don’t want to wait until the next business day to get their questions answered.
They want their answers now. Because of that, these chat widgets keep visitors on the site long enough to get their questions answered, and that goes a long way to impress these visitors and show them that you’re a company that considers customer service important.
Chat widgets are certainly faster and more efficient than emails and phone calls are.
It Increases the Credibility of the Website
Nobody wants to get scammed when visiting a website. They want to know that the company they’re visiting is legitimate and is there to help them. If they can interact with someone simply by sending a text message and get a response back immediately, it makes them realize that you are a real business and one that is there to help.
If your business is fairly new, this becomes even more important because visitors will want to make sure that you can be trusted with their patronage.
It Improves Your SEO Rankings
Simply put, a visitor to your site who uses your website chat widget is more likely to remain on your site for at least a little while. This, in turn, improves your SEO rankings.
If a visitor is on your site and has questions but no way to get answers to those questions, they’ll likely leave immediately without making a purchase. Even if they use the chat widget and do not make a purchase, they’re more likely to come back later than people who do not use the widget.
The Customer Service Experience Is Greatly Improved
No visitor will remain on your website for long if there isn’t good customer service. Visitors expect excellent service and a fast, simple way to get answers to their questions. Think about websites that are slow or have broken links on them.
How long do you stay on these sites? Probably not for long. But with a chat widget located on your site, the visitors get immediate assistance even if they’re just talking to a bot. It makes for a much better customer service experience all the way around.
It Helps You Collect Data About Your Visitors
An embedded chat widget can tell you what your visitors were doing on your website and even provide you with the information they chose to leave with you, such as their phone number or email address.
The most significant reason this is important is that next time they visit your site, that information will be retained and therefore, the visitors’ next visit will be a lot more personalized.
