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I haven’t tried it personally from the support side but I have been on the other end of it as a customer. It ends up feeling creepy to me. You think you’re alone just looking over a product’s site when all of a sudden this live chat box pops up with “I see you’re looking at X. Did you see our product could do Y too?” As a customer, I’m not a fan of it.
Hey @Evan, I think you’ve heard my thoughts on live chat enough to know where I stand overall — generally not a fan of it because it’s rarely executed well.
That being said, I think it could be done well in a proactive manner, on certain pages of a website. For instance, if a site visitor is clicking around in documentation / knowledge base pages, and they’re not immediately finding the desired result, a proactive live chat prompt might be welcomed. It wouldn’t be right to prompt on every click, but if the chat service can be configured to do a bit of traffic analysis, you’d be able to tell that a visitor is struggling to find an answer. Give them time to find the answer themselves, but don’t let them flounder around on your site.
Similarly, if a visitor is landing on a contact form / trouble ticket submission page, I’d say it would be appropriate at that point to issue an almost immediate chat prompt. Same thing with a company contact page. Those are signals that the visitor wants a human interaction, so give it to them.
It can be a nice sales & marketing tool on product, feature, solutions, pricing pages, etc, if it’s not overly aggressive. However, my preference is to invest resources in your product marketing — make it simple to understand what you’re offering, and easy to buy it, without having to do a high-touch customer service interaction
As a user, it really annoys me. If I want help, I’ll ask for it. That might just be me.
As a support agent, I’ve rarely seen it result in an actual conversation with a user, so it seems like a waste of my time when there are other users actually asking for help.
I like @Jason‘s idea about only doing it on certain pages, like if a user has been clicking around in the KB for awhile or is on the contact form. In that case, the user is probably looking for an answer and being proactive could improve their experience.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! Lots of food for thought…
Great food for thought! We’re going to be trying proactive chat in Q2. We’re installing it within Moz Analytics and will probably only target customers on their first day using the product, though we might provide it for 7 days. It’s going to be framed as an onboarding assistance coach, with the goal of increasing engagement within the product in the first seven days and decreasing churn of those users over two months.
I agree that most implementations feel creepy, so I’ve had to think a lot about what it might look like. I’m thinking a tab on the lower right that pops up a little bit and says, “We’re here for live chat. Do you need help with anything?” and later clarifies it’s for a set period of time as a coaching mechanism.
Has anyone tried using it this way? Learned anything? Have feedback? I’ll let y’all know how it goes!
We haven’t done a pop up at WordPress.com, but we do offer a chat option in a few different places. Not sure if it counts as proactive though
We do offer live chat as a service with one of our upgrades where we’re available during a set time. We also have a live chat box (using Olark) display for some new users, and users who have one of our plans in their shopping cart. Overall, I think our approach is relatively subtle, i.e. a small box in the lower right corner.
The vast majority of our customers who use the chat feature ask pertinent questions and, judging from our internal metrics, get a good deal out of it. Every now and then someone requests the chat box be removed, but that’s pretty rare. Rather than a sales-y approach, the chats are always framed as support, whether that means helping someone set up their site, choose a theme, or decide if an upgrade is the right option for them.
Lots of great tips here - considering how you would feel as the customer if you saw the proactive message, only prompting on certain pages or after a certain amount of time, and framing your messaging as ‘helpful’ rather than ‘sales-y’ - are excellent for support-focused pages.
At Olark (we’re a live chat product for those who may not know) we do not use proactive chat on our own site, in general. We do have our chat configured to send notifications to the operators when a customer is in need of help - for example, the customer gets a 500 error a few times in a row, the operator is notified, and the operator can decide to manually send a message asking if everything is okay. We tend to receive a positive reply back from the customer when we do this, but that may also be due to our site being for a live chat product in the first place.
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