How To Engage With Website Visitors In Real Time

Your website visitors are the most important asset you have for the growth of your online business. When someone lands on your site it's not only important that they resonate with your messaging and product offering, it's also imperative that they don't leave your site confused or with unanswered questions.

When someone leaves your website, your goal is to have given them all the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision because if that's not the case there's no guarantee they'll reach out via email or ever return to your site.

Visitors on your site are at the top of your sales funnel and are at their peak level of focus and interest in your product or service offering. Don't waste that opportunity by letting them leave with unanswered questions or feeling unsure of whether your product is right for them.

This article discusses 4 ways to interact with visitors in real-time before they leave your site to offer assistance, answer questions and nurture leads.

Live Chat

Live chat software allows website visitors to speak to you via text messages in their browser. Questions can be answered in real-time with support or sales agents before leaving your website. This means there's no need to reach out via email or contact forms.

Benefits of Live Chat

Live Chat provides an instant feedback loop for customers as well as support agents. When visitors get answers to their questions instantly, they're far more likely to convert into paying customers.
Productivity of support agents is increased not only by answering questions in real-time, but by getting confirmation from customers that their questions have been answered. This means tickets are closed faster.
Live Chat increases customer engagement by providing a quick and easy way for them to contact you.

Disadvantages of Live Chat

Live chat can often feel impersonal, especially when support agents aren't well trained or are rushing to simply close tickets as fast as possible. Often customers prefer speaking to someone over the phone or video chat which provides a more personal experience.
Customers come to expect instant responses. This means you need to ensure you either have support staff available 24/7 or have fall backs in place like email or chat bots.

Chat Bot

Chat bots provide a similar experience to live chat with the main difference being that there isn't necessarily a real person on the other end.

Chat bots use AI or scripted responses to interact with website visitors and are commonly used for basic support queries.

Benefits of Chat Bots

With Chat Bots, you can ease some of the support burden from your support staff. Chat Bots are able to handle simple queries while handing off more complex queries to your support staff.
Chat Bots are always available so you can provide at least a basic level of support 24/7 when you might not be available.

Disadvantages of Chat Bots

Chat Bots are unable to handle complex support queries. For all but the most simple questions or scripted responses, a real person is required.
Chat Bots can often feel impersonal leaving visitors wishing they could speak to a real person.

Video Chat

Real time video chat embedded in your website goes beyond live chat by allowing visitors to speak to you via audio or video while they're on your website.

Real time video chat from Feederloop also provides screen sharing, call routing and voice messages. All of this sits directly on your website so visitors don't need to leave your site or download anything to speak to you. Everything happens in their browser, on your website.

Benefits of Video Chat

Video Chat provides a near in-person experience for your website visitors. They feel connected with your business and heard as a valued customer.
If the Video Chat solution provides screen sharing like Feederloop does, complex support queries will be resolved faster by not only hearing what the issue is as described by your customers but also seeing it first hand.
Potential leads which would have otherwise been lost through slow email responses or impersonal live chat messages can instead be nurtured by sales staff via live video chat.
In the case of Feederloop, not only can customers start inbound calls with you, but you can also proactively call anyone on your website. This can increase conversion rates when cold calling potential prospects while they're on key conversion pages (eg: pricing pages).
Video Chat can provide fall backs when staff are unavailable such as voice messages or email. This way you get the best of all worlds by offering both video/audio support as well as more traditional options.

Disadvantages of Video Chat

As is the case with Live Chat, Video Chat is also resource intensive in terms of requiring people to be available in real-time.
If the Video Chat solution you choose doesn't have intelligent fallbacks when agents are unavailable, customers will get frustrated.

Polls, Surveys and Quizzes

There are several products available which allow you to survey visitors on your website by means of a popup. This usually involves defining your questions in advance. Answers from the surveys, polls and quizzes can then be analyzed to gain insight into your visitors and customers.

While these tools don't typically provide a way for you to start real-time conversations with visitors, they can never the less be used to provide valuable insight and increase customer engagement.

Benefits of Polls, Surveys and Quizzes

Answering the questions is quick and easy for website visitors. There's no need to respond to an email or navigate to a separate survey tool since the popup appears as they're on your website.
Automated response aggregation and analysis.
Flexibility: These tools often provide ways to only target specific visitors or customer segments. They also provide question flow, design and branding customizations.

Disadvantages of Polls, Surveys and Quizzes

These tools don't provide a way for you to interact with visitors in real-time.
Over the years, people have increasingly started to ignore these kinds of popups on websites.
The pre-scripted nature of the questions means you can't follow a more natural conversation flow as would be the case with Live Chat and Video Chat.

Conclusion

While the messaging, feature descriptions and marketing on your website can go a long way towards converting visitors into customers, there will inevitably be gaps where more information is needed. This is especially true as prices increase or when your business focuses on B2B and enterprise clients.

Someone browsing your website is a clear indication that they have some level of interest in your product or service. There's no guarantee that they'll end up converting to a customer. The only thing you can be sure of is - at this point in time, they're on your site and are learning more about your business the longer they're there.

Don't let visitors leave your website with unanswered questions. They might never come back. Make it easy for them to interact with you, start a conversation and get the answers they're looking for.

Providing visitors on your website with fast, simple to use tools to speak to you in real-time before leaving your website has been shown to increase conversion rates and reduce customer support resolution times.