Live Chat for Real Estate – Best Practice #1: The What, When and Where
Posted July 29, 2011, 11:22 PM by ReadyChat
Based on our experience working with a wide variety of companies within the online real estate space, we’ve developed a set of best practices for companies to effectively use live chat engagement to develop and maintain a competitive advantage online. This is the first of a series of 8 instalments.
When, Where, and How you engage customers in live chat are critical components of an effective online strategy. First of all, it’s important to proactively engage your customers when they are likely to need help the most. And when is that? There are a number of conversion-critical moments on any website, but the most common and critical is when a prospective homebuyer/seller decides to fill out the contact form for a sales representative to contact them. That is the “moment of truth‟— when your site visitor attempts to become a customer.
Tip: Help them convert by offering help when they need it.
Just how do you do that? By developing a system of behaviour triggers that allow you to proactively reach out to customers with live chat before they abandon the site. In addition, making click-to-chat buttons visible in the signup process may help you improve conversion rates and reduce abandonment—when combined with live assistance prior to submitting a request. Plus, making assistance available will help you improve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty at the same time.
To make sure that proactive engagement is introduced at the crucial points of the online conversion process, you should thoroughly analyze your site to understand where and when your visitors are getting lost or abandoning your site. Study your website analytics and see where visitors are dropping off your pages. When you can identify when and where customers are confused, then you can provide assistance before their frustration is so great they can’t be saved.
You should also be present to communicate the right message at the right time, when prospects are displaying signs of abandonment or distress. Examples are when a visitor can’t find the information they were searching for and click the back or home button in their browser menu to leave your site. This is where proactive live chat greetings can become a powerful tool for any online real estate website. It’s critical that your greeting messages be related to the content on the page the visitor is viewing. Many websites fail to send personalized chat greetings but rather use a site-wide or generic greeting, which usually results in poor visitor engagement. Sending a proactive greeting relevant to what the visitor is searching for can dramatically improve online engagement and create opportunities to convert visitors into real estate sales leads.
Stay tuned for our third installment in this series on Live Chat Best Practices.