How to Add Live Chat to Your Website is essential for meeting modern customer expectations. Today’s users demand instant answers, personalised help, and fast support.
Live chat has emerged as the gold standard for meeting these expectations. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, businesses implementing live chat often see significant improvements in user experience and success rate.
No matter whether you’re an e-commerce store, a service-based business, or just another content site, with live chat, you can significantly increase your visitor experience and expand your company in the process. And this robust guide will take you through the entire process from setting up live chat on your website to advanced optimisation techniques.

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Why Your Website Needs Live Chat

The State of Customer Expectations Today

Today’s consumers have little patience when it comes to finding answers. Live chat tickets get placed in the queue and resolved through the same workflow as tickets from customer support. The customer can ask for help from your chat agents, and your chat agents can ask for help from the support team if they need it.
According to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 79% of customers prefer live chat for its immediacy, compared to email or phone support.
When someone lands on your website, they’re looking for answers to their questions pronto! This could consist of information regarding products, pricing, technical support or general questions.

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The Benefits of Using Live Chat on Your Website

Increased Conversion Rates
We all know that live chat can increase conversions by as much as 40%, based on HubSpot’s research. This exciting jump is largely a result of having removed the purchase obstacles with one-click product explanations, which help to resolve fears at the moment.

Increased Customer Satisfaction
Live chat offers instant gratification, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Customers appreciate the convenience and one-on-one service of instant assistance.

Cost-effective Customer Service
Since it is cheaper than phone support, one agent can answer multiple chat sessions at once. This allows them to reduce service costs without compromising service quality, according to Forrester Research.

Rich Customer Insights
Live chat conversations are a goldmine of information about customer complaints, FAQs, and user behaviour. This information can lead to better decisions and improve the effectiveness of your business strategy itself.

Competitive Analysis
Most websites do not have live chat. Early adopters will have a major edge in customer service and user experience.

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Selecting the Best Live Chat Software

Essential Features to Look For

But when choosing a live chat solution for your site, there are some key features to keep in mind:

• Instant Messaging: Make sure chat functions with no delay
  
• Mobile Friendly: Your live chat widget has to be mobile-friendly. Choose a responsive design that custom-fits tables for different screen sizes
  
• Customizable Widget: Make sure to go for software that offers the possibility to edit the chat widget’s look, colours, and placement. This helps keep brand consistency throughout your website
  
• Integration Features: Make sure that the solution can connect to your existing CRM, email marketing software, and analytics tools.
  
• Analytics and Reporting: Powerful reporting capabilities will allow you to track chat volume, response times, customer satisfaction, and conversion rates.

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The Best Live Chat Software 

Free Options

• Tawk to: Provides totally free, simple live chat software. Perfect for small businesses getting started with live chat
  
• HubSpot Live Chat: This is a dense tool that interacts smoothly with HubSpot’s CRM. Great for businesses already in the HubSpot ecosystem
  

Premium Solutions

• LiveChat: A top-end platform with powerful AI capabilities and a wide array of integrations
  
• Intercom: Great for customer relationship management and marketing automation-centric businesses
  
• Zendesk Chat: Provides customers with personalised experiences on websites, mobile apps and social media
  

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Optimising Your Live Chat for Maximum Impact

Best Practices for Chat Widget Placement
Strategic Positioning: Place your live chat widget in the bottom right corner, where users naturally look for help options. According to Nielsen Norman Group’s usability research, this position is universally recognised and doesn’t interfere with your website’s content.

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Technical Considerations for Web Hosting

Ensuring Optimal Performance
Your web hosting infrastructure plays a crucial role in live chat performance. A reliable hosting provider ensures your live chat widget loads quickly and maintains consistent connectivity.

• Server Response Time: Fast server response times are essential for live chat functionality. According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights, look for hosting providers that guarantee fast page loads and minimal downtime.
  
• SSL Certificates: To protect customer information, live chat platforms need a secure connection, which means using an SSL certificate to encrypt data. As part of its https ranking criteria, Google ensures that your hosting provider has strong SSL certificate options, which is critical for protecting your chat and retaining customer trust.
  
• Uptime Guarantee: The live chat service depends entirely on your website being online. Choose hosting providers that guarantee at least 99.9% uptime if you want the live chat to be available to assist customers during their time of need.
  
• Scalability: As your chat volume grows, your hosting infrastructure should scale accordingly.
  

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The Future of Website Live Chat

Emerging Trends

• Voice Integration: You can expect more platforms to see a voice chat option in conjunction with standard text messaging.
  
• More Advanced AI Relating to Complex Customer Inquiries: According to Gartner’s predictions, AI will learn to take care of complicated customer inquiries without human involvement.
  
• Predictive Analytics: Live chat platforms will leverage machine learning to predict customer needs and proactively interact.
   
• Integration with IoT: As Internet of Things devices get more popular, live chat support may expand to smart devices and applications.

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Conclusion

Live chat has gone from being a “nice to have” to an expectation. Live chat can be complex to set up, but it brings valuable improvements to customer satisfaction, increased sales, and reduced support costs.

Achieving success with live chat requires careful consideration of platform selection; ensuring your chat process is implemented effectively; and ongoing improvement based on your chat performance data, customer feedback, and your existing practices. Live chat widgets can be valuable tools to help you separate your organisation from a growing number of competitors within an increasingly competitive digital marketplace. No matter whether you’re a start-up considering your first chat implementation or looking to improve your existing chat function for your website, you should focus on providing appropriate value to your website visitors in the use of your website. Develop and maintain the technical environment that allows for creating and communicating with customers that is reliable, secure, and fast.

By selecting the right hosting partner, you will ensure your live chat runs as planned with little to no downtime and security issues that can be noted with hosted applications. That’s where ElySpace can help.
Are you ready to upgrade your website with a professional live chat solution?
At ElySpace, we can provide the required hosting environment and security attributes for live chat to be successfully launched or upgraded on your website, or at least assist you in reviewing items for your existing live chat solution. Our hosting, featuring SSL certificates, 99.9% uptime, and scalable hosting, allows your website and chat system to perform well when you’re busy, while also maintaining customer trust.

Contact ElySpace to learn how our hosting services apply to your live chat aspirations and customer experience strategy.