We offer it to many of our clients because they ask for it on their websites. We’re talking about live chat for your website or opening your phone and business up to text messaging. The demand seems to be growing for remote contact and chatting, but is it worthwhile to invest in it for your business site? Let’s take a look at the positives and negatives of live chat on a website or app.
The Pros and Cons of Live Messaging with Clients
It’s seen more and more on business websites now. The ease of being able to talk to an online associate live, ask questions, and (usually) end up making your purchase right then and there at the end of the conversation.
There are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it, but within that, there are also inherent pros and cons of live messaging.
Positives
You give clients a (sometimes preferred) direct line
Clients like good service. That goes for any industry, not just medical marketing. It’s extremely good of you as a provider to offer this option for people who do not want to talk on the phone, are at work, school, or whatever the case may be. If you’re the type of person who uses live chats often with GoDaddy or whoever else, you know what we mean.
Leverage live chat to make new sales
Some of the time, the people messaging are ones who would have otherwise called. Sometimes, though, you are getting reaching new people who would have never gone through the effort of calling. Live chatting is just what some people look for at this point.
You are interfacing with prospects you may have never had access to otherwise.
Your sales people (hopefully) will be the ones responsible for this kind of contacting and interfacing. They will love the opportunity to get additional leads and make more money. You will love the additional revenue.
Negatives
As with all good things, there are inherent weaknesses and negatives that come along with live chat for your website. The good news, however, is that they are avoidable for the most part.
It can hurt your loading times
If your website is slow, it can be a major drain on its potential to attract new business. You should keep this in mind when choosing a live chat option for your site.
It can do more harm than good if you don’t implement it correctly or implement something too large for your site to handle.
Takes up space on the screen
“Real estate” on the screen of a digital screen is always important to think about when designing a website, ad, or anything else. The more things you add to your site to make it “better” will take up space.
The space above the fold is the space that people see on their screen when they first enter the site before scrolling. This space, especially, is one you need to optimize for good experience for the user. If they don’t like it, they could leave and never return to your brand.
So what does this have to do with live chatting?
Your live chat box is going to take up some of the real estate on the screen of your user – especially the ones using their phones (probably most of them).
Go for a live chat app or plugin that takes up just a little bit of space on the screen. You can also designate it only to the contact page if you want to keep it off of your main screen when people check into the site.
All things to think about.
All things we can help you out with.
If you need help with your practice’s website, get in touch with us to talk a little more about it. We even have a live chat…
