How to Add a Live Chat to Your Website Step-by-Step

Reading time7 minutes
Jaqueline Corradi
Jaqueline Corradi
Content Manager

Do you know how to add a live chat to your website? The process is simpler than you may think. With just a few clicks, you can have a new communication channel available to everyone who visits your website.

It's possible to personalize the live chat widget and engage in conversations with your target audience by sending personalized messages, based on their interactions at your pages. Adding a live chat offers more opportunities to conquer leads, and sell more.

Why Add a Live Chat to Your Website

1. Improve Customer Support

A live chat will make your company's customer support more efficient. Instead of spending time with calls or emails, your clients can solve their problems immediately, on your website. It's practical and encourages people to send their questions.

2. Offer Better Customer and User Experience

User experience refers to how someone feels when visiting a web page, while customer experience is about the buying journey. Both of them are fundamental when it comes to how people perceive your brand.

If you have a live chat, you can enhance both customer and user experience. When navigating through your website, the visitors can count on immediate support.

But, keep in mind that to provide great user and customer experience, you must prepare your team so they know how to answer the questions and give the best solutions. Also, you need to create a system to have a fast response time.

3. Reduce Costs

Keeping a call center is much more expensive than using a live chat, and you can reduce the number of calls significantly. Besides, by aligning the live chat with a chatbot, it's possible to offer 24/7 customer support without spending more.

4. Increase Sales

Satisfied customers mean more sales. When a potential customer enters your website and quickly solves all their doubts through the live chat, it's more likely this person will make a purchase.

Just the fact that you have a live chat, even if the customer doesn't use it, is reassuring. The person knows there is a direct line to speak to the company, and this makes them feel safer to make a purchase.

5. Get To Know Customers Better

The live chat is also a great asset when it comes to gathering more information about who your target audience is. You can analyze the conversations, and identify the most common complaints to implement changes and enhance your company services.

You can also discover where most of your customers are located, their average age, their demands, preferences, and much more. The better you know your customers the better you can help them.

6. Solve Problems Faster

Having to solve problems with customer support is already a task that most people want to avoid dealing with. Losing hours because of that is frustrating, but you can prevent that by offering an efficient live chat.

With a well-prepared customer support team, customers can easily contact your company and solve their demands. This has a positive impact on how your brand is perceived and encourages customers to buy again on your website and even recommend it to their friends and family.

7. Gain Trust and Credibility

People often feel insecure about buying from a website they have just gotten to know, they worry about data security, product quality, and delivery time, for example.

To show customers that they can trust your company, there are several things to be done, such as adding customer reviews, and website certificates, building a professional website, and having a live chat.

8. Straighten Customer Relationships

To build a long-lasting relationship with your customers, it's necessary to nurture it and show how you value them. You can do that by providing efficient customer service through multiple channels, including live chat.

This feature shows that people who buy from your brand can count on a company that cares about them enough to establish an efficient and fast support system. Therefore, they feel compelled to buy again from you.

How to Add a Live Chat to Your Website in 8 Steps

1. Choose a Live Chat Software

The first step when it comes to how to add a live chat to your website is choosing a live chat software that meets your needs and provides high-quality service. The best live chat software must be easy to use, affordable, and scalable.

Make sure the live chat of your choice offers the features below:

  • Behavior-based chat triggers
  • Transfer chats between agents
  • Multilingual chat
  • Co-browsing
  • Real-time visitor tracking
  • Canned responses
  • Omnichannel customer communication
  • Away messages
  • Upselling/cross-selling
  • AI chatbots

With JivoChat, you will count on all those features. You can integrate live chat, chatbot, call, email, and social media channels to create customer profiles and manage everything in a centralized platform.

2. Create an Account in the Platform of Your Choice

After selecting the live chat software, you will use, you need to create an account and download the app. The best live chat software, such as JivoChat, provides desktop and mobile app versions so you and your team can keep track of customer interactions wherever you are.

JivoChat website

When you create an account, you will have to choose a plan, as well. Most live chat companies offer different types of plans, which can include from basic to advanced features. You can opt for a free live chat plan in the start, and change to a pay one as your business grows.

3. Install the Chat Widget on The Website

You will receive a code that must be installed on your website. Follow the instructions given according to the live chat software you will use. Once you have added the code to the website, you are ready to receive and answer messages from your customers instantaneously.

Installation code for JivoChat

4. Personalize the Live Chat Widget

Live chat apps, like JivoChat, allow you to personalize the live chat experience by changing the widget design. You can choose the color, size, format, and font type, and define where the window will be placed on each page. That's important because it enables you to align the widget appearance with your brand's visual identity.

5. Integrate the Live Chat With Other Platforms

Once you have installed the live chat on your website, it's time to integrate it with the other message channels you use. JivoChat allows you to synchronize with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and much more.

6. Enable Proactive Chat Invitations

Have you ever noticed that when you enter some websites, the live chat window pops up immediately with a personalized message? That's a proactive chat invitation. Instead of waiting for website visitors to click in the chat window and a conversation, you can catch their attention by sending a message.

Live chat window

You can create different messages and trigger them based on customer behavior. For example, if someone is about to leave items in the cart, you can engage by offering a coupon discount, so they can finalize their purchase. The messages need to be customized and written according to your customer buyer journey,

7. Create Canned Responses

To optimize your work and speed up lead response time, you can develop canned responses for frequently asked questions. The answers will be sent automatically according to the question, and if necessary the person is redirected to talk with a live agent. Live chat and chatbot work together and complement each other.

8. Keep Track of The Live Chat Performance

After you have learned how to add a live chat to your website, and the live chat is installed, enjoy the analytics features to keep track of the results. Analyze the data to ensure customers are satisfied with your service and look for ways to improve continuously.

Enjoy the Live Chat Benefits

Not that you know how to add a live chat to your website, it's time to enjoy its benefits. Make sure your team is prepared to deal with the live chat demands, train them to offer high-quality customer support make the most out of the features provided by the live chat software of your choice.

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