Website Hosting

A chat widget is a little box installed on the corner of your website. Website visitors can get instant and fast support through a chat widget which makes it easier to connect with your business.

1. Live chat improves the support experience for customers

The top reason why customers prefer live chat is that it lets them get their questions answered immediately.

With live chat, you give customers a way to reach you in the exact moment that they have questions or problems they can’t solve. This feels much better than sending an email to a support team; with email, it’s hard to know when you’ll get a response back.

The immediacy of getting help is likely why customer satisfaction ratings tend to be higher for live chat than other types of support.

2. Live chat helps with customer acquisition and onboarding

Live chat is a great way to connect with prospective and new customers and give them the confidence they need to use your product or spend money on your website. According to Forrester, consumers who use chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those who don’t.

Being available to help builds trust, even if your customers don’t need to talk right then and there.

3. Live chat lets your agents build rapport with customers

In an ongoing chat, agents can observe a customer’s tone and sentiment and adjust their styles to fit the situation best. By mirroring style or adjusting formality to match a customer’s, agents can quickly build rapport and establish a friendly, helpful relationship.

Messaging platforms also offer a more authentic way to showcase your agents’ personalities than traditional channels.

4. Live chat reduces repetition for your customers

No one wants to have to explain the issue they’re having over and over again. In fact, 72% of customers expect an agent to know their details — including support history and product information — without asking for them.

With quality live chat customer service software, agents can read the text supplied by the customer while also reviewing other details they have access to. This may include things like an indication of which screen the customer is currently viewing and notes from previous interactions with customer support.

During a chat session, some tools will even allow an agent to share a screen with the customer or easily send links and screenshots to help them better understand a set of directions, making everything crystal clear.

5. Live chat boosts your customer service team’s productivity

Live chat is also helpful in improving the productivity of your customer service agents. While a person can only be on one phone call or reply to one email at a time, with chat they can juggle a few at once.

For trickier issues requiring research and reporting, they may want to stick to one or two, but if they’re working the chat queue full of quick and simple questions, handling five at once is manageable with some practice.

Since features and chat handling vary for each tool, be sure to choose the software that works best for your workflows and team. Even better, look for customer service software that can handle your chats, emails, and other support channels all within one tool so agents can focus in one place and get the work done.

6. Live chat lets you provide 24/7 support

With careful scheduling, live chat support can be made available 24/7 — if that would be beneficial to your business — or any other selection of hours you prefer.

By expanding your instant availability to cover the whole day, your customers will have little reason to complain about their questions going unheard. Even if you can’t keep chat staffed around the clock, your self-service support options, like a knowledge base full of content about your product, is available anytime.

When chat isn’t available, be sure it’s quick and easy for customers to find their way to your support documentation. Many times, people are perfectly happy to help themselves, but they aren’t sure where to find the information they need.

With your knowledge base and chat working together, customers will feel taken care of regardless of what hour of the day they find themselves needing support.

7. Live chat increases customer engagement

When you make live chat readily available, you’ll likely see an increase in interactions. While some of that may be customers who switch to using chat instead of email/phone support, a portion of the growth will be people who found chat and realized they could get help instead of giving up and possibly ditching your product altogether.

With increased customer engagement comes a chance to make a good impression and give customers a reason to stick around. To add to the inviting feel, set up your chat tool to display agent names and photos (if possible), and implement a conversational chat style.

8. Live chat can give you an edge over your competition

If your competitors don’t offer live chat (or provide low-quality chat support), that gives you space to do it right and earn their business.

Think about this: if you were a customer in a hurry trying to decide between two products, would you pick up the phone and call support to get your questions answered, or would you be more tempted by the company that was readily available on their website?

Most people are more likely to ask questions over chat than they are willing to make a phone call. In fact, more than half of consumers prefer chat over phone support.

9. Live chat data helps inform product decisions

One major perk to providing support via chat is all of the data you can collect. Depending on your live chat software, you should be able to store, organize, and tag chats to filter them for review later.

By putting the work in up front to sort chats and review them, you can create a collection of data that informs your support team — and your product and marketing teams, too.

For a simple starting point, develop a set of tags all agents will use, and have them tag their chats. Consider tagging for things like feature requests and bugs, as well as by question type or topic to help pinpoint any frequent issues.

As you tag by type, you’ll be able to spot the places in your product that may need updating or require more support documentation to help your customers out.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are often referred to as the gold standard in accessibility and they are widely respected as providing the best path to accessibility compliance — but does the law actually require WCAG compliance?

For federal agencies and their contractors, yes, they are required to conform with WCAG 2.0. For private businesses, the answer is more complicated: they’re not required by law to comply with any specific standard like WCAG, but their websites do have to be accessible.

Private businesses and WCAG compliance

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the most-cited law in regards to web accessibility compliance. This is because the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in places of public accommodation, and websites are increasingly interpreted in legal cases as places of public accommodation. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has reaffirmed that the ADA does apply to websites as well.

So if it’s known that websites are places of public accommodation and therefore need to be accessible to people with disabilities, why is there confusion around whether websites have to comply with WCAG?

In short, and as confirmed by the DOJ, the ADA applies to websites and requires that they be accessible. Mostly because of the ADA’s origins back in 1990, the law doesn’t specify information about websites or a set of technical standards like WCAG. This is largely where the confusion lies, but here’s how to interpret it:

• The absence of a technical standard in the ADA itself does not mean websites don’t have to be accessible. They do have to be accessible, but they aren’t necessarily in violation of the ADA by not following a specific standard like WCAG. This was one of the points the DOJ made clear in its October 2018 letter on the issue and a sentiment that was validated in January 2019 updates in the Domino’s accessibility case.
• WCAG 2.0 and its successor, WCAG 2.1, are consistently identified and upheld as providing an acceptable level of accessibility, cited by plaintiffs and in rulings. This means that while the ADA doesn’t yet specify WCAG as a formal standard under the law, the courts are upholding that compliance with WCAG provides reasonable accessibility. To learn more about the acceptable and use of WCAG, read History of WCAG and How Widely Used is WCAG?
• Facing mounting pressure to act and formalize web accessibility standards under the law, including in a recent letter from Senators seeking answers, the DOJ will eventually put the confusion to rest and state with clarity exactly how website accessibility should be measured and tested. It is with overwhelming likelihood that when that happens, they will point to WCAG as the requirement.

In the current climate, websites have to be accessible and it’s well-accepted that compliance with WCAG is the best way to achieve that goal. That’s why our recommendation is that all businesses that have a publicly-available website test and fix their sites according to WCAG 2.1 specifications.

A cookie policy is a declaration to your users on what cookies are active on your website, what user data they track, for what purpose, and where in the world this data is sent.

Also, a cookie policy should contain information on how your users may opt out of the cookies or change their settings in regard to the cookies on your website.

Many website owners choose to incorporate the cookie policy as a section of their privacy policy. You can also leave your website cookie policy as a stand-alone section.

Regardless, you are legally required by the European GDPR and the Californian CCPA to have one available to your users on your website.

The privacy policy is a document, usually a page on the website, in which all of the methods and purposes of the data processing activities on the site are outlined, including contact forms, mailing lists etc.

Cookies are a potential privacy risk, because they are able to track, store and share user behavior.

Whereas most of the remaining privacy policy may be static, the cookies used on a website are dynamic and might change often.

Therefore, an adequate cookie policy should be regularly updated to make sure that the information is accurate.

What is the difference between a privacy policy and cookie policy?

The cookie policy deals specifically with the use of cookies on your site, whereas the privacy policy is a general document regarding all of the data processes on a website, including contact forms, mailing lists, etc.

Often, the cookie policy is integrated as a part of the privacy policy of a website or an app. Arguably, it is the most challenging part. At the heart of this is the nature of cookies:

• Firstly, cookies tend to change often. This means that the policy, having to be updated and correct, also must be revised accordingly.
• Secondly, cookies operate out of sight. Most website owners don’t even know themselves, what cookies are in operation on their own website.
• Thirdly, the majority of the cookies in operation on a website are usually set by third parties, i.e. have another provenance than the website itself.
• Therefore, it can be hard to have a complete overview at all times of the cookies in operation on your website, what information they gather, for what purpose, and where in the world the data goes to.

The easiest way to ensure full control over your cookies, and to be sure that you have an accurate and updated cookie policy for your website, is to get a GDPR/ePR and CCPA compliant cookie solution, where the cookie policy is integrated with the actual monitoring of cookies on your website.