{"id":14712,"date":"2018-03-05T18:00:09","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T18:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=14712"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:57:02","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:57:02","slug":"live-chat-strategies-for-speed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/live-chat-strategies-for-speed\/","title":{"rendered":"Need for speed: how to address leads faster with live chat"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Sales, timing is everything. You can have the world\u2019s most talented sales team and the greatest product but still lose to a competitor.<\/p>\n

A recent HBR study<\/a> analyzed 1.25 millions sales leads, and found you\u2019re seven times more likely to win a deal if you respond to prospects in less than an hour versus responding in two hours.<\/p>\n

The fastest way to respond to a prospect is through live chat<\/a> on your site. Contact forms still have their place, but there\u2019s a delay between when someone fills out a \u201crequest a demo\u201d form to when an SDR follows up. This follow-up process can last days or weeks as SDRs battle to catch the prospect live or get an email response.<\/p>\n

Live chat allows you to circumvent this process. But, many companies either fail to make the most of their messenger, or simply use it inefficiently. At Intercom, we\u2019re always experimenting with new ways to deliver a better user experience through live chat and have learned a couple of lessons from more than 20,000 customers using our chat solutions. Here are three simple, tested, but often overlooked live chat time-savers we\u2019ve uncovered:<\/p>\n

1. Be selective<\/h2>\n

Do you email every single lead in your database when you fire off a nurture campaign? Then why would you make live chat available to every lead that visits your site? Doing so can prove to be very costly. Your SDRs should be focused on diagnosing the needs of qualified prospects and providing them with a personalized experience, not having conversations with every person that comes to your site.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, it\u2019s now easy to offer live chat only to prospects who match your ideal customer profile. By leveraging tools like Clearbit<\/a>, you can choose the subset of leads who will see a messenger on your site. Maybe you only sell to B2B SaaS companies under 200 employees. With a couple of clicks you can pick the criteria that makes sense for your business.
\n\"Intercom
\nBeing selective about who you chat with will ensure your SDR team is making real progress towards their goals. It\u2019s also a sustainable way to drive live chat adoption across your sales organization. Your reps will be more motivated to use live chat when they see its ability to deliver a constant flow of high-quality leads.<\/p>\n

2. Balance bots with a human touch<\/h2>\n

Over-automation has tarnished the reputation of Sales and Marketing. We\u2019ve all encountered pesky Robo-Dialers and spammy automated emails. Live chat is the newest frontier, but some marketers are adapting the same ineffective tactics used in the email and phone era to this medium. No one likes to feel like a number. And, nothing annoys prospects more than having a prolonged conversation with a chatbot<\/a> when they thought they were going to talk to a person.<\/p>\n

Modern sales and marketing requires the right balance
\nof automation and human connection.<\/p>\n

Modern sales and marketing requires the right balance of automation and human connection. Our most successful customers use our bot, Operator, to automate the collection of contact information<\/a> (email, company name and company size), while allowing their SDRs to build valuable relationships with prospects.<\/p>\n

Making live chat conversations personal is the most efficient way to making each interaction as human as possible. Prior to having your SDRs jump on live conversations, spend some time determining how you will route chats to individuals or team inboxes. For example, let’s say you service customers in multiple countries and employ multilingual sales professionals. In that case, try routing conversations to your reps based on your visitor\u2019s browser language.<\/p>\n

3. Set proper expectations<\/h2>\n

We\u2019ve been conditioned to expect instant responses when we talk to people on messaging platforms. Whether it\u2019s Slack or iMessage, people tend to grow impatient as they intensely monitor the three animated dots, waiting for a response.<\/p>\n

Here are some steps you can take to set proper expectations with your prospects in live chat:<\/p>\n