What is an effective live chat strategy for your staff?

Congrats! You’ve successfully implemented Qualified and are ready to say “see ya!” to those old-school website forms and “hello!” to personalized conversations that create long-lasting relationships with VIP buyers. 

So how do you make sure your sales reps are at the right place, at the right time, to engage in those game-changing conversations? It’s all about developing an effective live chat strategy for your staff.  

There's not a one-size-fits all solution. Your live chat strategy depends on several factors in your company. Staffing your chat is an art, not a science. 

Luckily, Qualified is committed to helping you do whatever it takes to create that masterpiece. We outlined a few key factors to consider when designing your game-winning staffing strategy. 

Website volume and patterns 

It’s important to monitor your daily website volume as a whole, and identify what times of day you see high traffic periods. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to do this. During those high traffic times, you’ll want to have ample sales reps ready to pounce or respond to inbound requests. 

A key part of a successful live chat strategy is properly staffing your chat during these high volume times, as you’re less likely to miss the opportunity to strike up that crucial conversation, build that relationship and ultimately make that sale. 

Territories 

Some companies are structured in a way where representatives are only allowed to speak with buyers in their territories. If this is the case, you’ll need more staff to ensure all customers are met with a great experience.  

However, at Qualified, we recommend letting this technique go an focusing on developing a better live chat strategy. By allowing all representatives to engage with any customer on your website, you not only reduce staffing needs but also create a stronger buying experience for your customers.

Inbound & Outbound Engagement 

Once you’ve figured out key volume metrics and empowered sales representatives to be conversationalist masters across all customers, it’s important to think through your inbound and pouncing strategy. 

And this is where a little science (or rather…math) comes in. 

On average, you can expect 5-10% of your daily website traffic to engage with the Qualified Messenger. 3.5% will interact with a sales representative via live chat and 1-3% will book a meeting. 

For example, a website with 3,000 visitors a day and a high pouncing rate may have as many as 150-300 Qualified conversations, either with a bot or a human. Ideally, sales reps will have ~100 live chat conversations (mostly during peak times) and could book as many as 60 meetings in one day. Using this information and what you know about peak website visit times and territory distribution, you can staff Qualified with representatives to pounce and respond to inbound chats to meet these benchmarks.

You can use the formulas below to inform your inbound v. outbound live chat strategy as well.

Inbound Requests = [Expected visitor volume] x [3% conversation rate] x [10% qualified rate] 

Pouncing = [Expected visitor volume] x [ 8-10% conversation rate] 

While successfully staffing your chat won’t always be as easy as punching in a few numbers, if you use these best practices as a guide to inform your live chat strategy, you’ll be well on your way to connecting, conversing, and closing.