If you work in sales or customer service, you should never underestimate the power of a well-managed live chat. With Magical’s shortcuts, templates, and text expander, running a live chat feature on your website is a breeze … once you get the visitor to engage. So how do you open the conversation? Here are some of the most effective chat triggers you can use to personalize your customer's experience, increase satisfaction and retention, and close more sales.
What are chat triggers?
A chat trigger is essentially a list of criteria. When visitors interact with your website, their behavior checks certain boxes. When a certain number of the criteria are fulfilled, it ‘triggers’ the live chat function and—Tada! Like magic, the live chat box pops up, usually with a message to welcome the visitor and offer to help.
Chat triggers let you give your visitors information proactively. This saves them time and encourages them to stay on your site.
Even better, you can personalize your chat triggers to appeal to different visitors—whether that’s recognizing that someone has visited your site before, offering to help someone who seems to be comparing products, or reaching out to someone who’s trying to get hold of your customer service department.
Live chat is a powerful tool if you work in sales because it lets you guide and prompt your visitor at every stage of the sales funnel. And, if you work in customer service, you can improve visitor experience (and make your business look great) by stepping in to address any concerns before people become frustrated.
How do I use chat triggers?
To set up your chat triggers so they actually get clicked, it can help to think of your live chat like a shop assistant in a brick-and-mortar store.
Say you want to buy a camera. The assistant might greet you when you first come in and let you know they’re available if you need any help. The live chat equivalent of this is a quick ‘Hello’ message when people first land on your site. There’s a pretty low chance that a visitor will engage with this message, but you’ve let them know how easy it is to get support.
The shop assistant is more likely to step in with more specific information once you start to linger at a certain place in the store—and then, there’s a better chance you’ll take them up on the offer. It’s the same with live chat. Once a website visitor has been to multiple URLs or spent 30+ seconds on a certain page, it’s safe to assume that they’re looking for something. You can set a chat trigger for these criteria to offer help or advice and make the experience seamless for your visitors..
Wondering which chat triggers to use? This is where your analytics will help—your data can tell you about who your visitors are, how they’re using your website, and which stage of the sales funnel they’re in.
Combined with the templates in Magical’s customer support MagicPack, you can easily field common questions that come in over live chat with personalized responses using just a few keystrokes. . (After all, there’s a reason Magical is loved by over 10,000 companies around the world!)
Now let’s take a look at some of the chat triggers you might want to set up.
1. For the new visitor
If someone is using your website for the first time, you can set the live chat to pop up when they first arrive. You might want to set your criteria as:
- The visitor is on the site for the first time
- The visitor has stayed on the site for 5 seconds or more
- Your chat agents are online to answer questions
When these boxes are ticked, you can set a proactive—but not pushy—welcome message to set the tone:
Hi! Take a look around. I’m here if you have any questions.
Welcome to <company name>. Let me know if I can help.
This is the exact approach Drift takes on their homepage. And as they’re one of the pioneers of chat software online, you can assume they know a thing or two about how to trigger a conversation.
2. For the returning visitor
Thanks to cookies 🍪 you can set different welcome messages for visitors who’ve already been to your site before. If they’re coming back, they’re sales prospects who are already interested and not just visitors who are noticing your brand for the first time. This is a great chance to exercise that personalized connection and show people that you value their time and interest:
Good to see you again! Is there anything I can help you with?
Welcome back! Let me know if you have any questions.
If you go back to Drift after checking out a few other websites, you’ll be greeted with a new chat trigger that subtly implies they’ve seen you here before.
3. For the referred visitor
You can set chat triggers based on URLs, which lets you set a different welcome message depending on the page your visitor is on. This is especially useful for your site’s landing page. If someone comes to your landing page, it’s because they’re interested in an ad, offer, or social media campaign that sent them to your site. This means you can be a bit more specific with your live chat opening:
Nice to see you! Any questions about <offer or product>?
Looking for <offer or product>? Our team is standing by.
You might even consider using an explicit call to action here:
Ready to sign up? Let’s go to our booking portal
Click here to get an extra 20% off for new customers
The key here is to get specific. You know what your customer is interested in, so let them know that you know. (Y’know?) Check out how Peloton does it here, when you start clicking through to the landing page for their bikes.
4. For the visitor weighing their options
If someone has been to multiple pages of your site already, it’s safe to assume that they’re interested, researching, or looking for an answer to a specific question. Setting a chat trigger to recognize this means that you can step in to help out:
Hi! Let me know if you need help comparing our products.
Interested in a free trial? Let’s get you started.
Customer support system Trengo does this very well when you start clicking around on their website. It’s like they can sense you’re looking for something, and so the live chat prompts you to let them help.
5. For the engaged visitor
It’s also possible to set chat triggers for how far a visitor has scrolled on a page—from 0% (the headline) to 100% (the end of the page). If someone has scrolled down 30% of a page, they’re probably looking for more information, so set your live chat to pop up with a helpful message, like:
Can I help you with <product or service>? Let’s chat!
I see you’re interested in <product or service>. We’re offering 10% off until Friday!
Alternatively, you could set the live chat to appear when a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on the page (say, 30 seconds or more). This is exactly how it works on Okta, the identity security platform when you linger on one of their feature pages.
6. For the visitor about to jump ship
Your analytics data will show you the pages on your website which have the highest bounce rate (that is, the last (or only) page people view before they leave your site). Spend some time thinking about why that might be and then set a chat trigger for that URL with a message to encourage people to stay on your site:
Looking for something in particular? I’m here to help.
Hi there! Have you seen our <special offer>?
The product analytics platform Amplitude does a great job of catching your attention in this way. When you start to leave their website, the live chat entices you with the promise of showing you “something cool.” (And who can resist that?!).
7. For the visitor who has a problem
If someone is spending time on your FAQs or contact page, there’s a good chance they're looking for someone to speak to about a problem. If you set the trigger so that the chat appears when someone has spent, say, five seconds on your contact page, visitors are likely to engage with it because it lets them get straight to the point.
Overall, 73% of people are satisfied with using live chat to solve a problem, compared to 51% with email and just 44% by phone. So it pays to encourage people to use this helpful tool:
Hi there! Can I help you with something?
Hello! Our chat agents are standing by to help.
And for your next trick, using Magical shortcuts in your live chat helps you get answers to your customers faster—especially if things get heated. There’s nothing worse than when you’re frustrated than watching the live chat agent sit on “ . . . “ But with Magical’s shortcuts feature, you can auto-expand your most commonly used phrases with just a couple of keystrokes.
8. For the mobile visitor
It’s worth noting that, even as far back as 2018, 52% of chat queries were coming from mobile devices. But using the live chat function on a website isn’t particularly convenient if you’re on the go. If you have the capability, this is a great time to invite these visitors to move to another platform:
Questions? Chat with us on WhatsApp!
This is the approach Lollimeow takes when they’re selling their bubble backpacks for cats. (Yes, that’s a thing.) By integrating with a platform like Messenger, you can ensure the conversation is easy no matter which device visitors are using.
9. For the hesitant visitor
‘Cart abandonment’ is where people put items in their shopping cart and leave the site without checking out. (And, yeesh, it costs online retailers a lot.) You can do something to counter this by setting chat triggers to target visitors who haven’t yet completed their purchase:
You’re almost there! Is there anything I can help you with?
Or, since additional costs such as shipping are the number one reason for abandoned carts:
Don’t forget, there’s free shipping on orders over $80!
The famous example here is from Domino’s Pizza, which uses a live chat to help make the checkout process easier and more conversational for its hungry (but hopefully not hangry) customers.
Magical’s best advice for using chat triggers
If you can use your analytics to understand your customer and time your messages correctly, the right chat trigger can make all the difference to the way your visitors engage with your site. And, once you have their attention, you can use the Magical app to help run your company’s live chat and transform the process for everyone involved. 🪄
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