Live chat is important to many websites because it allows your customers to contact you regarding any questions or concerns that they have. One thing that people will look for when selecting a product or service are support options.
This topic won't be long because you have probably used "live chat" in the past and you realize the value in it. I'll give a brief explanation of what live chat is and then I'll discuss some live chat software along with features that you may want to consider before choosing live chat software.
Live chat is an application that you install on your computer that allows users of your website to connect to you. Generally you'll need to install the software on your computer plus add a snippet of code to your webpage.
This code will display your 'live chat' icon and often times will switch to 'online' and 'offline' as you open and close the software on your computer. When someone clicks the icon it'll open up a window so that they can contact you regarding their question or concern.
There are a lot of options to choose from in regards to live chat software. They vary from free options to options that you need to purchase a license for. You'll find that the features of some of the live chat software are great tools to monitor your website and find areas that need additional development.
Applications such as Bold Chat offer you the ability to connect directly with your website's visitors. A great feature of the application is that you track the page that your visitors are currently on and the path that they have taken to get there.
This is a great marketing tool because it allows you to determine pages that are popular and what pages people generally leave your website on. This allows you to make improvements to those pages.
As I mentioned, there are free options as well. They work great but you're simply limited by the features that you'd like. If you simply want to offer live chat without all the bells and whistles, a free live chat application will work just fine. You can always upgrade to a product like Bold Chat as your needs grow.
A great free option for free live chat software is ilient.com.
I invite you to visit my webmaster forum, it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on.
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Great article! Talking about live chat, I accidentally came across inside, and after looking through their site http://www.inside.tm/, it morphs a business website into a virtual storefront so business personnel can see and help their site visitors in real-time using chat.