Cat got your website’s tongue? If your website doesn’t establish a dialogue with visitors; if it doesn’t kickstart customer exchanges, then its reticence is costing you revenue.
Customer contact is a key goal of any business site. You want your website to open the door to communication and provide a central activity hub for commerce and conversation.
But in order to do so, your site needs to actively encourage the exchange.
It’s not enough to simply have a website and expect customers to rain down requests and enquiries. To win that customer contact, you need to make your site as welcome, as engaging, as accessible, and as interactive as possible.
Here’s how.
The fickle visitor
The attention of your online visitors is precious, but also fleeting. Short attention spans and idle brain syndrome mean we’re quick to boredom if we aren’t doing something.
And boredom makes us click away to other sites and other brands.
In other words, your website needs to get visitor’s attention, keep their attention, and use that attention. It won’t do that if it’s tongue-tied.
If you want to get your visitors talking to you, you must first prove easy to talk to online.
And a key way to do that is through interactive web design and multiple customer contact options.
Compare the two
Experience without interactive customer contact options
Your visitor lands on your website. They find an FAQ page, but don’t find their question there. So, they click back and return to the home page to scan for contact options.
There’s no chat button available upfront. There’s a telephone number listed, but it’s buried in the footer. (Plus, the visitor isn’t quite concerned enough to go through the effort of a call.)
They find a “Contact Us” page, but at this point they’re pretty disengaged.
An appealing contact form might just win their input, or they might just as easily click away and forget about your site in seconds.
Experience with interactive customer contact options
Your visitor lands on your website. They click through to the FAQ page and look for their question using the search function. Though some similar questions have been answered, they’re still unclear.
But this time, a cat doesn’t have your website’s tongue. Instead, the visitor spots a handy live chat button on the bottom-right of the page they’re browsing.
So, they click it and ask their question. It’s answered on the spot, and the helpful support agent directs them to other useful information available on the website.
Plus, once that dialogue is established, the agent will find it much easier to take customer details and nurture the lead.
It's plain to see. When a site doesn’t boast interactivity or open opportunities for customer contact, it doesn’t actively engage its visitors. Potential customers, as a result, can slip through the cracks.
Getting their attention: interactivity
When visitors land on your website, they’re displaying a passive interest in your content. Making your website interactive increases the chance of turning this passive interest into active engagement.
Without interactivity, they’re more likely to passively scan your content and then click away.
So, to get the attention of your visitors, the first and most obvious thing to do is ensure that there are things for the visitor to engage with.
For example, display clear, focused call to actions on each page. Post interesting articles to read. Include tools like search to allow online visitors to locate information relevant to them.
But you need more than links to your content. Making an interactive website also means giving it a helpful, interactive presence. And this is where customer contact options come into play.
Keeping their attention: personalisation
Technologies such as live chat software and chatbot integration are a great way to achieve personalised customer contact options.
Through chat, you can use proactive chat invitations to engage visitors based on their onsite journey. For example, you can set a trigger that automatically greets return customers by name, or offers help to someone reading help files, or sends a location-based offer.
This way, you can solve that reticence problem and make your website warmer and more communicative.
And, because channels like live chat software provide instant gratification, you don’t risk your online visitors losing interest while they search for a static contact form or wait for an email reply.
Instead, when they ask a question or request support, they get an answer while they’re still engaged with your content. This means that you don’t need to regain their attention.
Real-time customer contact gives you the opportunity to capture fleeting moments of interest and turn them into conversations.
Using their attention: customer contact
Conversations lead to conversions. To use the attention you’ve won, you need to then prove helpful and sustain that customer contact.
This is where you might want to take advantage of handy live chat features like sentiment analysis, speed chat options, and CRM integration.
For example, sentiment analysis would help you spot likely sales opportunities. Speed chat features would help you respond quickly and accurately. Meanwhile, CRM integration would help you keep a useful record of the visitor contact on file for future use.
Ultimately, you want to make customer contact as frictionless and easy as possible from the moment a visitor lands onsite to the moment they reach a resolution.
Get it, keep it, use it
The attention of your online visitors is valuable and in short supply. So, make sure that your website is ready to grab their attention, keep it, and let you use it.
Don’t let the cat keep your website’s tongue. Give your website a voice and make your customer contact channels interactive and reachable from any page.
After all, what better way to engage your online visitors, than with real-time conversation?
👉 Give a voice to your website with a free trial of WhosOn.