It’s a well known fact that customers respond better to personalized outreach, driving more closes and customer loyalty. But did you know there’s a way to both personalize messages, and make customers feel special and catered to, just by strategically planning your outreach?

This brings us to proactive messaging/proactive live chat — we’ll cover what it is, what a powerful tactic it is for customer satisfaction, & more!

What is proactive live chat, exactly?

Proactive messaging refers to reaching out to customers on a website before they reach out to you. It’s like making the first move in the conversation—but with a purpose. Businesses use this strategy for a bunch of solid reasons.

Proactive chat vs reactive chat

There is also a term “reactive chat” in customer service. Reactive chat means website visitors reaching out to a customer care team/chat support, initiating a conversation. Reactive chats also has some best practices. To be effective in communication with your website visitors, you can implement these both types of customer service.

Two types of proactive live chat messages

There are two types of proactive chat messages: trigger-based and broadcasted.

Trigger-based proactive messaging is messages sent after a user takes a specific action. For these messages to be triggered, specific conditions must be met — for example, a website visitor with no chat history stays on a pricing page for longer than 5 minutes. When both conditions — “new website visitor” and “staying on the pricing page for more than 5 minutes” — are met, a proactive message designed to educate the user will be sent.

Broadcast proactive chat messages target multiple users. Usually, they pop up in high-traffic locations, like a sign-up page. These messages are not trigger-based, but they can still target specific customers by being placed in certain locations on your website. Examples of broadcasted messages are: product announcements, invitations to webinars/events, newsletter promotions.

Why use proactive live chat for your business

• Helping customers make decisions: A lot of the time people just need a little nudge in the right direction. If you jump in early, you can guide them through their buying process and make it easier for them to choose what works best.

• Sharing updates they might have missed: Got something new to share, like a cool feature, a product launch, or a service update? Making use of proactive chat lets you point customers toward where they can learn more, without them having to dig for it. Sometimes, having the information laid out in front of them will give customers the incentive to check out the new product, sign up for a membership, a free trial, etc…

• Fixing problems before they even pop up: If you know about a common issue, why not let customers know ahead of time? It saves them from frustration and shows you’re on top of things. Reaching out first this way establishes you as a responsible business who cares about customers’ convenience.

• Offering help when they’re stuck: Ever been on a website and felt totally lost? That’s one use case where proactive chat shines—it guides customers in the right direction, so they don’t feel stuck or confused.

• Smooth over a bad experience: Sometimes things go wrong, and that’s okay. If it so happens that a customer ran into an issue of some sort, sending an apology, offering a discount, or showing you care can go a long way in rebuilding trust. Taking the proactive route in unpleasant situations can milden the “bad aftertaste” for your users and make them more likely to continue working with you.

Proactive live chat use cases and examples

From cart abandonment to quick FAQ and language support — there are various use cases of proactive chat. Here are some good ones for better customer experience and higher website conversions.

1. Sending a proactive welcome message to new visitors

One simple yet effective way to use live chat software is to send a friendly welcome message to people visiting your website for the first time.

Most likely, new visitors aren’t familiar with your products and what you offer, so it’s crucial to help them along their discovery and, ideally, conversion journey from the very first step. You need to make sure you’ve made visitors’ first encounter with your website as seamless and smooth as possible, displaying just the right amount of information but also guiding them.

Try to put yourself in their shoes: you’d need to first take a look at all the information in front of you, analyze it, and then decide whether to continue engaging with the site or opting to ask for assistance. This is why timing that initial friendly “nudge” just right is so critical, both to customer experience and getting users to actually stay.

Crafting personalized short welcome message for customers is a great way to engage target audience and increase brand loyalty.

2. Offering a discount on the first order

Some businesses offer discounts to first-time customers using live chat. If you visit some eCommerce site and scroll for a bit—or try to leave the page—you’ll likely encounter a popup with 5%, 10%, or even 20% off in exchange for your email address.

Unlike popups, proactive live chat messages are more subtle and less intrusive. Configure a proactive live chat targeting first-time visitors and offer a discount — this may increase sales.

3. Cart boosters to reinforce buying intent

Consider offering a limited-time discount or special deal to a customer who has added products to their cart. The added incentive at checkout can push a visitor to complete their purchase and convert into a paying customer. The live chat message here can be a limited-time offer or any special offer.

4. Sending product recommendations

Product recommendations is another great tactics to drive more sales on your website. Send personalized product recommendations, upsell and cross-sell relevant items. Choose right timing, placement, and the types of products you recommend for higher customer engagement and enhanced customer experience. This type of live chat messages offers immense benefits: by offering relevant products to customers, you can save their time searching for the needed item, increase sales and enhance customer service.

5. Providing quick FAQ

Another example of proactive chat is sending messages to visitors who are looking for a specific answer. For instance, you can set your messages to pop up when a website visitor spends more than two minutes on a product page. Or, if they visit a FAQ page page, you can trigger the proactive chat window to pop up when they scroll halfway down the page. Add quick FAQs that may be handy to users in this proactive chat message.

6. Reducing cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is a pain in the neck for eCommerce today. 76% of consumers don’t finalize their purchase and click away. This often happens due to a lack of knowledge (about shipping costs, checkout procedure, etc.). There are ways to decrease cart abandonment, and one of them is to send proactive messages to users.

A live chat agent can change the situation for the better by sending a proactive live chat message offering assistance knowing an average time a client spent on a page. This way, a customer will interact with a customer care rep, tell what the problem is, and complete a purchase.

7. Greeting returning visitors

If you offer warm and high-quality service, customers will come to you for more. And if you notice a recurring visitor who has visited your website before, make sure you have all the valuable data about them. To check it, set up your proactive live chat software using such triggers as visit times, chat times, time on a website, time on a page, or order history. By sending a visitor a ‘welcome back’ message, ask how much they enjoyed their last purchase, and offer a helping hand.

8. Engaging visitors from various geographical locations

Identifying which customers are of great value is important. If your customer statistics suggest that clients from a specific area have the most intent to buy, they’re an ideal target for a proactive chat invitation. Useful metrics here are country/region, city, current page URL, time on website, and time on the current page.

9. Tracking pages with high exit/bounce rate

Use Google Analytics to detect your high bounce rates pages. To prevent visitors from clicking away, you can send a message based on time spent on the current page or exit intent. 

With a rule-based proactive chat, you can set up an invitation for a conversation to automatically show up when a visitor is on a page for at least 10-15 secs.

You can also utilize a proactive rule that HelpCrunch has which is ‘Time before exit intent’. It allows specifying the time that a user should spend on a page before leaving it (exit intent). At this point, they get a message (for instance, offering a discount).

10. Monitoring product pages

If a customer lingers around a specific product page, it means that there are some doubts or questions. Trigger a proactive chat message with ‘Time on page’ rule after 30 secs asking if there’s anything you can help with. This will help close a deal faster.

11. Messaging users coming from referrals

By tracking referring URLs, you can build a great conversation. For instance, if a visitor comes from a landing page where you promote your products or services, ask in a proactive chat invitation if there are questions about that promo. The rules for setting up a proactive message here can be: referral page URL, current page URL, and time on page. 

If you’re unsure how to make your team message your website visitors to welcome and engage them, below are some best practices for proactive live chat. 

Proactive chat best practices

Proactive is not intrusive: proactive live chat is a marketing tactic designed to offer assistance to your users in a polite manner. The key is to send messages when users actually need help, rather than bombarding them with irrelevant offers or, worse, sending intrusive messages offering help when it’s unnecessary.

To make the tactic effective, it’s important to set up timing correctly and craft messages that welcome visitors, not repel them. There are actually no certain proactive chat rules, but there are some common proactive live chat practices and tips that marketers use to make proactive messages effective. Find them below.

Know your timing

For starters, set a message trigger up to at least 1 minute. All in all, you don’t want to charge at visitors all at once, give them some time to look around. But how do you know which moment is right? For that, you can check the average time spent on a page with Google Analytics or any other similar tool, identify when a customer is familiar with the content but is about to leave. After that, send a proactive chat message offering your help.

For instance, you see that a client makes final touches on the order for one minute. Trigger a proactive message at 1 minute, saying something like: “Need assistance with your order? Click here”.

Make your proactive live chat personalized

With this type of chat, there’s no point in hiding behind a mask. Show your customers who you are, introduce yourself, and shape a conversation in a friendly way. You can also shape your message according to a client’s current country, city, or browser language using special chat triggers for that. 

Another great way to craft a personalized proactive chat message is to refer to the page the user is scrolling in your message. Customers scrolling the pricing page will appreciate a proactive chat message like this:

“Hi! I see that you’re browsing through our pricing page. If you have any specific questions about our pricing — I’d like to help!”

Customize the look of your live chat widget

Personalization isn’t just about sending the right message to the right visitor—it’s also about how your live chat looks. This is where adding a personal touch to your live chat widget can make a difference.

While most proactive chat software come with ready-made templates, small changes can make them feel more aligned with your brand.

Keep conversations specific and relevant

Use two different approaches when a person browses a pricing page or a technical support page. Don’t offer a discount to people browsing the knowledge base or facing technical issues — this is pretty obvious.

You can also add some details to your proactive chat message to make it relevant. For instance, instead of generic ‘Need help?’ go with ‘Hi! Need help choosing a great pair of running shoes?’.

Ny the way, if your team is new to proactive messaging or customer service automation overall, that’s not a problem. There is plenty of assistance for customer service teams: from using a chat script for customer service to canned messages — all these will streamline your team’s work and increase customer engagement on your website.

Be proactive but know your limits

Let your customers close a chat window or ignore a conversation when they want it. Make sure your help is appropriate and you don’t irritate a client. For instance, a message ‘Hi, you’ve added an item to your shopping cart. Proceed to the payment section.’ may seem too imposing.  Besides, don’t put a flashy proactive live chat window on every site’s page. Choose a few ‘strategic’ pages instead and make the most of them there.

If you need help setting up a live chat or you need assistance figuring what is live chat and how your team can implement one — reach out to our support team on a website and we’ll be in touch.

Specify the number of proactive messages

There are triggers that allow you to monitor the number of proactive live chat invitations you have already sent. Set them up if you don’t want to bombard customers with bulks of messages on every page. These rules are ‘Number of sent proactive invitations’ and ‘Time since the last proactive invitation’. 

Setting up proactive live chat

Proactive live chat is configured in a customer service automation tool or proactive live chat software.

Once you’ve created the messages, you need to set up rules for when and how these messages should pop up and be displayed on visitors’ screens:

Find an instruction for setting up proactive messages in HelpCrunch live chat tool.

Proactive live chat software will help you not only write and send messages to website visitors automatically but also track user engagement.

Once you’ve finished with setting up messages, you’ll get a  live chat button at the bottom of your website, where people can communicate with your team.

Conclusion

There are dozens of reasons that make proactive live chat a must-have feature. It helps provide instant assistance, enhance customer experience, keep track of users’ behavior, and many more. Besides, it’s a perfect tool for taking the lead and engaging visitors. 

To reap the benefits of proactive chats, it’s important to time your messages properly and offer assistance when it’s needed. Using chat triggers in customer service automation software will help you incorporate proactive messaging effectively. If you’re looking to define proactive live chat for effective marketing, this article has covered this. It has also outlined proactive live chat benefits and provided best practices and tips that can help you implement proactive chat and make it effective for your business.

If you’re looking for a best live chat solution for your business — our team will be glad to help. Don’t hesitate to reach out and we will provide a consultation.