Live Chat Software for Midsize Businesses: How to Get Started
In tight markets, convenient contact channels give medium-sized companies a competitive advantage. Live chat helps them build long-term customer relationships and save on service costs.
- How midsize companies benefit from live chat
- Choosing a live chat provider: 7 tips for midsize companies
- Userlike: Live chat software that grows with you
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How midsize companies benefit from live chat
Reduces service costs
Agents can only answer the phone and emails one at a time, but they can assist several customers at once using live chat. This means you can handle larger volumes of inquiries with a small team while saving on service costs in the process.
To motivate customers to use chat instead of phone and email, make your live chat widget stand out using color and an inviting chat bubble like NIVEA does on its contact page, for example.
If you continue to receive too many requests on your more expensive service channels after launching live chat, you can promote your chat on social media or in your newsletter, for example. For more tips on how to encourage your customers to use live chat and messaging, read our post "Why and how to guide customers to your messaging channels."
Increases conversion rate
Live chat is not only an ideal service tool, but also a helpful sales tool for midsize businesses. For example, you can invite your website visitors and leads to chat using Userlike’s proactive mode: the chat window opens automatically when a visitor performs a certain action defined by you, e.g. "stays longer than five minutes on a product page" or "opens the contact page."
Userlike: Instant chats, long-term customer relationships
Over 10,000 companies like Toyota and Hermes trust Userlike to connect with their customers every day - via website chat, WhatsApp, chatbots and more.
Learn moreIf you want to get to know your leads better, you can add a registration form to the chat so users can enter their email address before chatting. Userlike then automatically shows you all the social media profiles that are linked to the visitor’s email address, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
In the contact profile, you get an overview of the person’s current location, URLs visited, and previously saved notes — so you can also use Userlike as a mini CRM or automatically transfer valuable data to your existing CRM system.
Builds long-lasting customer relationships
Medium-sized companies that manufacture special industrial solutions such as heavy machinery thrive on regular customers who stay with them for many years. That's why they are often at trade fairs or travel to visit customers on site. With live chat, you can also maintain this personal contact digitally — whether you sell your solutions B2B, B2C or D2C.
Userlike is one of the few live chat providers that allow long-term conversations on your website. When visitors return to your site after a few days or weeks, they can continue a conversation they previously started and see what was discussed before. The sticky chat feature also connects the customer - whenever possible - to the same agent they spoke with.
To make the conversation even more personal, you can use screen sharing to browse through your products with the customer or switch to a video call to present your products live.
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Select a live chat provider: 9 tips for midsize companies
- GDPR-compliant
- Growth opportunities
- Experience
- Official messaging integrations
- Easy access to self-service offerings
- Reliable customer service
- Feedback options
- Transparent pricing model
- Fast integration
A GDPR-compliant setup is particularly important for medium-sized companies, especially if they are family-run and use their own name. Of course it’s also important that the data of your employees and customers is well-protected. But how can you tell if a solution is truly GDPR-compliant?
Make sure that the live chat provider specifies Germany as its server location and encrypts its messages. As a German company, Userlike takes data protection seriously and guarantees medium-sized businesses a GDPR-compliant solution.
One criteria that many midsize businesses often don’t consider is whether the live chat software can grow with them. Is it possible to add features later that become more important as their request volume increases?
Chatbots, for example, take a lot of work off your agents and can even support your sales team. Specialty insurer Wertgarantie started with Userlike's live chat in 2018, but decided to integrate a chatbot due to their large number of inquiries. "Botti," which Userlike integrated together with our partner OMQ, now handles a large volume of the insurer's customer requests.
If you want to expand your international relationships in the future, Userlike’s live translation feature can help you easily overcome language barriers in lead generation. Both your messages and the visitor’s are translated instantly into the desired target language. Currently, Userlike provides you with 26 languages to choose from.
The key data that different live chat providers show may be very similar, but only after constant use can you learn if it’s useful for a wide range of customer scenarios. We recommend testing it thoroughly to see if features are integrated in a meaningful way and if the interface is easy to use - even for those who are not "digital natives."
Userlike has over 10 years of experience with live chat and customer messaging, so we have adapted our software to the needs of different industries and company sizes. Userlike's interface is similar to popular messaging apps, so your team members will quickly find their way around.
The biggest advantage of Userlike for us is the simple and clear navigation. After many tests of other software, we finally decided to use Userlike. We like that you can easily solve small issues quickly and without any problems.
Review by LBI managing director on OMR Reviews
In addition to live chat, messaging apps are also a promising channel for customer service. WhatsApp is already standard in private communication and widely used. Therefore, adding a messaging channel to complement live chat will help you build customer relationships.
Userlike offers a central inbox for all the most popular messaging apps and is an official WhatsApp Business partner. This means you can add all messaging apps, including WhatsApp, to your service mix in a GDPR-compliant way.
Even though chat and messaging are among the most popular contact channels, many customers prefer to help themselves using well-organized FAQ pages or tutorials. This is helpful for medium-sized companies — they often offer a broader variety of complex products compared to small companies, which means many detailed incoming questions.
Userlike’s Website Messenger combines live chat, AI and links to important pages in one tool. Our quick links feature allows companies to add up to three buttons in the messenger board that redirect customers to important websites like your intelligent FAQ page, tutorials or popular product pages.
Customers have questions not only when they first get started with your software, but also when new updates are released. Especially in emergencies, like if there’s a technical problem, it’s important that your live chat is readily available.
However, many live chat providers only make phone contact available to large companies that pay for an extended package. Providers like Userlike, on the other hand, provide the same expert service to all businesses, including live chat, email and phone support.
Customers rarely fill out long customer surveys and consider them pretty annoying. A good live chat tool lets your customers leave a simple star rating and brief comments once the chat ends. The motivation to leave Userlike one-click praise or criticism directly after a face-to-face service interaction is much higher than with email or phone calls.
Live chat providers’ pricing tables often have basic plans that only come with a limited number of contacts and messages per month. Additional volume comes with an extra charge and may lead to unforeseen costs. Userlike offers unlimited contacts and chats per month in every plan, so you can budget ahead of time.
A common reason why midsize businesses are hesitant to adopt digital channels is potential implementation costs. Yet you can set up a live chat like Userlike in about 10 minutes. To do so, create a Userlike account and copy the code we provide into your website source code.
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Userlike - live chat software that grows with you
Userlike offers the right solution for any company size. Medium-sized businesses can use the Team plan to get started with all the important live chat and customer messaging features needed for professional service. This includes the possibility to integrate any messenger, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or SMS. If you need more than four operator seats, you can add them at any time to the Team plan or upgrade to Corporate or Flex.
Our Corporate plan with 10 operator seats is for companies that want to expand their service with multiple messengers, video calls, live translations and automation.
You can test all plans for free and without obligation - you don’t need a credit card to register. Once your trial period ends, your account will automatically switch to the Free plan and you can continue chatting using all our core features. Our service team would be happy to answer any questions you have via live chat or WhatsApp. We would be happy to become your software partner for professional customer messaging!
