How to Make Money With Live Chat

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Phone calls do not work for customers from different time zones. Emails take too long to respond. Self-service options lack personalization and are unable to cover all possible scenarios.

What’s the alternative? Live chat apps.

They help to address all customers’ needs. First, they are convenient and easy to use. Second, online communication happens in real-time. And finally, the problem troubleshooting is fast and personal.

Those three factors made live chats the most popular way for customers and companies to communicate with each other. Nowadays, 79 percent of customers prefer live chat to any other communication medium.

Even as individuals, you can do online chat and get paid very well… from the comfort of your home. Getting paid to chat is now a thing that pays online.

This article shows you the very genuine companies that really pay people for chatting with others online. Some of the companies are even big name companies that you probably already know and buy things from.

Some of these companies even pay everyday people, regardless of your education or experience. Knowing which companies are genuine and really pay is the first step to getting started on the right foot with this opportunity.

You can chat online as a side hobby and get paid. You can also chat online as a full time job and still get paid. Regardless, you get to work from home and still get paid handsomely.

We will provide more details in this article. Below are the main points.

What is Live Chat
Benefits of Live Chat For Your Business
How to Implement Live Chat on Your Website
Effective Tips to Get The Most Out of Live Chat
Features to look for in a live chat tool
What are the top live chat tools?
How to Make Money From Live Chat
10 Companies That Will Pay You For Chatting Online

What is Live Chat

The live chat definition is very simple. It’s an online communication app that enables you and your website visitors to chat in real-time.

Online chat is a great alternative to phone calls or emails. All you or your visitors need to do is to type the message inside the chat box and send it.

The technology behind online chat has been around since the 1970’s, though it was not widely used until the late 1990’s. Since that time, it has become a staple in the way customers communicate with businesses online.

A whopping 53% of customers would rather chat with a company than call. These customers prefer live chat for a variety of reasons. Some appreciate the ability to multi-task while chatting.

Others feel live chat is quicker and more efficient than a phone call. When asked about using live chat versus email versus social media to contact a business, nearly half said they use live chat.

Live chat isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. From 2015 to 2019 the use of live chat grew by nearly 400%. Read that again – 400%! This means your customers are using live chat with other businesses, and they want to use it with you too.

It’s not just for customer support. Live chat can also change your approach to sales. 41% of customers said they trust a brand that offers live chat on their website. And this trust translates to sales – 51% of customers said they are more likely to purchase from a company that offers live chat.

Consider this: 77% of customers said they wouldn’t purchase from a website with no live chat option. That’s a lot of lost sales.

Benefits of Live Chat For Your Business

Statistics are great for proving the point, but let’s jump into the real benefits of live chat in your business.

Reduce your expenses

The old school way to provide customer support – by phone – is expensive. Depending on your company size and specific needs, it can be really expensive. The use of live chat support can reduce these costs in a couple of ways.

The most obvious savings come from equipment and support costs. Encouraging customers to use live chat support will cause a natural reduction in phone calls. Fewer phone calls require fewer phones, thereby trimming the cost of equipment and support.

The often-underestimated savings with live chat is manpower and overall employee efficiency. A phone support agent can really only handle one phone call at a time. Compare that to live chat, where support agents can often handle multiple chats at once.

Support calls sometimes require research or complex problem solving. In these cases, the customer may require a callback. The nature of the live chat environment makes it easy for agents to research or ask for help and resolve issues during the first contact.

Increase your sales

One study found live chat for sales had a 305% return on investment over a six-month period. That’s an impressive return considering most applications are relatively simple to install and easy to use. And that high rate of return doesn’t have to come along with a huge headache.

Don’t forget the equipment and manpower savings we mentioned above. Those apply to your sales team, as well. In the same way a customer support agent can handle multiple chats at once, so can a sales rep.

For potential customers who don’t want to spend time on the phone or wait on an email back-and-forth, live chat is the best alternative. They’re connected to a live person but with the convenience of an electronic exchange.

In fact, customers who are engaged via live chat are three times more likely to buy than those who are engaged through other communication channels.

Improve your customer loyalty

Consumers are incredulous by nature. Though people do a lot of shopping online these days, they’re still leery. Live chat takes a bit of the unknown out of the online experience. The mere site of a “chat with us now!” button takes the edge off, even if website visitors don’t need to chat with anyone at that moment.

Giving your customers a quick and easy way to reach you will transform the loyalty they feel toward your brand. And reinforcing that loyalty with great service through live chat will seal the deal.

Whether it’s a prospective customer or a repeat-buyer, the availability of live chat has been proven to increase the feeling of trust.

Learn about your customer’s problems

In a traditional phone support setting, customers may be reluctant to share their pain points. Some customers don’t want to be perceived as a “problem child” or a complainer.

Others may not be able to articulate their issues or feel put on the spot. And those who do voice concerns may not even be heard by anyone other than the person they’re speaking to.

Customers will often find it easy to express their concerns or problems via live chat. Though it’s a personal interaction, it’s not face-to-face (or voice-to-voice), so some of the pressure is alleviated.

Customers who may have difficulty expressing their problems verbally, or those with a language barrier, will also be more encouraged to share during a live chat conversation.

And what about those problems your support agent heard on a call but didn’t tell anyone about?That problem is solved, too. Most, if not all, live chat applications keep an archive of all chat. This allows management, QA, or trainers to review chat logs to discover problems, complaints, or areas for improvement.

Handle your customer’s problem quicker

There are many ways live chat can speed up problem resolution for your customers. Most of them have to do with convenience.

Have you ever called tech support and spent a long time on hold waiting to ask one simple question? Imagine how easy it would’ve been to instantly send support your question knowing the message would be received and responded to in a matter of minutes (if not seconds)!

Take a look at the average response time for chat below, and you’ll quickly see why customers prefer to use chat.

Attaching files or sending links is another great benefit of live chat. Rather than trying to spell out a URL over the phone or promising to email a document, your support agent can simply send the file or link through their chat conversation.

Your customer’s convenience

We’ve touched on this a few times already in this article, but it’s important and worth mentioning several times. Your customer’s convenience is a big deal. In fact, customers who had a bad experience on a website are 88% less likely to return. That’s almost a guarantee they’ll never visit that website again!

Of course, a bad online experience could be caused by a lot of different things. But one of the biggest complaints is the inability to find a simple and fast way to contact the company.

Once they’re in contact, your customers still expect convenience and ease. This is where the points mentioned above, like response time and sending documents, can really make your customer’s life easier.

If you want to foster a feeling of loyalty, make your customers’ interactions as painless as possible.

Beat your competition

We saw some statistics earlier about live chat usage. While those numbers were impressive, we’re really only getting part of the story. The stats tell us customers like live chat and they want to see it available on every site they visit, but the stats don’t tell us this… A lot of companies are still not using live chat!

A study of 1,000 businesses found that only 9% had websites with a chat function. This is surprising, given the vast amounts of data proving customers prefer live chat.

Imagine the success of the 9% who are using live chat.

It’s a smart, cost-effective, trouble-free way to get a leg up on your competitors.

Expand your market

Simply having a website does not guarantee your business an online presence. A website is a lot like a storefront. Only your storefront doesn’t have any windows, and people on the street can’t see anyone inside. This makes it impersonal and maybe even a little bit sketchy. It’s hard to get new customers that way.

But if you put some windows in your storefront, turned on some lights, and staffed it with people, things start to change. Now customers on the street know there are people available to help them. It’s no longer a gamble to go inside and shop.

This is exactly how live chat can change your business. Those “chat now!” or “we’re available!” buttons on your site are telling customers, “C’mon in!We’re here to help!”

In reality, your website is a domain and a bunch of code. But it doesn’t have to be so cold. With live chat you can turn your website into the neighborhood store even if your customer is across the globe.

Reach out to your customers

We know live chat allows your customers to reach you in real time, but there’s another side to that coin. Most live chat applications also allow your support agents to reach out to website visitors.

This usually happens with pre-defined rules set up in the chat application. One of the most common rules involves visitors who have browsed on a page for a certain amount of time. They’ll see a chat prompt inviting them to ask any questions they may have.

This type of proactive contact is another way visitors feel welcome on your website and comfortable with your brand. Reaching out to offer assistance can be the difference between a browsing customer and a buying customer.

Run reports on your visitors and chats

Phone reports are helpful, but they’re really just numbers. Email reports are less helpful, and they’re also just full of numbers.

Live chat applications provide a variety of reports and analytics. These can range from standard reports like chat volume and agent performance to more specialized reports like geolocation. The reporting capabilities are generally more robust than phone or email reports and can help organizations get a holistic view of their customer.

Get more feedback from your customer

Most live chat applications include built-in customer surveys. The surveys, often presented immediately following a chat, tend to have a high rate of response because the customer is already engaged.

Customer feedback is helpful in any case, but live chat surveys are particularly valuable because the data is easily reported and analyzed through the live chat application.

How to Implement Live Chat on Your Website

Implementing live chat for your business need not be a complicated venture. But as with any other technology, there are some minimum requirements. Let’s break down the requirements into these categories:

Server requirements
Visitor requirements
Agent requirements
System requirements

Server requirements

These days, most live chat applications are cloud-based and hosted by the chat company. In this case your organization’s server plays little role, and no specific requirements are needed.

If you choose to utilize an application that’s installed directly on your server, your requirements will vary depending on the solution you choose. Check with the vendor in this case.

Visitor requirements

Fortunately, if your customer has internet access they can most likely make use of your chat tool as all popular operating systems are supported. An updated browser usually provides the best experience. This goes for mobile customers as well. The most popular mobile browsers can interact with live chat applications.

Agent requirements

Similar to the requirements for visitors, agents also need an updated browser to view and interact with chat customers.

For agents handling chats from a mobile device, ensure the device is using the most updated mobile browser for their operating system.

System requirements

If you choose to take advantage of the audio and video capabilities offered by many chat applications, the system requirements are largely the same as above.

All popular operating systems are supported. However, older browsers may have some issues with this type of chat (especially video), so it’s important that both the visitor and agent are using the most updated version of their browser.

Effective Tips to Get The Most Out of Live Chat

It would be great if the mere act of installing live chat sent your sales and customer satisfaction through the roof. Installing is just the first step, however. The second step requires a little work from you.

Here’s how you can make the best use of your chat application.

Canned messages

One of the benefits of live chat is the agent’s ability to process several chats at once and answer simple questions with ease. Canned messages are one of the reasons this is possible.

Canned messages can take care of introductions and general “no-brainer” questions. Think questions like:

What’s your address?
How can I track my package?

Canned messages are a huge timesaver, but be careful when and how often they’re used. These responses can seem impersonal (they are, after all). Word your canned responses in a way that doesn’t seem like they’re computer generated.

Use them when appropriate, but certainly don’t carry on an entire chat conversation using only canned responses. The personal touch – knowing they’re chatting with a human – is what makes your customers love chat in the first place.

Check out live chat examples from others in your industry if you’re not sure where to start with canned messages.

Be quick – timing is everything

The rapid-fire nature of live chat is what draws a lot of customers. If they call your office, they’ll probably be put on hold. If they send an email, they’ll have to wait at least a day for response. But if they engage you in live chat, they’re expecting almost instantaneous attention.

The general rule for response time is about 30-seconds. This means the initial chat request and each subsequent message should be handled within 30-seconds. In some organizations, the bar is set even higher, with agents expected to respond within 10-seconds or less.

It’s important to keep your customer’s attention – especially if the customer is pre-sale. Dragging out a chat with long pauses between responses will only cause the customer to lose interest.

Clearly state your availability

Your website should plainly state your company’s business hours, especially if you’re not open 24/7. Same goes for your chat application.

Likewise, if your chat agents aren’t available at any point during your business hours, make sure it’s obvious.

Make use of your chat application’s scheduling and availability functions. When your business closes, make it clear chat is closed and will re-open later. If all agents are busy during business hours, be sure your chat button reflects this – tell your customer no one is available or invite them to leave a message.

Build rapport

When you’re chatting online, a simple name and photo can do wonders. Attaching a name and face to the person typing is the first step in building rapport. Make your agents more accessible by adding their photo and name to their chat profile. Your customer will feel they’re corresponding with a person instead of a bot.

Use the right voice

Train your chat agents to reflect your brand in their chat interactions. At the same time, be sure your agents are connecting with customers on a personal level.

If you’re a medical supply company, there’s a good chance your customers are familiar with the technical terms of the industry. In this case, it’s okay to use those terms and other jargon.

On the other hand, if you’re a plumbing company, it’s likely your customer is a homeowner. They’re probably not familiar with the technical terms a plumber might use.

In this case, the chat agent should use language a homeowner is comfortable with and avoid terms or concepts only a plumber would understand.

Look to your competitors for customer service chat examples if you need guidance on how to best interact with your customers.

Be professional

Live chat is a less formal way of communicating, but it shouldn’t be unprofessional. Be sure your agents are using correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation (even if the customer doesn’t).

Make use of any spell check tools available with your chat application. If there’s a particularly difficult statement or phrase that your agents are always using, set up a canned response.

Features to look for in a live chat tool

A fool-proof lead capturing mechanism

A live chat widget should stay invisible and non-intrusive on the website, all the while being there to welcome visitors when they need help or support. A live chat software should be able to do so by capturing lead information and automate it to your CRM system for your sales team to act on in the future.

A modern live chat tool does all this by launching triggered messages based on user and event properties, deploying interactive chatbots at the right time, and sending in-app contextual campaigns. Your sales and marketing teams can follow-up on the leads to close more deals and make more sales.

A convenient, familiar experience

Your live chat tool should come with a zero learning curve for your consumers to use. It should offer the continuous, contextual, and instant messaging-like conversations that consumers are familiar with using in their everyday lives.

Furthermore, it should offer the convenience of time and speed to map their queries to the right team through the right Topics.

On the business side, it should allow your sales and support teams to have a comprehensive view of all conversations in one dashboard so that they can prioritize responses and work more efficiently.

Having a great product interface is equally important on the agent side for your teams to offer engaging conversations that feel natural and friendly.

A fulfilling self-service experience

A live chat tool shouldn’t be just about agent-to-customer chat experience, but also a customer journey of exploring information at their own pace. A modern live chat tool should include self-service offerings such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), self-help guides, tutorials, and help videos for customers to find quick and easy answers to their concerns.

Freshchat offers businesses to embed integrated or page-based FAQs within their chat widget so that customers don’t have to leave a page to find answers.

It also allows businesses to create FAQ content in more than 31 languages to help them break the language barrier with their global customer base. Customers can also upvote or downvote FAQ articles as a form of feedback to allow businesses to improve their content.

Unbridled team collaboration

While live chat is a doorway for your customers to talk to your brand from a closer proximity, it should also be a tool to make your team more productive and collaborative in their everyday tasks.

It should allow your sales and support teams to categorize conversations, prioritize threads, tag team members, attach private notes (visible only to the team), and do much more.

Freshchat live chat tool takes team collaboration to the next level by offering IntelliAssign, a rule-based, automated task routing feature that allows you to load balance chat conversations among agents or teams based on their workload or expertise.

This allows teams to perform at their optimum level while making sure that customers get the best experience they deserve when engaging with your brand.

Reports and analytics

A live chat software is essentially a business-enabling tool that should be able to produce measurable metrics for improvement and optimization. It should provide useful data points for decision-makers to analyze and identify the best practices and anomalies in their live chat operations.

It should enable live chat teams to look back at their performance such as their first response time, customer satisfaction rating, and a visual insight into their processes.

A live chat software should be able to produce data on the real-time chat volume, conversation trends, and historical metrics for business teams to learn from and calibrate their performance.

Seamless integration

A live chat tool should fit into your all-star business toolkit and connect with all software that are pivotal to your daily operations. It should integrate with your existing CRM software to manage lead and nurture them, your helpdesk software to offer great customer support, and other business-critical apps.

A live chat tool should come with the best of all worlds to help your business pull and push data seamlessly and help you make data-driven decisions. It should function as one of the spokes in the wheels of your business instead of a standalone, siloed product that is hard to work with.

What are the top live chat tools?

There are older and newer live chat systems and they’ve all taken a slightly different path. The common element is a front-end messaging box but the rest, behind the scenes, can be completely different. Here is a brief list:

Intercom — Iceberg type software

Chat on the front, fully automated messaging, email and educational system behind. Growing at a billion dollar pace. What’s interesting is that their chat system is like a simple security guard at the door who answers questions and then lets you in through a door to a huge operation.

It’s a full email marketing, sales lead management, educational system but that’s harder to explain so they initially just called it ‘live chat’. You can’t fully understand it until you use it so see these case studies. Pricing is done according to modules and the number of customers rather than per agent.

Livechatinc — Chat and ticketing system

They focus on live chat rather than the CRM part so it’s not as big as Intercom but they have quite a large database of customers.

Zendesk chat — aka Zopim

So, Zendesk buys Zopim and integrates it. Zendesk had a big giant ticketing system and is an entire platform, their zendesk chat is merely one part of the beast.

The interface is not as cool as Intercom though we have heard that it will have some features newer companies have not thought of and that plays out in the details. Their pricing for chat functionality is a lot less than Intercom and Drift and more than Olark.

Drift — The new cool kid on the block

They’ve got a really loyal user base who love Drift, they’re growing quickly and they’ve got advanced chat bots. The guys who built it, like David Cancel, are experienced and often quoted entrepreneurs.

They don’t have the whole sequential emailing drip campaign thing that we needed but it can be done through integrations. Their chat bot part is certainly interesting as it does encourage people to leave more details without having to ask each one manually.

Their pricing depends on a combination of per seat and total contacts meaning they’re in the Intercom pricing rage.

Olark

One of the early movers in the live chat world. Very nice people, even their slogan is ‘make your business human’. They’ve been around for a while and they don’t charge much compared to other companies. It does the job if you’re looking for chat functionality at a good price.

Re:amaze

It’s not one of the big ones though maybe that’s an advantage as it has 5 star ratings from its customers with a specific focus on e-commerce and SaaS companies which you can see from it’s list of integrations.

How to Make Money From Live Chat

Online chat jobs require that you use chat software to communicate with customers. These jobs are can usually be customer service jobs where you answer customer questions online.

Even though you answer questions, it’s different from earning money playing quiz. With this, you also can give advice and solve problems related to tech support, sales and billing.

Some chat jobs include making inbound and outbound calls. Most will require you to chat with customers and send emails. And no, online chat jobs are not always about selling feet pics or flirting with others online for money.

Most people can work as online chat agents, customer care agents, chat support agents, or virtual call agents. The roles are similar despite the different terms used to describe the jobs!

Getting paid to do chat jobs is not rocket science. Academic qualification is not even necessary before most companies can hire you for this. You simply need to prove your typing accuracy and speed to improve your chances of been employed by some of the companies.

If you are someone who is always saying “I need money now“, jobs like these can come handy, especially as it doesn’t require too much experience or education. If you have previous experience with jobs that have to do with online chat, it will be easier for you to get hired.

Nevertheless, with most programs you will need to simply pass a test. This is often required as part of the hiring process. Compensation for chatting jobs online is mostly based on performance or based on the amount of time spent with customers.

On the average, most online chat agents are paid between $10 and $50 per hour.

10 Companies That Will Pay You For Chatting Online

1. Amazon Chat Support Representative

Amazon is renowned when it comes to ecommerce and service delivery. It also often hires individuals to work as chat support representatives. These agents can use online chat tools to communicate with customers and help them solve their shopping needs.

The chat jobs are usually computer jobs that can be done part time and are available during the busiest holiday months in the year. Thus, you can make money with online chat at Amazon between September and January.

The compensation from Amazon is usually attractive and you can also be hired permanently if your performance is outstanding.

2. JustAnswer

JustAnswer regularly hires live operators that provide answers to questions asked by different people. The questions are on different topics and are asked by professionals like doctors, lawyers, vets, mechanics, and business people.

The answers you get paid to provide on this website must be professional and well-researched. You will use chat software to provide your answers.

JustAnswer pays you a percentage of all answers that are accepted.

You can earn from $5 to $30 for each answer accepted. This is just like getting free paypal money, especially if you are one of those who love to answer questions and could even happily do it for free.

You can cashout when your account reaches at least $20.

3. Presto Experts

Presto Experts hires “experts” to provide online chat services. This is a company known for helping people and businesses get answers to their questions.

Unlike say, packing jobs, these jobs don’t involve physical exertion at all. You can sign up and start making money by providing your knowledge to clients. You will get to deliver your answers via chat, email and phone.

For sharing your knowledge on different subjects, you can be paid from $2 to $3 per minute.

4. Asurion

Asurion is a call center company. It hires work at home agents for both full-and part-time online chat positions. It’s one of the jobs suitable for 16 year olds who want to earn extra money while studying.

You can work as a chat agent and provide customer service to clients. This company works on behalf of different clients and pays between $10 and $12 per hour.

You can work at your own schedule and you can also choose to work evening and weekend hours.

5. LiveWorld

LiveWorld hires chat agents and really pays. Agents are given various responsibilities that include:

Customer service, social media moderation, engagement and monitoring.
You can also be hired to identify and escalate trends, sentiment, topics and emerging issues.
You need to have great typing and communication skills to work as a LiveWorld chat agent.
Excellent spelling, grammar and punctuation skills are also a must! So is multi-tasking.

LiveWorld regularly provides part-time online chat jobs and work-at-home positions. The pay is hourly and may include benefits like health insurance, generous time-off, and a 401(k).

6. Accolade Support

Accolade Support is a provider of outsourced call center services. The company regularly hires chat agents to work from virtual locations.

As a provider of online chat opportunities, Accolade Support ensures that its call center chat agents are experienced in providing customer service, sales and technical support.

Exceptional computer, communication and typing skills will easily get you approved for an online chat work position with this company.

This might also work for you if you are in college and looking for how to make money as a student. You will work as an independent contractor and earn around $10 to $12 per hour.

7. Live Sales Staff

Live Sales Staff hires independent contractors to work as chat agents. You can apply with this company and provide support chats to their clients.

You can be hired to help in customer service and sales. Your core responsibilities will include online chat, email and support tickets. The pay is not clearly stated on the website and may not be regular.

8. American Express

American Express provides financial, insurance and travel services to customers. Its products include a variety of credit cards, traveler’s check and charge cards.

This international multi-corporation often hires work at home customer service agents. These agents take calls, reply to emails and chat online with customers.

The core duties of these work at home agents center on providing reservations for travelers and those with jobs that involve traveling. You really can get online chat work from home with American Express and respond to customer inquiries.

The pay you will receive from this company is reasonable. If you perform well you will earn more. On average, chat agents with American Express can earn up to $15 per hour.

9. Working Solutions

Working Solutions will hire chat agents to provide online chat services. If you have experience with chat or can demonstrate good communication skills, then you can sign up with this company.

It’s a bit like online tutoring jobs as it can be done completely online from home but doesn’t involve actual teaching. Instead, working Solutions pays the agents to provide sales, customer service and technical support.

As an independent contractor, you can work from home and help this company provide customer service solutions. You will communicate and chat with their customers and get paid for your time and skill.

Working Solutions can pay you from $7 to $30 per hour. That can be really easy cash, especially when you consider this can be done online, at your own convenience.

Most online job positions are project based.

10. Operator

Operator partners with other companies to promote their products.

They hire “experts” who provide live chats. These experts are chat agents that help customers of the partner companies with their shopping experience.

They provide recommendations to the Operator mobile app users so they can access and shop for the best products even when using online shopping apps and even cash back apps.

You can apply for an online chat job with Operator. You can work at your own schedule and help customers shop for different items like home decor, fashion, electronics, beauty, and much more.

Operator can pay you around $10 per hour. Also, you are expected to put in at least 20 hours/week. The can be in 4 or 8 hour shifts.

Conclusion

From the above information, you will have figured out that there are a lot of opportunities in live chat. As a business, having live chat installed on your website helps to increase conversion and drag in more Customers thereby increasing your profit.

Also as individuals, live chat provided a means to earn money online as there are many companies ready to pay you for chatting. Follow the tips provided in this article and take full advantage of live chat.