Real conversations with real visitors, in real time.

More conversions, fewer bounces, happier customers.

Add automation when you’re ready.

Live chat is the foundation. Layer AI for first responses and a Knowledge Base so common questions answer themselves.

Three decisions to make before the first chat arrives.

Installing the snippet takes a couple of minutes. The decisions that determine whether live chat works for you take slightly longer and are much easier to make now than to unpick later. There are three: when you are open, what you ask before a conversation starts, and where a conversation goes when it needs someone else.

Publish only the hours you can genuinely staff, and let the offline form cover the rest, because a chat button that nobody answers is worse than no chat button. Keep the pre-chat form to the minimum that helps you reply; every extra field costs conversations. And decide the escalation path before you need it, so the first hard question does not turn into an improvised handover in front of a customer.

• Publish hours you can staff, and use offline capture for the rest
• Ask only for what you need to reply, and nothing more
• Know where a conversation goes when it exceeds the first responder
• Agree who is watching the widget on the day you turn it on

Live chat launch checklist Pre-chat form design

What the first week should actually look like.

Start narrower than you think you need to. Putting the widget on your pricing and contact pages rather than every page gives you a volume you can answer well while you are still learning, and answering well is what turns an early chat into a customer. Widening the placement is easy once you know what the traffic feels like.

Spend the week collecting rather than optimising. Save the answers you retype as canned responses, note every question that made you hesitate, and read your own transcripts at the end of it. Almost everything you would want to change in month two is visible in week one if somebody reads the conversations.

• Start on your highest-intent pages, then widen
• Save a canned response the second time you type the same answer
• Keep a list of questions the site should have answered already
• Read the week’s transcripts before deciding what to change

Live chat best practices Your first week with live chat

The four things that quietly stop it working.

Live chat rarely fails loudly. It fails by degrees, and the causes are consistent enough to list. The first is a button that is online when nobody is watching, which trains visitors that chatting is pointless. The second is a pre-chat form long enough that the visitor gives up before saying anything.

The third is a greeting that asks a question the visitor cannot answer, of the how can I help you today variety on a page whose whole point is that they do not yet know. The fourth is treating chat as a channel that runs itself, with nobody reading the transcripts, so the same avoidable question gets answered by hand five hundred times instead of once on the page where it belongs.

• Online status that does not match who is actually available
• A pre-chat form that costs more conversations than it saves
• A greeting that asks the visitor to do the work of framing the question
• Nobody reading transcripts, so the site never learns from the chats

Common live chat setup mistakes Why visitors abandon live chat