Chat assistance is becoming more popular in custom website design as a means for providing more prompt and personal customer service.

Chat assistance can help you retain customers by immediately answering their questions, easing them closer to actually making a purchase.

Before you decide yes on chat for your custom web design, you need to know which kind you want custom web designers to include: live chat or chat bots.

Learn about the pros and cons of each to know which one will be best for your business.

Live Chat for Custom Website Design

If you’re thinking of adding chat help to your custom web design, chances are you’ve already considered live chat.

Live chat is done in real time, with customers reaching a live customer service rep.

While custom web designers find it’s typically the best way to offer this service on a website, there are definitely some advantages and disadvantages of live chat to know about:

Advantages of Live Chat

  • Live Person - Customers speak with a real person in real time. Most people who have experienced both prefer this because they get better answers to their questions.
  • Can Be More Effective - The faster, easier, and more thorough the chat support is in your custom website design, the further along the buying funnel you can move your customers.
  • Empathy and Accuracy - A live person has the ability to react more appropriately to the exact question being asked. They can also interpret what the customer is asking without dealing with typos and other errors.

Disadvantages of Live Chat

  • Less Availability - Unlike a chat bot, your live chat help may not be available 24/7. If it is, it means a higher cost for providing this service.
  • More Expensive - Overall, live chat is more expensive than a chat bot simply because you are paying for real people availability for your customers.

Chat Bots for Custom Web Design

In contrast to live chat, chat bot help implemented by custom web designers is done using a software program that interprets customer questions and provides the appropriate answer.

Many times chat bots are more than sufficient for providing the level of help a customer needs; other times not.

Consider these reasons why you might or might not want to choose to add a chat bot to your custom web design versus live chat:

Advantages of A Chat Bot

  • 24/7 Availability - Your chat service can be active at all hours for all customers.
  • Faster and More Efficient - Chat bots provide answers faster than humans, understand multiple languages, and handle an unlimited number of chat requests at one time as opposed to live chat that can only handle one customer at a time per representative.
  • Less Expensive/More Cost-Effective - Chat bot software costs much less than paying for live chat support, allowing you to provide ongoing service at a greatly reduced cost.

Disadvantages of A Chat Bot

  • Limitations - Chat bots are suitable for answering simple, specific questions. Although chat bots do learn using AI, it can take them months to learn how to answer your customer’s questions and may still not be able to answer them all.
  • Empathy and Accuracy - In addition to the points made above, chat bots give responses without the emotion and empathy that people prefer and appreciate. Lack of empathy could give customers the impression that the business is uncaring.

Is Live Chat or A Chat Bot Better For You?

The answer to that will question depend on a number of things including your budget, the type of support you want to provide in your custom website design, and how important accuracy and speed is to your desired support response.

Discuss the options with your web designers so you choose the one that will help you the most!


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