It’s been reported for some time now that adding an attended (as opposed to always “offline”) live chat to a website can help increase sales.

Live chat address many buyer needs from customer assurance elements (they understand that there is actually a real person behind the site) to instant help ability which can answer questions and save a sale that would have otherwise been lost.

Forrester Consulting just released a new study on the benefits of adopting an interactive chat strategy.

The report specifically discussed the use of Live Person as the system of choice, but there is a great open source free option as well called Crafty Syntax which works equally well if you have the skills to get it in place.

If you want to read the whole study, the full report can be downloaded for free from here.

Some key findings presented in the study include:

• 305% ROI from proactive sales chat with a payback period of 6 months (when using paid chat services)
• 120% ROI from customer service chat with a payback period of 6 months (when using paid chat services)
• Chat assisted application completion rates 138% higher than self service
• 59% call deflection rate

So if you haven’t already implemented a live chat solution on your website it might be time to consider that as an option. Just make sure if you do decide to put a chat strategy in place you actually use it. Keep someone behind the “desk” and keep the chat “online”. It does you no good to implement a live chat solution that is always offline.

If you’ve tried live chat on your site and can measure its effectiveness let me know what effect it had. It’s always nice to hear one way or the other real world examples from store owner experiences.