One awesome and simple way to increase the effectiveness of your chat widgets for 2025 is to review how you use LibraryH3lp on your web pages. Maybe with a few tweaks here and there you can enhance visibility and make the widget more usable for your guests.
We've developed some questions you can ask yourself to ensure you have your chat widgets customized to maximize engagement. In this post, we'll tackle these first two questions.
- Is chat available to guests?
- Do guests notice your chat widget?
- Is it easy for guests to start a chat?
- Do guests know they're chatting with a human?
- Do guests have enough room to chat?
- Do guests have to wait a long time to connect to an operator?
1) Is chat available to guests?
First and foremost, if operators aren't staffing chat then chat won't be available to guests. For example, if chat is only available for an hour a day you probably won't get many chats unless that happens to align with the busiest hour of guest traffic.
Take some time to review your chat scheduling to ensure folks are online and available to help guests as much as possible. Similarly, you'll want to review the offline options you offer guests when chat is offline to ensure no inquiry goes unanswered.
If you are a library and need help staffing chat, we recommend contacting our partner Chatstaff to see about boosting chat availability for your patrons. Chatstaff is not a co-op and is staffed by carefully vetted MLS-level librarians.
2) Do guests notice your chat widget?
Even if chat is available, you won't get chats if your guests don't notice your chat widget. Makes sense, right? You'll want your chat widget to be visually appealing and aligned with your branding. Most LibraryH3lp customers do a fantastic job with this right out of the gate. Let's take that a step further.
When designing a theme for your chat widget, we recommend selecting colors that contrast with the most common colors used on your website's to ensure the chat widget stands out. You want to draw the guest's eye to the availability of chat. And don't worry. You don't have to go outside of branding guidelines to get contrast. Just look through your branding palette and choose the colors that contrast best against the page.
Once a guest knows that chat is available, they'll naturally look for chat in the same place as they navigate around your web pages. We recommend placing the widget in a prominent, easily accessible location, such as the header, sidebar, or bottom corner of your webpage.
Proactive chat invitations are another great way to draw a guest's eye and let them know that chat is available. You can customize these so that guests are invited to chat after they've spent some time on a web page. The animation of the invitation appearing after the timer expires draws the guest's attention. And you don't have to worry about annoying your guests with proactive chat invites. There's a built-in politeness cookie so that the invitation is suppressed once a guests declines the invitation.
That's it for now! Stay tuned for our next post where we'll tackle the next two questions designed to help you achieve better engagement for 2025. If you have any questions or hit any snags, please contact LibraryH3lp support. We're always happy to help.
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