Customizing Your Chat Widgets for Better Engagement - Part 3

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Welcome to Part 3! We've been talking about New Year's resolutions and about how this is a great time to reflect on how you're using LibraryH3lp to engage with guests. We've been brainstorming some ways you might do even better for 2025. Just a few tweaks here and there could really enhance visibility and make the widget more usable for your guests. 

To help you maximize engagement, we developed some questions you can ask yourself to see where you stand. In this post, we'll tackle the last two questions.

1. Is chat available to guests?
2. Do guests notice your chat widget?
3. Is it easy for guests to start a chat?
4. Do guests know they're chatting with a human?
5. Do guests have enough room to chat?
6. Do guests have to wait a long time to connect to an operator?

5) Do guests have enough room to chat?

If your guests are trying to chat with you in a cramped chat widget, they may get frustrated and give up. Cramped chat widgets are probably ok for short, quick conversations but if guests are spending even a moderate amount of time chatting with operators they'll want more room so they can easily review the conversation if needed and see any images the operator may share with them. 

Use the chat widgets on your web pages as a guest would and see how it feels. Try short text, long text, and send some images. Make sure you do all of this using different devices -- desktops/laptops, tablets, and phones.

We strongly recommend using pop-out chat widgets since they generally work best for mobile and also give the guests the most room for chat. Importantly, pop-out chat widgets are NOT subject to pop-up blockers so no worries there.

If you're using embedded chat widgets, make sure you've set the width of the chat box to 100% so that it is responsive.

6) Do guests have to wait a long time to connect to an operator?

Let's face it. Everyone's attention span is short and getting shorter all the time. If guests have to wait too long before they get an initial response from an operator, they won't stick around. 

We recommend taking some time to review the average wait times for your operators in 2024. The reports page of the admin dashboard includes a "Chats Per Operator" report that let's you know the number of chats answered by each operator along with average, median, minimum and maximum wait times. Analysis of this data is a great way to identify if any corrective action need to be taken with staffing either on an individual basis or communally. 

That wraps up our list of questions! If you missed or need to review the first four questions, take a peek at Part 1 and Part 2. And if you have any questions or hit any snags, please contact LibraryH3lp support. We're always happy to help.