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Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Enhancing the Guest Experience with Proactive Chat Invitations

Have you considered adding a proactive chat invitation to your chat snippet? Adding an invitation to your existing chat entry points can be a game-changer for maximizing visibility of chat on your web pages. We touched briefly on proactive chat invitations a bit in our 2025 New Year's resolutions post but the feature is so important we thought it deserved its own post.

Let's say that you are a library offering chat in a research environment like your catalog search results page. Patrons might miss the in-page chat entry point if they are feeling overwhelmed. There's tons of search results staring them in the face and maybe they're struggling in their research. Adding a timer-based offer of help in the form of a proactive chat invitation can be a welcome life preserver -- especially if the patron knows there's a human librarian on the other side offering immediate assistance.

When LibraryH3p first offered proactive chat invitations about 10 years ago, we had several libraries do pilots to gauge effectiveness. Though many years old now, we wanted to again share the results of those pilots here because our customers found proactive chat to positively impact engagement. We invite you to follow that link and take some time read through what other LibraryH3lp customers have experienced with proactive chat invitations with real guests.

You can turn on proactive chat invitations on any of your existing chat snippets. We recommend keeping the messaging of your invitations concise, friendly, and, well, inviting. For example, "Welcome! Have questions? Get real-time help from real librarians." 

We recommend setting the timer for your invitation anywhere between 15 to 45 seconds. By waiting at least 15 seconds, a guest has had some time to scan the content of the page. But you don't want to wait too long before offering up help because guests tend to move quickly through pages rather than sitting on a particular page for minutes at a time.

Let us know how it goes! We're always eager to hear feedback on features and are happy to help if any questions pop up or if you hit any snags.

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