Seven chats in six months. Sometimes the answer is don't buy one.
Sometimes the honest answer is that nobody was going to ask. Here is how to tell before you pay for one.
Seven chats in six months.
That is what one web designer reported after putting a chat tool on a client's site. Not seven a week. Seven in total, across half a year, on a paid tool.
Nothing was broken. It worked exactly as sold. There was just nobody to talk to.
The question nobody asks first
Every sales page asks whether you want to answer customers faster. Of course you do. It is the wrong first question.
The first question is whether enough people are asking anything at all.
Work it out with three numbers
You can do this on the back of an envelope. No tools needed.
- How many people visit your site in a month? If you do not know, that is your first answer. Find out before you buy anything.
- How many questions do you get in a month? All channels. Real questions, not people confirming a booking.
- What is a job worth to you? Roughly. Average value, times how often an enquiry turns into work.
Now be pessimistic. Assume a tool catches one extra enquiry a month that you would otherwise have lost. Is that worth the monthly fee?
For a kitchen fitter, one extra job a month is enormous. For a nail salon at thirty pounds a visit, it is not. Same tool, opposite answer, and nobody selling it will tell you which one you are.
Signs it is not worth it for you
- Fewer than a few hundred visitors a month. There is not enough traffic for anything to happen.
- Your work comes from repeat customers and word of mouth. Those people already have your number.
- You are already fully booked. Answering faster just means saying no faster.
- Every job needs a visit before you can say anything useful. Then the question was never answerable online.
If two or more of those are true, keep your money.
Signs it might be
- You answer the same few questions constantly, in many different wordings.
- A lot of messages land in the evening or at weekends.
- One job is worth a lot, so losing one hurts.
- You already wrote the answers down and people still ask.
Try the free version of the experiment first
Before paying anyone, spend an afternoon writing your five answers clearly on your own site. Put them where people land, not on a page called Questions.
Wait a month. Count the questions again.
If they stop, you just solved it for nothing. If they keep coming in twenty different wordings, now you know what you are buying and why. That is a much better place to start a sales call from.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.