Behind the word, "triggers" lies one of the biggest, underestimated, most impactful, features of your chat widget software. This smart rule tracks your visitors in order to send the right message at the right time to the right people. The result: boosting customer engagement. Great promise, right?

Users spend an average of 5.94 seconds looking at a website’s main image.

Conversion XL

Triggers can take many ways and have different objectives. Indeed, you can segment each automated messages based on your goal: help, engage or sell

Triggers can be sent depending on different factors :

on leave intent
on click on a link
on pages
on URL parameters
on user event
on user data
after delay

These different factors help you to automatically interact with almost all of your critical customers' path. This way, triggers are a no brainer when using a live chat.

Recently, we dived in our own data and decided to give some key takeaways for triggers because we think this feature is so much underestimated.

Why you should use triggers for automating customer engagement

1. Gain Insight Into Visitor Behavior

What better way to learn about your customers than to talk to them while they are facing issues or browsing through specific web pages.

Live chat gives you instant access to customers feedback because it allows you to engage with a human, you can gain relevant information by asking questions. This allows you to identify the true pain points of your clients, which can prove invaluable as you work to improve your products, services and marketing strategy over time.

2. Boost users engagement

It may sound cliche, but live chat puts you in the right place at just the right time. It gives you an opportunity to connect with virtual buyers, many of those are just a few clicks away from becoming customers. So when popping the chat automatically, depending on specific criteria, you’re in a unique position to engage when it's the best time to.

3. Build Stronger Customer Relationships

There is one thing that customers are expecting in this age of instant gratification: Reactivity. It is at the heart of customer support and being efficient enough is sometimes hard. Send targeted, automated messages helps you to improve this first impression that can sometimes be so hard to change.

What’s more? It’s personalized and unique ! Customers believe they are speaking with a human behind the screen so be sure to be reactive enough to answer when a trigger appear or you'll transform happiness in deception 😅.

Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel.

Consumers prefer live chat for customer service

So let's dive into a few use case that you could apply to your live chat software.

Live Chat Triggers for e-commerce

On leave intent :

Web pages abandon: Send an invite to share why they want to leave your website

On first connexion :

Welcome Series: Send specific welcome messages to present the company and engage with the user. Ex : Welcome discount or educational content.
Newsletter subscription: Remind that there is a newsletter available to get all the news about the company

On users data :

Repeat buyer: Offer specific discount for repeat buyers
Targeted discount: Offer specific discount based on demographics & geographics criterias (Men/Women, city / country free delivery...)
Multi-language support: Send a specific message in users language to show him that you can help based on his native tongue.
Mobile user: Send a chat to explain that you can handle text messages and invite the user to use your phone number.

On users events :

Failed connection: Send an help messages when users fail at connect to his account
Payment failed: Send a message presenting the other solution available

On pages :

Category: Present new products within the category the user is browsing
Homepage: Present the company and offer value to the customer.
Product: Send a reminder that your company is available for complementary questions and serve content that can help the user to make his decision.
404: Send a message trying to understand users request
Cart: Send an upsell proposition based on users choice

On URL parameters :

Facebook (ads) visitors: Track urls parameter : fbclid so you can send targeted messages to your Facebook visitors
Twitter ads visitors: Track url parameters (As twitter doesn't provide any specific URL parameter, we advise you to use UTM builder) so you can send targeted messages to your Twitter visitors
Linkedin Ads visitors: Track url parameters (As Linkedin doesn't provide any specific URL parameter, we advise you to use UTM builder) so you can send targeted messages to your Linkedin visitors

On time :

Inactive user: Send a message to users that have a long inactivity on your website
Active user: Send a message to user that a long activity on your website (compare with the average length on Google Analytics to define your strategy)

Combined Live Chat Triggers for e-commerce

On time & On page :

Inactive users on checkout page: Send a specific message that may address an issue on your website.
Active users who speaks foreign language: Send a message to active users based on the URL the users is browsing.

On URL parameters & On time & On Page :

Facebook Active Ads users on specific pages (checkout / categories / homepage)
Twitter Active Ads users on specific pages (checkout / categories / homepage)
Linkedin Active Ads users on specific pages (checkout / categories / homepage)

On leave intent & On page :

Funnel abandon (cart, connexion, delivery mode and paiement)

There are many more triggers to build on your e-commerce website. Your imagination is the only limit (and also your live chat features 😊)

If you ever want to understand what are Crisp features, feel free to discover our website chat widget and how triggers can help you boost users engagement.

As there are more and more alternative to live chat, big companies like Intercom or Drift, Zendesk, or Freshdesk are now creating dedicated pages with specific triggers that could help these companies to better engage with their potential users.

Chat widget triggers are not the only solution when building the right customer engagement strategy. You can have a look at the best popup alternatives here to build stronger interactions with your website visitors.

We will add other examples to this article as time goes.