How to add instant messaging to your website & reduce phone call congestion

Struggling with phone call load due to coronavirus enquiries? You’re not alone. Without an easy way to check in with you online, your customers will keep calling to check if you’re open or ask if you have certain products in stock. 

Most businesses aren’t used to having to to deal with these kind of increases in demand and so, understandably, they don’t have a bottomless customer service team. A live chat service can give your team breathing room to do the job they’re there for in the first place, especially when you pair it with daily updates posted to your social media channels. 

Instant messaging services let you handle multiple enquiries at the same time from your computer or smart phone, meaning you can be more efficient with your time and keep your customers in the loop at a time where there’s already enough stress and confusion.

The good news is you can set up live chat using Facebook Messenger on your website now for free: it’s fast to use and people are already used to using it because it’s exactly the same as normal Facebook Messaging.

Here’s how to do it

1. In your Business’s Facebook Page, go to Settings then Messaging.
2. In the ‘Add Messenger to your website’ section, click the ‘Get Started’ button.
3. Choose your language and greeting message and click the ‘Next’ button.
4. If you want to stay on brand, you can specify a custom colour. Click the ‘Next’ button.
5. Add your website’s domain (eg www.yoursite.com.au), hit the ‘Save’ button and then click on the block of code to the right. This will copy it.
6. Go to your website and paste it into the appropriate section – Squarespace users: Go to Settings, then Advanced then Code Injection and paste it in the Footer section – WordPress users: this depends on your theme, but putting it just above the </body> tag in the Footer section is ideal.
7. Refresh your site and test it out — you should now have a working instant chat service on your website.

If this all sounds a bit technical for you I’m happy to install the code on your site for free during this time.