When it comes to your mortgage brokerage’s website, you undoubtedly put a large amount of money, time, and effort into driving traffic to the site. When visitors come to your site they are looking for answers. Unfortunately, even the best-crafted websites with the largest amount of detailed information will certainly leave a few questions unanswered. When this happens, it’s critical that you have a way for site visitors to communicate with you and get the answers they need as quickly as possible. You skip this step and you risk losing that visitor to one of your competitors that can answer their questions. A live chat tool on your website is a perfect way to hedge your efforts and ensure that visitors can get the answers they need when they need them.
What Is A Live Chat Tool?
Over the years chat tools for websites have massively progressed. What used to be a dedicated page on your website with a screen you and your website visitor could chat back and forth on is now much more advanced. A chat widget can be placed pretty much anywhere on your website. Your visitors don’t only have to chat with you via your website anymore either. Live chat tools offer things like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS communication preferences for instance. Additionally, with the introduction of bots and artificial intelligence, live chat features on websites can now even work when a live agent isn’t available, many times solving the website visitor’s questions without the interaction of a human.
The main purpose of a live chat tool is to give people the ability to get answers to their questions, that they are unable to find on your website, in an on-demand fashion that keeps them engaged with you and increases the likelihood of them doing business with you.
What Mortgage Offices Need To Manage Website Visitors
Lead capture is something your mortgage website needs to do well. Paying for ads and posting content everywhere takes a lot of time and money. Driving traffic to your mortgage website is pointless if you do not have a few different ways to engage visitors.
To put it in perspective, imagine if you were fishing. If you are not catching anything, it would make sense to try a different lure. Chat is another lure to use for starting a conversation with potential clients. It’s a very important addition to your toolkit. People looking for information want answers quickly. Chat allows the perfect environment for that.
Must-Have Features For Your Mortgage Live Chat Tool
As we’re sure it is of no surprise, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds of live chat platforms available online. So how do you pick one that has the right features for a mortgage brokerage? Here are some key features you want to evaluate when searching your options:
- Support for multiple conversational platforms (e.g. Facebook Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, etc.)
- Artificial intelligence-enabled bot capabilities
- The ability for a bot to seamlessly hand off a chat to a human when the conversation gets more complicated
- The ability to embed forms in chats (e.g. a bot sends a lead a loan application form)
- The ability to integrate with your Brokerage’s CRM
3 Top Live Chat Tools
Now that we’ve described some key features you’ll want to take into consideration when choosing your mortgage website’s live chat tool, let’s take a look at a few of our favorite live chat platforms.
Freshchat is a live chat engine for your website that includes artificial intelligence-powered bots and the ability for your website visitors to use it on a multitude of different channels. They have a 30-day free trial and different pricing plans (starting at free) to suit your specific needs.
Pros
- They have connections to tons of communication channels (e.g. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, SMS, etc.)
- They have a vast library of integration capabilities making it possible to sync with your CRM
- Their team features are great for mortgage teams
Cons
- Their free service tier doesn’t really give you many valuable tools
- Their app store (for integrations) and their additional communication channels require the higher end of their subscription levels
- There have been some complaints about the speed in which push notifications arrive to mobile devices
LiveChat is a chat service that was literally made with scale and expansion in mind. They have over 170 tools you can integrate with and their platform was built specifically around the idea that they wanted it to be easy to sync with your CRM. They have a free 14-day trial and various pricing plans to suit your needs.
Pros
- CRM integration cannot be easier
- Odds are any of the third-party apps you are using can integrate with this tool
- They have a great pre-chat and post-chat survey feature allowing you deeper insights into your website visitors
Cons
- They are more expensive than other live chat platforms
- There are some reported delays and connection issues with long chat sessions
- Their starter tier service offering is extremely limited in how you can customize the app to match your brand
BNTouch has developed one of the only mortgage specific live chat features in the industry. With their simple to use chat widget, you can start collecting leads on your mortgage website and automatically add them to your lead pipeline so that they’ll be eligible to receive your automated email or SMS marketing.
Pros
- The widget is very simple to install on your website
- The chat platform integrates seamlessly with their CRM so it can collect lead info in real time
- The chat widget can trigger a number of automated marketing and lead nurturing campaigns
Cons
- The chatbot isn’t as advanced as other artificial intelligence-driven chat tools
- Their live chat tool doesn’t connect with as many outside platforms as other solutions
- The platform is built into the BNTouch CRM, so if you already have a CRM you’ll need to migrate to a new CRM platform
Summary
If you want to capitalize on the money, time and energy spent driving traffic to your website, you have to be there for your visitors. They are looking for answers and they want them right now. Live chat tools are a great way to spark up a conversation with a potential client, get them the answers they are looking for, establish your position as a leader in the mortgage industry and close more business.
See Mortgage Website Live Chat In Action!
