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I admit: When I’m shopping, I want my cake and to eat it, too. I don’t want a sales rep following me around when I shop—but I want him when I have a question. And then I want him to disappear again!

That’s why I like live chat options on websites. There’s no pressure, there’s no awkwardness—I can be antisocial and STILL get my questions answered. Live chat also is the preferred communications method for roughly 20 percent of the population, according to a survey conducted by live chat provider, BoldChat. Live chat does more than appeal to 20 percent of the population, however. It also drives conversion and leads to higher average orders.

Website visitors who use live chat are four times more likely to convert, according to BoldChat, and the typical order value is 25 percent higher. Not to mention that support costs are lower; sales reps can juggle several customers at once in a chat environment without it reducing the customer experience.

“The asynchronous nature of chat, combined with an agent's ability to handle more than one text based communication at once delivers a near immediate return to the bottom line,” noted BoldChat.

BoldChat realizes that not everyone is sold on the benefits of live chat, however.

“Have you held off on adding live chat to your website because you wonder if there will be a significant return on investment or because you don’t know how much chat volume you’d get in the first place,” asked a recent BoldChat blog post. “What if you could estimate an ROI by comparing your website’s numbers to the numbers of one of the largest live chat user databases?”

With that in mind, BoldChat offers a free chat volume and ROI calculator. To use the calculator, just enter the estimated website traffic, conversation rate and conversion value into the calculator. The widget then crunches the numbers for you.

The real power of the calculator is that it also compares your numbers to the summative data of its entire customer base, which helps the calculator predict what live chat can do for your site, according to BoldChat.

It also is easy to set up live chat with products such as BoldChat. To make live chat easier to deploy, BoldChat is offered as a hosted service in the cloud. This means there is no software to install. To include live chat in your web site using the BoldChat solution, all that is needed is to paste in a snippet of HTML code.