Live chat on your website, with every conversation in your CRM

Plenty of B2B sites have a chat window. And this is what often happens. On Tuesday evening a visitor asks whether you deliver to Germany. Nobody answers, because the chat is switched on while the team has gone home. Or someone does answer, the question is handled, and the conversation disappears into the chat tool. Nobody in sales sees that a buyer at a mid-sized company was exploring. There is no lead, no follow-up, and three weeks later that buyer purchases elsewhere.

The reverse happens too. An existing customer reports in the chat that their order never arrived. The person on chat promises to look into it and writes it on a sticky note. The note gets lost. The customer hears nothing and emails their account manager, annoyed.

The problem is not chat itself. It is that chat stands apart from everything else. A chat tool does not know who the visitor is, has no leads or tickets, and keeps conversations where sales and support never look.

In Lumo conversations are part of your CRM. When a visitor leaves an email address, Lumo creates a person, a lead and an activity. If it is a support question from an existing customer, one click turns the conversation into a ticket in your helpdesk, with an SLA clock and an owner. Outside business hours the visitor sees a message you write yourself, so they know what to expect instead of waiting in an empty chat.

A conversation on your site then leaves something behind, even after the visitor closes the window.

This is a made-up example to show the flow, not a customer case.

Say a SaaS company with thirty staff sells project planning software to engineering firms. Its pricing page gets questions about plans and integrations, and its help pages get questions from existing customers. A chat window from a separate tool was already on the site, but conversations ended up nowhere.

The company creates two channels in Lumo. One for the marketing site in English, with the welcome message "Questions about the product? Ask us. We reply on weekdays from 9 to 5." One for the help pages, with a message pointing to the customer portal. Both have business hours, and outside those hours they say: "We are offline now. Leave your email and we will reply tomorrow morning."

On a Wednesday a visitor on the pricing page asks whether the software works with a particular accounting package. Sales rep Lena replies within minutes using the saved reply /integrations and asks for an email address. Once the visitor gives it, Lumo creates a person, a lead and an activity. The lead appears as New, and an automation assigns it to the rep for engineering firms.

The same afternoon an existing customer on the help pages reports that exports fail. The support agent turns the conversation into a ticket with priority High. A developer picks it up, and the customer follows progress in the customer portal.

A chat is a start, and what follows is already in Lumo. A sales question becomes a lead you qualify and convert into a deal. A support question becomes a ticket in your helpdesk that the customer follows in the customer portal. The person sits in contact management, with the conversation as an activity.

For visitors who would rather fill in a form than chat, put a web form on the same page. Leads from chat and from forms arrive in the same list, each with its own source. And Lumo for customer service shows how chat, tickets and the portal form one working day.