How to use human-powered website chat for 50% more conversions

Jeffro (00:01.528)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. If you’ve ever wondered how to get more leads from your website and actually turn them into paying clients, this episode is for you. My guest today is Ted DeBettencourt, founder of Juvo Leads, a company that helps B2C service businesses like law firms, home services, elective medicine, and senior living convert more website visitors into leads and ultimately into paying customers. Ted started his career running a legal marketing agency where he saw firsthand how website chat and lead conversion were often afterthoughts which cost businesses real revenue. So instead of settling for bad solutions, he took matters into his own hands, launching Juvo leads in 2015. And now his team helps over a thousand businesses maximize the leads they’re already getting. So today on this episode, we’re going to be talking about website chat, conversion strategies, and how service businesses can optimize their lead flow to book more jobs, clients, and cases. So Ted, welcome to the show.

Ted (00:53.966)
Thanks for having me on, Jeff. Pleasure to be here.

Jeffro (00:56.184)
Yeah, I’m excited as well. And I was telling you before we started, I love the background, the wooden walls and the writing of a cabin. But he said it’s part of a barn, which is pretty cool too.

Ted (01:05.518)
Thank you. Yeah, we’re going to have a bar and we just bought a farm out here in rural North Carolina. I got my chickens in the next room while it’s still cold out and we’re in the process of ordering some mini cows as well.

Jeffro (01:16.695)
Well, that’s a different world than I lead. I just have to wrangle three kids at home. So that’s enough for me. So let’s jump into this, Ted. So a lot of businesses focus so much on getting traffic to their website that they forget about what happens once a visitor actually lands there. So when it comes to lead conversion, what are some of the biggest missed opportunities that you see?

Ted (01:22.286)
Fair, fair.

Ted (01:36.878)
I mean, this one isn’t self-serving, but I prefer to give the self-serving ones. But the biggest one we see is if you don’t put your phone number easily accessible everywhere, should obviously be in the footer, but also putting in the header, that’s important. Having a contact form is important so people can contact you that way. But the third most popular one, and the one that I champion, of course, is having a chat on your website. So there’s a lot of ways to do it, but some semblance of chat, actually doing chat right is more important than just knocking a box and saying you’re doing it. I’ve seen a lot of businesses that have chat on and so we’ll start a chat and they’ll say, yeah, we’ll be there soon. And they’re not there soon. you know, having a chat that’s actually responded too fast is very important for businesses.

Jeffro (02:22.883)
Gotcha, let’s move on to the next one. Go ahead, yeah, just give me a recap.

Ted (02:34.988)
I said we get, sure, yeah. Making sure your phone number is readily available on the site, having a place for the phone calls, having a place for the forms, and then most importantly, nowadays, having a place for visitors to chat with you.

Jeffro (02:41.204)
no.

Jeffro (02:51.181)
Okay, well most business owners add website chat as an afterthought or assume people don’t really use it, but you’ve built an entire company around it. So why do you believe chat is one of the most powerful tools for converting leads?

Ted (03:05.454)
What I know is when we put chat on our websites, we do a lot of A-B testing. So we’ll do call tracking, form tracking. We can track everything that comes in from a website. When we do an A-B split test and we put chat on half the traffic versus the other half of the split test with having it no chat, we know that the 50 % of the traffic that has chat gets at least 50 % more total qualified leads. So how our business works is we know we make a bold claim. That bold claim is you’re to get 50 % more leads, but we want to give every business that works with us, a free 30 day trial, so they can see that split test and see that data for themselves. Because, know, saying you get 50 % more leads than actually doing it are two different things. So we always try to seek to prove that with the data.

Ted (04:30.638)
Yeah, we do a 58, everyone we work with, you get a free 30 day trial. A lot of our clients opt in to do a split test. What that means is half the traffic has chat, the other traffic, the other 50 % doesn’t have chat. We wanna prove to every client that we work with that they’re getting at least 50 % more total leads when they use our chat on their website. And we’re able to do that 95 % of the time.

Jeffro (04:55.202)
So do you have, what percentage of the people actually make use of the chat option or is it just improving conversions by virtue of the fact that it’s available, people know it’s there?

Ted (05:05.102)
What we see is, so let’s say a website gets 100 leads in a month. Usually about 33 of them will be from chat. 50 of them will be from phone calls, and then the remainder will be from forms. So phone calls is still the number one way a business gets contacts. But chat has quickly moved into number two, far surpassing the number of forms a website gets.

Jeffro (05:29.121)
Got it, that’s interesting. And obviously not all chat solutions are created equal. So you guys have real people behind the chats, correct?

Ted (05:37.526)
Exactly right. We use the motto, butts not bots. Butts in the seat, not bots in the cloud. We got real people answering chats. There are AI solutions out there. Right now, after about two to three chats, you can pretty quickly tell you’re chatting with a robot. And we avoid that. Someday AI is going to be really good, and it’s going to be on every website. Until that day comes, people are still better for conversions.

Jeffro (06:00.257)
So what about though, if that day comes and you can’t tell if it’s a human or not, what are the things that make the difference between a bad chat experience that annoys a visitor versus a great chat experience that actually drives conversions? Because you also have people that are bad at it too, right?

Ted (06:14.816)
Exactly right. So the number one thing about chat, there’s three kind of worlds of chat. There’s the AI chat, the robot chat. There’s the chat software where the business owner has to answer it. And then there’s the human power chat service of which I’m, my company is. So the AI chat, we already kind of talked about some limitations. It’s getting better every day, but not quite there yet. The chat software is great, but the problem is chats come in 24 seven, 365 and a business owner has a hard time responding. If it takes us 30 seconds or longer to reply to a chat, we’ve already lost 50 % of the chatters. We have to respond to the chat in 12 seconds or less to maintain the maximum amount of leads we can get. So what makes a good chat is someone that responds fast with the answers that the people are looking for. What makes for a bad chat is when you go to type of chat and it’s either a horrible out of syntax robot answer, or someone where it’s saying, yeah, we’ll be with you soon. And then they don’t hear back for minutes slash hours.

Jeffro (07:12.937)
Once AI is indistinguishable from a human in terms of conversation, is there still a pro and con between using a live human versus the AI bot? Because obviously the AI bot has access to a whole knowledge base of things. What are your thoughts there?

Ted (07:32.376)
Sure, when you can’t tell humans from robots, then shoot, we’re going to become a robot chat company. It’s pretty much that simple. One of the reasons, some advantages we have right now over robots, aside from the conversations being less awkward, is that we can easily plug into other people’s software. So for example, someone wants us to schedule a home consultation on their team’s calendar so they can go out and take a look at the property. We can jump on a calendar link and fill that out for the chat.

Jeffro (07:37.694)
Okay.

Ted (08:00.736)
If they want us to add a lead to their CRM, we can do that. If they want us to send them a retainer or contract through chat, we can do that. Right now you can’t tie in third party tools like that to AI. But when that happens, plus there’s no distinguishing, then it’s really going to be a race to who feeds whatever AI model they’re using the most data. We have more data on chats because we’ve answered millions of them. So, you know,

AI is as good as the data you feed it. We have a lot of data to feed that AI when the time comes.

Jeffro (08:33.386)
Right, so I like that the fact that humans can do that extra next step that’s still manual right now. So yeah, if APIs are built out or there’s integrations between stuff, then okay, of course, AI is gonna help do that a lot quicker and easier. But yeah, I think we still have a little bit of time until we get to that point.

So a lot of service businesses get a lot of leads, but they might struggle with turning those leads into actual deals or jobs. So what are some strategies that you recommend for improving the follow-up and increasing those conversion rates?

Ted (09:03.502)
Sure. Well, the numbers that are true for Chad are also true for a business owner. So if it takes us 30 seconds to respond to a chat, we’ve lost half the visitors. Same is true for a lead that comes in, but the rules are a little bit more less forgiving. So if a call comes in and it takes you, oh, you say, oh, I’ll get back to it that same day. Nope. You’re losing it. If you, if you have to respond to a lead within minutes to maximize the chance to turn that into a, into a paying client. And that’s true for any competitive home service industries especially true for law, but for any business where they’re gonna go and look for the next person to see if they can help with their problems, you can’t wait days, you can’t wait hours. It has to be minutes, hopefully seconds, until your team is on the phone with these leads to convert them into paying customers.

Jeffro (09:49.621)
So what about if you do reply quickly, you have a conversation with them, but they decide, I’m not going to book the call. What do you recommend for like follow up on that? Is it even worth it at that point or they just kind of lost?

Ted (10:01.55)
It depends on how you structure it. As long as you have TCPA compliance to follow them, I would call back that lead nonstop, text that lead nonstop, and follow up with them until you get a hard no. I see you’re rocking your high level shirt, so I’m guessing I had to answer that accordingly. But yeah, lead follow up is the most important. It’s the easiest opportunity for businesses that aren’t following with the leads. You fix that hole, you’re immediately going to bring in a lot more business to your business.

Jeffro (10:15.238)
Jeffro (10:29.257)
Yeah. Going to say that again, guys. Follow up with your leads. Don’t just, yes, getting new leads is important, but don’t waste the ones you’ve already had. So Google Local Service Ads, the LSAs, if you will, they’ve become a major lead source for a lot of service businesses because of how easy they are to use, right? So how can businesses optimize those local service ads to get better results and make sure that they’re kind of maximizing their ROI?

Ted (10:55.79)
Sure, one thing everyone knows is that you want to get a lot of reviews, you want to answer your phone fast. But we discovered about a year ago, there’s another call to action in the LSA. Everyone says, oh, LSA generates calls. There’s also a button that you can turn on called messages. And we didn’t realize the impact that this would have. So we had a client say, hey, Ted, can you answer messages? I’m like, I don’t know. We’ll try to figure it out. We tried to at first do it in the API. We tried to do it SMS. There’s no elegant way for a text provider to do it, except to manually log into an LSA account. So that’s what we do. We literally log into a few hundred of our clients’ LSA accounts. And when we started doing it, what we realized is that once we answered about five to 10 messages, their ads showed this little badge on it. said, typically replies in a few minutes. But more importantly, was that good for conversions? Their ads would skyrocket up the LSA rankings. So accounts that couldn’t get any LSA phone calls, even though they were maximizing their budgets, we’re now flooded with phone calls. LSA is very much a feast or famine world. So what we’ve learned is that when you turn on messages and you answer them fast, Google will rank you higher in local service ads. So if you tried local service ads in the past and you haven’t been able to get much traction, turn on messages, answer them fast, or have a company, you know, there’s a few companies that do what we do, and you’ll automatically get a ton more LSA messages, but more importantly, your ads are gonna skyrocket and you’re gonna get a boatload more LSA phone calls.

So it’s really important to have those messages on. It’s a ranking factor just like it is getting reviews.

Jeffro (12:29.492)
That’s awesome and good to know because yeah, Google likes to give people good results for what they’re searching for. And so if you’ve demonstrated you answer quickly, then of course they’re going to show you to more people. So that’s amazing. So I mean, that kind of sounds like low hanging fruit, honestly. But are there any other low hanging fruit opportunities that people aren’t taking advantage of when it comes to their website and lead generation?

Ted (12:51.886)
Sure. Make sure the phone number is right on top of the website. It should always be in the footer no matter what. Having someone answer that, if it’s going to voicemail, you’re probably doing a bad job. If it goes to a third party that doesn’t know your business, you want to fill up that hole. If I ever call you during the day and it hits voicemail, that’s a problem. A lot of businesses also don’t have a way to have people text them. Before LSA came out, that was our fastest growing communication channel.

So for us, and all businesses should, whether they use us or somebody else, put a little tab at the top of your business website on mobile. So people can click a button and text you. You’re gonna see you get a lot more and a higher percentage of leads every month, not every month, about every month, will come in from text. When we first started answering text messages, was about one to 2 % of our leads. Now for most of our businesses, it’s about 15, 20%.

Jeffro (13:46.012)
Interesting. And do you guys do any live transfers once you’re chatting with someone and you’re like, hey, can we get you on the phone with one of our team members?

Ted (13:54.09)
Absolutely, we always try to do that, but we want to find out from the business when times are open. So we have two ways to do it. We either do it by default, as soon as we save a chat, we call the company and say, you have a new chat lead, press one to talk to Steve. Sometimes it butchers the name Steve if it’s more complex. Business owner presses one, they’re on the phone with them. The other way we do it is we ask the chatter. Hey, this sounds like a project we can definitely help you with. Are you available now for a phone call? If they say yes, we call the firm the business, they pressed one, they were talking to the chatter.

Ted (14:31.448)
That’s the face of that interview.

Ted (14:39.916)
I think it recorded on my end, by the way.

Jeffro (14:43.342)
Yes, and that’s why I use Riverside to make sure it records over on both ends so we can piece it back together, which is nice. It’s just annoying to try to talk and be like, yes, I totally understood what you said. No worries. Sometimes there’s something going on in between us and we can’t control it. All right, so we’re talking about relying on the phone calls to close deals and transferring it over and stuff. Sometimes leads don’t pick up, though. So what are the most effective strategies for businesses to kind of reengage with those unresponsive leads?

Jeffro (15:13.146)
and get them back on track.

Ted (15:14.798)
You have a cadence. Every business should have a loss lead follow-up procedure. whether that’s call, call, call, call, text, text, text, call, call, call. If you’re texting, make sure you have permission to text and you’re texting within the time frames you’re allowed to. But whatever that cadence is for your law firm, setting up a system so that if your business or law firm does it, that’s what you do. You follow that cadence every time so that you only trash a lead after every step along that cadence has been followed.

Jeffro (15:44.977)
Let me ask you different question going back to the actual widget itself on the website. Are there things that you guys do to make it so that people notice it and actually use it? Because I’ve definitely seen websites that have the little chat icon, but either it’s hidden or there’s just nobody opens it. Some other sites start with it popped open to draw your attention to it. What are your thoughts on that?

Ted (16:07.47)
We’ve probably run a little under 100 A-B tests, testing out different iterations of what works best for us. The two most popular ways we start a chat is the first one we call active chat initiation. So if you come to mind why one of my websites where my chat’s on, we’re gonna pop up and say, hi, this is Amy, Sally, Steve. Are you looking for help with your roof? Let’s start a conversation. So we have that way. The second way is we play a short video of the business owner saying who they are, how they help their clients as a way to kind of build rapport. And then at the end of that video, it’s just a small little video on the right. It’ll say, you know, to learn more about how we can help you with your roof, start chatting with my team. We’re available, help 24 seven. So either the video or we start the conversation with active chat initiation.

Jeffro (16:54.289)
Okay, and those obviously, I imagine get more clicks and chats than where it’s just waiting in the corner for them to want it.

Ted (17:02.54)
Yeah, the difference between the difference between a passive chat that starts kind of collapse in a corner versus one of our two more aggressive is going to be the difference in about 80 to 90 percent number of leads. So we like to brag about how fast we are about responding to chats that pop up and how you start the conversation is probably the biggest difference maker between all the chat companies.

Jeffro (17:28.177)
Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What other tips do you have like that? Whether it’s the positioning or the, like, do colors matter? Anything else? The side of the screen? Have you done split tests left and right?

Ted (17:41.324)
Yeah, right works better. Left can’t, not a huge difference. Color is gonna vary per how the website looks. The biggest difference is what time people do it as they say, like chat, but I want it on a delay. So when we put a delay where a pop, we can do it, we maximize the delay at 20 seconds. If you put a delay of 20 seconds on your chat, you’re losing at least 50 % of the chat leads you could be getting.

Jeffro (18:06.331)
Gotcha. And you mentioned 24-7 chatting. So you guys have people around the clock answering these things? Or do you have sometimes sites where you just turn it off after hours?

Ted (18:16.525)
No, we’re on about 1,100 sites. We’re 24, 7, 365, English and Spanish, full coverage. Our team’s a little bit under 100. And every chat that comes in, we grade on a 10-point scale manually. We literally have managers going through and grading every chat because we know how important quality is to our people.

Jeffro (18:34.833)
Okay. So you focused, you know, we mentioned in the intro on law firms, a lot of home services, elective medicine, senior living. Are there other service type businesses that could benefit from chat or is it just these particular ones that maybe have a time-based sensitivity to it? Like obviously with home services, like if I’m calling a plumber and I’m looking for one, I probably have an issue and I want someone now, right? But there’s other companies where it’s not as pressing. So what are your thoughts there?

Ted (19:03.426)
Yeah. We’re not a good fit for B2B websites, but if I’m on a B2B website and it doesn’t have chat, I know they’re missing opportunities. For a lot of the B2B space, you probably want some internal team members doing that. Here’s why. People come in and they say, hey, I have this very specific question about this very specific thing you do. Can you tell me how you do this better than the guy next door or the other business I’m looking at? That’s a lot for our, our team to try to understand. So we’re not product matter experts on a B2B site.

But even a B2B site will want that because it’s an opportunity to convert and impress a visitor. So even websites like that, on the small ticket item for like a Pizza Hut, Pest Control, a sale isn’t worth a lot. It’s a lot about volume. So you’re to want some automated solution as opposed to a human powered. I have not seen many examples where chat, some form of it, isn’t beneficial to the website.

It’s about finding the right form for your business and making sure you execute it properly.

Jeffro (20:05.104)
Yeah, and that use case you mentioned for B2B with like specific questions, that actually is something that AI will be able to excel at because you can train it on your business and give it all the answers. And so it’ll be able to do that pretty effectively. But I like how you’ve given us a clear distinction between what’s possible with humans versus AI and why one’s better than the other and when to use them. So that’s really helpful.

Ted (20:11.107)
Yes.

Ted (20:26.99)
Thank you.

Jeffro (20:28.515)
Well, I appreciate you sharing your experience with us today, Ted. I think this was really helpful to make sure leads aren’t slipping through the cracks. Chat obviously is a great way to do that. And you guys have a lot of experience that demonstrates how effective chat really is. So that’s always a helpful reminder before somebody wants to try something, they want to know that it’s going to work for them. So obviously, it can work for a lot of people, especially if you’re doing those LSAs with messaging, like you mentioned. And that itself is a huge tip, which I didn’t even know about. For you guys listening at home, Ted does offer a 30 day free trial for anyone who is a good fit for the industries that we listed that he works with. So go to juveauleads.com and you can learn more about his company. I’ve got one last question for you, Ted. If you could give just one piece of advice to a service business owner who wants to double their lead conversion rate this year, big goal, what would it be?

Ted (21:20.718)
Little hanging fruit, put chat on the website. But no, aside from that, making sure you have a system in place so your phone gets answered during business hours at the least. If it ever goes to voicemail, fix that first. That’s the biggest leak. And following up those leads are the two most important things. After that, then let’s have that conversation about chat.

Jeffro (21:39.843)
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Thanks again, Ted, for being here. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. So go work on your website conversions, get that chat module on there, and we’ll see you next time. Take care.