Many big brands have live chat options on their website and it can play a big role in improving enquiries, conversions and sales. While this may be a great tool for big companies, there can be some drawbacks for small to medium sized businesses.

If you only have a small number of people available to answer questions, you’ll only disappoint visitors who find your chat service too slow or offline too often. You can obviously combat this by outsourcing the chat services, but then you lose some of the technical knowledge that may be required to answer visitors’ questions properly.

Live chat may also be a massive time waster for smaller businesses. Your customers and people who are very interested will happily contact you via email or by phone, but half interested individuals may swamp your team on the live chat, and they could well be timewasters.