What is live chat outsourcing and how does it work?

Live chat outsourcing means engaging an external partner to run the live chat channel on your website and handle every conversation on behalf of your organisation. The visitor does not notice: they chat with your business, only there is a specialist team behind the window.

That solves a familiar problem. A visitor has a concrete question, finds nobody who answers straight away and clicks off. Below you will read what outsourcing actually involves, which forms exist, how the process runs from kick-off to daily operation and how it differs from a chatbot.

What it means to outsource your live chat

With live chat outsourcing, an external team handles the conversations on your website, based on your information and in your tone of voice. The terms live chat outsourcing and outsourced live chat mean the same thing.

The partner delivers three things: trained chat specialists, a knowledge base with your products and processes, and the platform where the conversations arrive. Often more channels come in than website chat alone, such as WhatsApp, Messenger and email, in one inbox. What that looks like in practice is explained on the page about outsourced live chat with trained operators.

The difference with chatting yourself is that you do not have to recruit, roster and train people. You supply the knowledge and follow up the leads; the partner holds the conversations.

Three forms of outsourced live chat

There are three common forms, and which one fits depends on your own capacity and how much you want to keep doing yourself.

Fully outsourced

Every chat goes to the external team. It answers questions, qualifies leads and passes them to your sales team. This form suits businesses without their own customer contact team, or a team that spends the day on the showroom floor.

Alongside your own team

Your own staff chat when they can. If nobody is free, it is busy or the chat comes in outside office hours, the external team takes over. You see this a lot at car dealerships: the sales team chats during the day, and in the evening and at the weekend the partner picks up the conversations.

People and AI together

More and more often, an outsourced chat works with a mix of people and AI. AI answers predictable questions immediately, even at night, and hands the conversation over to a chat specialist, with a clear handover, as soon as it gets more complex. You decide the balance between people and AI yourself and can adjust it later.

How live chat outsourcing works in practice

An outsourcing project runs in five steps, from knowledge transfer to ongoing optimisation. Most of the time is spent at the front, building the knowledge base.

• Onboarding and knowledge transfer. You discuss your goals, your products, the questions that come in most often and what a good lead looks like for you. From that come a knowledge base, scripts and lead criteria.

• Technical set-up. The chat script goes on your website, in the head of your pages or via Google Tag Manager. Then channels and any integrations with your CRM or diary are connected.

• Test phase. The team runs test conversations with you and your colleagues, walks through the most common scenarios and adjusts scripts and tone.

• Go-live. Visitors chat with the external team. Leads that meet your criteria go to your sales team with the full conversation, in your CRM, by email or in a support system.

• Ongoing adjustment. A dedicated contact updates scripts, lead criteria and the knowledge base based on real conversations.

An outsourced chat with AI is usually live within two to three weeks. With chat specialists it takes a week to a month, depending on how complex your offering is.

What a chat specialist does for you

A chat specialist answers questions, looks for the question behind the question and moves the conversation to a concrete next step. That can be a test drive, a showroom appointment or a quote request.

Take a visitor asking whether a used car is still available. A good chat specialist confirms it, asks about part-exchange and timing and records the contact details. For a question about made-to-measure windows, it is about dimensions, the type of property and when someone wants to start the work.

What they do not know, they do not make up. That question goes to your own team with the conversation attached. The role looks different in every sector, as you can see in the overview of which businesses outsource live chat.

Outsourced live chat or a chatbot: what is the difference?

With live chat outsourcing the visitor talks to a trained operator; with a chatbot they talk to software that answers based on rules or AI models. A chatbot follows set flows or a language model, while a person can interpret context, ask follow-up questions and handle exceptions.

For predictable questions a chatbot is often enough: opening hours, delivery times, the status of an appointment. When it comes to advice, bespoke work or qualifying a lead, a person is usually stronger.

In practice it does not have to be a choice. Many businesses let AI catch the first questions and a person take over where needed. If you are only looking for the AI side, you can also have an AI chatbot managed for you.

What not to expect from an outsourced chat team

An outsourced chat team holds conversations and delivers leads, but it does not take over your sales. Being clear about that up front prevents disappointment later.

• It does not prepare quotes and does not negotiate on price. Your salesperson does that.

• It does not set up a sales strategy or advertising campaigns for you, but it does catch the conversations your campaigns generate.

• It does not give technical advice or a diagnosis. That question goes through to your own specialist.

Because the team processes personal data on your behalf, you record the arrangements in a written contract. Under UK GDPR, the ICO explains that a contract between controller and processor is required whenever another party processes personal data to deliver a service for you.

What the set-up phase is really about

Whether an outsourced chat works is decided in the first weeks. At Bconnect we therefore build the knowledge base together with the client: we collect the product and process information ourselves and turn it into answers, scripts and qualifying questions, instead of waiting for everything to be supplied.

Our 60+ chat specialists are employed by us, trained per sector and coached every week. They are available from 08:00 to 23:30, seven days a week, and AI can cover the hours outside that, day and night.

What we see go wrong most often is not in the chat but after it. Leads come in neatly, but are only called back days later. So agree up front who follows up a lead and within what time.

Outsourcing is a partnership, not an installation

Live chat outsourcing means an external team holds conversations on your behalf, based on a knowledge base you build together and keep updating. The technology is in place quickly; the quality comes from the preparation and the adjustments afterwards.

Still in doubt? Then the comparison in-house or outsourced live chat helps. What it costs is covered in live chat outsourcing cost, and what it delivers in the benefits of outsourcing live chat. All the sub-topics are brought together in everything about live chat outsourcing.

Frequently asked questions about what live chat outsourcing is