Did you ever buy something after using the site's live chat?

No, in fact I was so annoyed by them I made a browser extension to remove them from my site. I would encourage you to replace it with an email form :)

In our experience, adding live chat isn't just about whether we generate lots of chats or not; it actually instill consumer confidence whilst they are browsing our site, to know that we are the type of company that WILL be available via live chat if something goes wrong during their checkout process.

We tested 4 scenarios a while back, and the conversion difference was huge.

#1 - Live chat set to Online & Proactively engaging with tawk.to triggers when visitors met certain criteria. Eg: hit a certain page, or searched for a specific item.
#2 - Live chat set to Online
#3 - Live chat set to Offline
#4 - No live chat at all

Scenario #1 increased conversions bout about 15% over #2.. Which is huge.

But the really interesting thing was how conversions dropped by about 6% when we had No chat at all vs Live Chat online.

When we survey customers that decided to purchase from us without ever even speaking with a chat agent, 12% of respondents said that they felt more comfortable buying from our store because the chat was there if they needed support.

For reference, we tried Crisp Chat, Intercom and tawk.to and I'd say intercom had the best features, especially the automated popups.. but we couldn't justify the price, so we stuck with tawk.to and their trigger system work just fine for what we need.

I bought software recently because of live chat, the support was great.

Otherwise I might have just built it myself.

We also get customers because of our customer support.

I think it depends on the product you're selling. For us it's helped a lot because if you're going to spend $300+, you are going to have some questions!

There's been several times where our customers mentioned our live chat has been the differentiator compared to our competitors.

Anecdotally - since installing chat widget I've had way more queries come through than via email. And generally they're good queries that either lead to feedback about the product or sales.
Most of the questions can be automated with tawk / reamaze etc. So it can act as a self-service help desk.

I created an intermediate solution it is a Widget that you add to your website. It will show a bubble on the top bottom corner that allow your users to contact you by WhatsApp, Telegram or send a "call me" request. On top of that, you can set up 3 common questions with their answer.

If you want to see it working or create one yourself visit https://botcreator.online/ , you can contact me privately if you have any questions, at the moment I am giving it for free as I am not sure whether gives enough value to get people to pay for it.

I actually was hesitating about joining this program: https://pioneerprogramme.com/project/ and after I chatted with the guy who organizes it, I was sure I wanted to follow it and bought it :)

It was just nice to have a little touch of personalization in the process of buying. I just had a few questions who got answered quick

I think what's important is not necessarily live chat itself, but having an easy way for potential customers to contact you about your product. Having a widget on the bottom right corner lets people know that you take customer support seriously, which in turn could convince them to buy your product.

If you're interested in a customer support tool that favors asynchronous communication and is not live chat, I'm building one now called https://letterbase.io. Check it out if you'd like :)

I apologize if I am not answering the question to the point, but we used live chat widget tool from 2013 to 2017 for one of our projects, and we hired chat support execs to manage our chat support live 18 hrs a day. This really helped us in gaining and retaining our customers.

As you said, your customers contact you over chat mostly. I understand that timezone is the biggest factor in providing live support, only all the time. If your product margins are not thin, I would advise you to hire virtual agents from Asian countries. There are people with incredible language skills. The hiring cost will be extremely low comparatively.

I believe outstanding customer support should never be compromised.