In the digital world, This is where live chat software can help your online business. customers expect instant gratification. Contacting a customer by phone or email within 24 hours is no longer enough.
In fact, the worldwide live chat customer satisfaction rate is over 83{b2e062dacaa682ac06b65f50eda167b816e329330e76ab97664011f321ee08e4}.
The best live chat software can help you engage with multiple customers at the same time while simultaneously reviewing interaction history and user behavior.
And with the rise of natural language processing (NLP) and AI, chatbots make conversations easier when you’re away and help you better understand your customers.
In this guide, I have reviewed the 19 best live chat software tools. These reviews are based on help desk features , ease of use, pricing plans, third-party integrations, and more.
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Let us begin.
What is live chat software?
With so many players in every industry, it’s not easy to stand out and create a space in the customer’s mind for your brand. As businesses move into the digital space, customer experience and service become essential.
That’s where live chat software comes in.
Live chat software allows businesses to serve customer needs 24 hours a day and seamlessly address their needs in real time. It is one of the main ways to improve customer communication in the digital market. You can check virtual data room review where you can also communicate with them.
Customer-centric and focused, live chat helps businesses create a personalized experience for their customers, drive sales, and build long-term relationships.
Therefore, many companies are now using live chat tools to bridge the gap between customer needs and service. More and more businesses are starting conversations with first-time website visitors, returning customers, and existing customers.
How is live chat software used?
Setting up live chat software is decidedly easy. Let’s go over the process with Drift , one of the best on the market.
One of the best things about Drift is that it provides a free plan, you don’t have to enter your credit card information, and it’s pretty easy to set up.
You just need to visit the official Drift website and enter your email address; you are ready to do it.
Start selecting your live chat platform right away. Next, you’ll probably get this image flashing on your screen.
Click the “OK” button and go with the flow. You can select themes and color codes to match your company colors. Drift also allows you to set a welcome message that reflects your spirit. This is the first thing a visitor will see when visiting your website, so it should be catchy.
In the next step, you will need to add your company details and contact details so that your customers know who they are dealing with.
The final step would require you to install a code snippet for the live chat to work properly.
The process is similar when you try to use other market leading live chat platforms like Intercom and Chatfuel as well.
What should you look for in live chat software?
The requirements for each business vary. While some may focus on generating new leads and converting them into customers, some may aim to engage existing ones and foster long-term relationships.
However, here are some features that are essential for any business live chat service:
1. Predefined responses.
Canned responses take some of the load off the shoulders of your customer service executives and help deliver curated solutions for common and repetitive queries. Live chat platforms like Drift and Acquire.io are great options if you’re looking for this feature.
2. Third Party Integrations.
Third-party app integration with live chats helps solve business problems in real time. For example, Tidio offers integration with apps like MailChimp, Wix, Shopify, and more.
3. Reports and analysis.
Analytics are essential to knowing if your trading strategy is working on the ground and identifying any changes needed. You can track details like chat histories, conversion tracking, visitor details, average time spent in chats, and more. For example, a live chat service like Chatfuel helps you measure KPIs and other important metrics.
4. Smart triggers.
If you have a visitor who frequently visits your website, there is a good chance that they are interested in what you sell. Therefore, it is essential to identify, engage and follow up on them, as they have a higher probability of becoming customers.
5. Cross-platform compatibility.
Keep in mind that your audience is using all kinds of devices to browse the internet, including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, PCs, etc. As a result, a live chat service that provides cross-platform compatibility is highly desirable. For example, drift.
Apart from these, there are several other essential features like offline forms, file transfers, and timeout display. You will have to choose the ones that fit the needs of your business.
List of Best live chat software
Here are my top picks for the best live chat software.
LiveAgent
Best for ticketing and automation with a live chat solution.
LiveAgent lets you communicate with customers on their preferred channels, including voice calls, email, and social media. A single window helps you manage messages from multiple channels in one place.
Customer service agents can also create custom automation rules to send custom or predefined responses.
With LiveAgent, you can take advantage of its built-in contact forms to easily collect relevant customer information. It also allows you to monitor and respond to comments and messages on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Key Features::
- Community Forum Create an online community of customers by creating a custom forum, get feedback and grow your knowledge base.
- Automation – Set automation rules to automatically assign customer tickets to departments or agents and add tags.
- Call Center – Create a cloud-based call center to connect with an unlimited number of users.
- Knowledge Base – They have a dedicated knowledge base software for creating a search-based website for your business.
Advantages:
- Leverage video chats to interact with customers face-to-face and build a fruitful customer relationship.
- It also supports multiple languages to help you chat with global customers efficiently.
- Offers a 14-day free trial.
- LiveAgent also offers seamless integration with third-party apps including Jira, SpringBuilder, Clockify, Bold BI, and PipeDrive.
Prices
It offers a free plan with limited features. Their paid pricing plans start from $15 per month and go all the way up to $39 per month.
Userlike.
The best fast live chat tool across multiple channels.
Userlike turns instant chats into long-term customers. It stands out for its omnichannel capabilities, providing real-time chats on websites, messaging, SMS, Whatsapp, and more.
When agents are online, Userlike works like a classic live chat tool. When they’re not active, it works like a familiar messaging app: Customers message the business, leave an email address, and agents get notified that a message is waiting for them.
It also comes with some advanced CRM features.
With Userlike, you can filter and search for customers, post customer ratings, and view comparative analysis. This helps sales teams better understand who they are talking to and how they can best address their pain points.
For customers, intuitive menus allow them to quickly choose the department they want to chat with for instant results.
Its inclusive chat feature never interrupts navigation and quickly pushes buyers through the customer journey. Your chat transcripts help provide faster issue resolution so customers never ask questions again.
Additionally, Userlike helps you deliver a unique brand experience through its highly customizable design elements.
Key Features:
- Sticky Chat – Leverage your Sticky Chat rule to connect with users you’ve interacted with before to solidify customer relationships.
- Custom Design: Customize the chat bubble’s main text, color, contact, and operator to deliver a branded experience to customers.
- Smart Customer Profile: Automatically create a customer profile based on users’ public information to provide more personalized sales and support services.
Advantages:
- Efficiently send mature leads to your CRM and convert them into repeat customers.
- Get feedback, pre-chat and post-chat surveys, and customer chat ratings to assess operator performance.
- Turn missed opportunities into opportunities by proactively reaching out to customers with their questions.
- Take advantage of widget routers that measure user behavior and chat history to direct them to the most appropriate operator.
- Provide on-page guidance to customers for more engaging support.
- Integrates with other chatbots.
Price:
their paid plans start from $29 per month and go all the way up to $299 per month. You also get a free plan with some basic features.
It arises
Best for businesses looking to maximize their lead generation.
Drift is one of the leaders in the marketing industry and coined the term “conversational marketing”.
According to Drift, conversational marketing is a way to move buyers through your sales funnel with real-time conversations. This builds relationships by creating authentic experiences with shoppers and customers.
In addition to your standard live chat tools, you can take advantage of routing features to connect customers with the right person at the right time.
You can give your VIP website visitors a special treatment by giving them a fast track to your sales team. Drift also makes sure you never miss a message through notification alerts – you can automatically book meetings with VIP visitors in case you’re not available in chat.
Key Features:
- Drift Playbook – Leverage the Drift Playbook to automatically book meetings and convert visitors into leads.
- Reporting – Provides actionable data on response time, number of interactions, and conversion metrics to help you measure the performance of your sales and support team and increase conversion rates.
- Mobile App – Offers a highly functional mobile app that allows agents to share, record, live chat and track views. Its Video Drift feature allows you to talk to your customers anytime, anywhere.
Advantages:
- In addition to text-based emails, you can send personalized video messages to your customer for better engagement. It also provides instant notifications when the customer views your video.
- Chatbots can be configured with many autoresponder sequences to automatically book meetings.
- Take advantage of Drift Intel or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find new buyers.
- You can also take advantage of the “Chat to Call” feature to call the customer and try to convert them into a customer instantly.
- Live chat support and intuitive chat conversation features.
Price:
It comes with a freemium plan that provides all the basic features. The Essential and Premium plans cost $400 and $1,500 per month, respectively. There is an Enterprise plan that you can request a quote for.
Overall, Drift is a fantastic chat tool that makes it easy for online businesses to create more engaging instant interactions with their customers.
Comm100
Best for omnichannel customer support ($29 per agent/month).
Comm100 is a kind of one-stop communication tool that provides a live chat tool as one of its products. It allows you to control your live chat with customers through the web as well as through a mobile app.
Some of the prominent features include shared browsing, automatic translation, audio and video chat, customizable chat window, spell checker, and more.
Here is a list of all Comm100 live chat features: app
- web, desktop and mobile for agents.
- Possibility to chat in 13 languages.
- It allows you to handle multiple chats simultaneously.
- Leave messages offline.
- Conduct a pre-chat and post-chat survey.
- Share files and images within the chat.
- Visitor monitoring and chat volume report.
- Remove an agent from the chat or transfer the chat to another agent.
You can also ban unwanted visitors from chatting and only serve leads or customers you want.
To handle more than one chat in real time, Comm100 allows access to multiple chat operators simultaneously. Live chat software also allows users to send images, screenshots, and other files for convenient chatting.
You can also integrate your live chat tool with other channels like email, social media, and SMS to provide omnichannel customer support.
Plus, you get access to an extensive knowledge base and free online training to integrate the software with the website.
Price:
Comm100 live chat tool comes with three pricing plans:
- Team: $29 per agent/month
- Business: $49 per agent/month
- Company: based on quotes
You also get a freemium plan with all the necessary features and a free trial with all paid plans.
The Team plan offers features such as configurable chat buttons and window, real-time monitoring of visitors and agents, data storage for 1 year, etc.
On the other hand, the Business plan includes additional features like multi-language chat and machine translation, canned messages, audio and video chat, etc.
Intercom
The best marketing solution with live chat support.
Intercom is a customer messaging platform for sales, marketing and support teams.
It offers a modern user interface that provides smooth navigation, typing indicators, and the ability to send emoji and GIFs. It also allows you to easily customize your messages based on your branding requirements and across iOS, Android, and the web.
Over 30,000 businesses use Intercom, including Shopify, Atlassian, and Y Combinator.
Additional tools include a mobile app that enables instant screen sharing, meeting booking, and voice or video calling. It also allows sales teams to seamlessly collaborate with support teams. They can be easily synchronized to answer difficult technical questions more efficiently during conversations.
Key Features:
- Conversation Routing – Assign sales inquiries and support requests to the right teams and individuals.
- Rich Customer Profiles – Get detailed information about users and their chat histories for better customer engagement.
- Sales and Marketing Bots: Offers two separate sales and marketing bots that work 24 hours a day to book meetings and provide customer support.
Advantages:
- Measure customer acquisition ROI by tracking Intercom’s impact on opportunities, pipeline, leads, and successful deals.
- Leverage team performance reports to recognize and reward top performers.
- Get data on SLA targets, response time, and user volume to optimize team resource management.
- It also offers seamless integration with over 100 apps, including Marketo and Salesforce.
- Customize chatbots and connect them with your technology stack to automate workflows without writing a single line of code.
- Excellent chat experience and tools for support agents.
Price:
their paid plans start from $39 and go up to $999 per month.
Chatfuel
Ideal for companies that need automated support on Facebook.
Chatfuel is one of the leading chatbot platforms for Facebook Messenger. It is more suitable for increasing your sales and lowering the conversion cost of leads.
Your chatbot engages with visitors 24/7. You can automate your pre-planned answers with frequently asked questions to increase customer satisfaction and reduce support cost.
Key features:
- Free plan: Chatfuel offers a free plan with all the relevant features that works for pages with up to 5000 subscribers.
- Clone Messages – Instantly send duplicate messages to a person or group.
- Random answers: the chatbot is capable of responding with multiple answers to the same question, giving it a human touch.
Advantages:
- automatically respond to keywords and questions entered by the user.
- It allows you to embed a Facebook Messenger on your website with the Facebook Live Chat Website Plugin.
- Automatically updates public Facebook user information, including the user’s first name, last name, location, gender, time zone, and profile picture. It can also help you segment your user list for campaigns and streams.
- Send automated messages to users who comment on relevant Facebook posts.
- Measure the number of messages opened, sent, and clicked from the analytics dashboard.
- Visitor monitoring and co-browsing for real-time support from chat agents.
Price:
Their Pro plan costs $15 per month. It also offers a freemium plan and a quote-based plan.
Adquirir.io
The best for a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
Acquire.io is one of the most popular live chat programs available. Provides extensive integration with over 50 leading chat services, including Skype, Facebook Messenger, Line, and Twitter.
You can take advantage of its intelligent chatbots to automate your responses to common questions and customer requests. And whenever your chatbot gets stuck, it will instantly route the chat to a human agent to help your customers.
It also allows you to view and interact with your customer’s browser through screen sharing, helping you provide excellent customer support. On top of that, it allows you to lock down critical information like credit card information to maintain absolute security during screen sharing.
You can also take advantage of on-screen markers and highlighters to easily guide customers.
Key features:
- Email Support – Integrate your support channel with email support to enable a bird’s-eye view of all customer interactions from one place.
- Video Chat – Use video chat for face-to-face interaction with customers for better query resolution and faster conversions. You can use both one-way and two-way video features.
- Personalize Messages – Target and trigger automated messages to your users based on the visitor’s page URL, location, device type, and visitor behavior.
Advantages:
- all information shared in live chat is encrypted. It also complies with major security standards, including HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2.
- Provides a unified view of the customer with all historical data present at your fingertips.
- Take advantage of the Mobile SDK to customize video chat for your branding needs.
- It is the only live chat software that also provides mobile SDK for co-browsing with users on mobile phones.
- Create custom chatbots without any coding.
Prices:
their pricing models are available upon request.
Podium
The best customer engagement tool for local businesses.
Podium is an all-in-one small business customer messaging tool that includes great web chat features.
Their software helps local businesses manage reviews, collect payments by text message, receive feedback, and chat with customers via text, video, and more.
Key Features:
- Receive incoming messages from customers.
- Send outgoing messages to customers.
- Collect payment via text link
- Send and receive Facebook messages.
- Send and receive messages through Google.
- Send messages based on templates.
Pros:
- Its “Webchat” function is very convenient. You receive customer information (name and phone number) and you can call, text and chat with them to keep the conversation going even when you’re not at your computer.
- Podium “VideoChat” works great and allows you to quickly connect with customers remotely via video.
- Teams can do more with a connected “Teamchat” experience.
- Its centralized inbox allows team members to manage and respond to messages from multiple platforms within one dashboard.
Prices: The
- prices are completely personalized and you must request a personalized quote.
Tidio
The best smooth and fast live chat solution.
Tidio Chat offers several cool features to help you provide better customer support and make you more responsive and responsive with customers.
They boast that you can “communicate faster than ever.” By combining live chat, email, and messaging on one platform, it only takes seconds to respond to customers, no matter how they contacted you.
Also, its email notification feature allows you to easily track your missed live chat messages and reply to them via emails.
Tidio Chat also helps you eliminate spam and useless messages through an IP-based user ban. You can also stay connected with your real customers even when you’re not in the office through its native iOS and Android apps.
Key Features::
- Live Typing Preview the message your customer is typing in real time to give you more time to prepare for a more appropriate response.
- Visitor List – Start proactive conversations with your customers based on who visits and user behavior.
- Chat Transfer – Instantly transfer live chat to another operator based on user specific requirements and queries.
Advantages:
- enables powerful customer data management with efficient third-party integration.
- Instantly respond to frequently asked questions through canned responses.
- It allows you to export user data in an accessible file that can also be accessed by other tools and CRM.
- Take advantage of its efficient desktop application to engage with customers without any delay.
- Use live chat analytics to track customer support operator performance and chat traffic.
Price:
It comes with a free plan for up to 3 users and unlimited chats. Their paid plans start from $10 per user per month.
LiveChat
Ideal for companies that want a powerful balance between artificial intelligence and human contact.
LiveChat offers many unique features to help businesses deliver a great customer experience. Your chatbots can create help tickets, chat across multiple channels, and generate valuable business leads.
On top of that, its AI engine helps you quickly route your chats to the relevant customer executive by automatically segmenting them based on their behavior on the website.
It also helps you display your products on intuitive product cards, leading to a significant increase in sales. You can also use your custom form fields and marketing automation software integrations to qualify leads more efficiently.
Additionally, it allows sales teams to create goals and track revenue directly attributed to live chat.
Key Features:
- Multi-Channel Support: LiveChat allows customers to chat through multiple channels, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, Apps, Website, Email, and Chat Link.
- Extensive integration – Easily connect LiveChat with apps you’re already using for business. Some of the 170+ leading apps include Salesforce, MailChimp, ChatBot, Google Analytics, and KnowledgeBase.
- Intuitive Dashboard – Customize the dashboard to get a real-time list of website visitors, select the data you need, and use filters to segregate data to identify potential customers.
Advantages:
- customize the chat window to your company’s branding needs.
- Provide support based on wait time and chat history.
- Easily monitor all conversations through a single window, including chat windows from multiple websites.
- Receive feedback and ratings from customer service executives to assess the quality of your services.
- Engage customers with quick questions followed by canned answers.
- It works well with eCommerce platforms and is recommended for those using Magento 2.
Prices:
offers a 14-day free trial and a custom Enterprise plan. Their regular paid plans start from $16 per month and go all the way up to $50 per month.
Olark
Ideal for businesses looking for a powerful data tool with supporting software.
Olark is a SaaS tool that gives businesses the ability to chat in real time, organize customer data, and leverage customer insights to optimize the user experience.
With Olark, you can store your chat transcripts and notes and then store them in your CRM software. This helps organize data so you better understand your customers.
In a nutshell, Olark helps its clients “feel heard”.
You can leverage your custom pre-chat forms to get context before you start chatting with customers to provide better response and service. You can also delight the customer by sending product suggestions and automatic offers at the right time.
In addition to that, Olark allows you to receive messages offline via chat and reply to them via email whenever you are unable to reply to chat messages.
Key Features:
- Automation – Take advantage of its easily configurable live chat automation rules to drive engagement and speed up your workflow.
- Live Chat Analytics – Leverage your detailed real-time live chat data to efficiently monitor agent activity, customer satisfaction levels, and chat volumes to make the right staff and prioritize business decisions.
- Transcripts – Use live chat transcripts to get valuable feedback on your products and services. Dive into the transcript archive with easy search, sort, and filter functions to read data efficiently.
Advantages: you
- helps track chat frequency, agent responsiveness, and customer satisfaction.
- Efficiently integrate with CRMs including Salesforce, Nutshell, and HighRise.
- Assign chat to different officials according to the requirements of the clients.
- Take advantage of detailed transcripts of past chats and find valuable customer insights and feedback.
- Check the user’s shopping cart to offer a more contextual service.
Price:
Olark comes with a simple pricing plan available at $19 per month.
Chat pure
The best live chat software with a long free trial.
Pure Chat offers unlimited chat support to help you engage your customers. Their AI-enabled chatbot is capable of efficiently automating appointment scheduling, lead capturing, and receiving payments.
You can also leverage customer contact history and real-time analytics to gain actionable insights into traffic trends, marketing campaign efficiency, and user experience.
Plus, it offers seamless integration with leading apps like Google Analytics, Infusionsoft, HubSpot, and Axosoft. You can also use it in conjunction with Zapier to integrate with over 1,000 apps.
Key Features:
- Customization – Customize the chat widget completely to make it feel like an integral part of your business.
- Free version: It also comes with an efficient free version with AI capabilities for small businesses.
- Money Back Guarantee: It comes with a 30-day money back guarantee to assure users of the promised quality and features.
Advantages:
- Optimize all customer interactions with real-time visitor analytics and contact history.
- It offers easy setup and an intuitive user interface.
- Take advantage of the trigger-based chat feature and visitor alert feature to send personalized offers and product suggestions to the most qualified leads.
- Leverage your native iOS and Android apps to respond to customers from anywhere.
- Leverage responses stored in chat sessions to provide fast, accurate answers to frequently asked questions.
- Easy to integrate live chat widgets.
Price:
Pure Chat has two paid plans namely Growth ($39/month) and Pro ($79/month). It also provides a 30-day free trial.
SnapEngage
Ideal for businesses looking for a powerful omnichannel live chat solution.
SnapEngage offers the perfect blend of chatbot and conversation features for a seamless customer experience. It comes with several advanced features, including the ability to let customers share their screens for more efficient support.
It is a reliable live chat software that offers 99.98{b2e062dacaa682ac06b65f50eda167b816e329330e76ab97664011f321ee08e4} uptime. Like other tools, it helps you collaborate with team members across departments to convert leads and retain customers.
Key Features:
- HIPAA Compliant: SnapEngage is the world’s first secure, HIPAA-compliant live chat to help healthcare organizations efficiently connect with patients.
- Customization: Achieve your branding goals by easily customizing fonts, button colors, logo, backgrounds, and chat forms with intuitive design features.
- Security and compliance: It is SOC 2 certified, leverages SSL and double-layer encryption. It also offers limited data access and prevents data breaches through audit trails, permissions, and access rules.
Advantages:
- offers responsive support to help ensure easy setup and assistance.
- Create a unified workflow by integrating with Zendesk, Salesforce, Dynamic 365, and more.
- Make data-driven decisions for efficient staffing and reduce operating costs through advanced analytics.
- Offer omnichannel chat support to your customers via website, WeChat, Facebook, Twitter, SMS or Zalo.
- It provides unlimited conversations with no number limit.
Price:
their paid plans start from $16 per month and go up to $40 per month.
Smartsupp
Ideal for eCommerce businesses looking for a live chat assistant.
Smartsupp is a great way to engage with customers for eCommerce store owners.
It integrates with many of the leading eCommerce platforms and website builders , allowing for real-time personal conversations.
Smartupp also offers personal touches. There is a customizable window that allows you to embed the image of a customer support operator to show that humans are behind every chat interaction. It also offers detailed visitor information on its web dashboard to help you track customer behavior and traffic.
Smartsupp has native iOS and Android mobile apps to allow your support staff to stay connected with your customers on the go. You can also create your own rules to trigger automated custom messages on the right to drive sales.
Key features:
- Video Recording – Gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior through video recordings of customer movement in the app.
- Detailed Stats – Easily track customer chat ratings, measure conversions through Google Analytics, and monitor chat volume or user engagement to define your customer strategy.
- Integration – Offers APIs for more flexible integration with tools like website builders and eCommerce platforms.
Advantages:
- send automated messages to engage visitors at the right time.
- It promises a quick setup that happens in minutes.
- Integrate with e-commerce platforms to view customers’ phone number, name, or email.
- It offers integration with major eCommerce platforms including WooCommerce, Shopper, and Webnode.
- Take advantage of its customizable web dashboard to see the data you really need.
Prices:
offers a free version for small businesses with up to 3 users and limited features. Their paid plans, Standard and Pro, cost $10 and $19 per month, respectively.
HubSpot Live Chat
Ideal for businesses looking for live chat as part of a marketing toolkit.
HubSpot offers its free live chat software as part of its free CRM tool. Therefore, it is a great option for startups and small businesses looking for a comprehensive set of marketing tools. By having your own CRM, you offer seamless integration and generate more credible customer data for actionable insights.
Record transcripts of each chat to help you use them for user behavior, training, and agent performance. This feature also allows you to engage in contextual conversations and help provide better support and assistance for purchases.
Key Features:
- Build bots – Leverage your chatbot builder to instantly create bots that allow you to qualify leads, provide instant answers to frequently asked questions, and book meetings efficiently.
- Slack Integration: Hubspot offers free Slack integration to help agents receive direct chat notifications and respond efficiently through Slack. Users can also take advantage of the Hubspot mobile app to chat with customers on the go.
- Office Hours: Designate office hours in your chat widgets so users know when you’ll be available to chat.
Advantages: The
- chatbots can offer a more personalized and friendly experience due to their integration with Hubspot CRM.
- Take advantage of email capture to catch up on missed conversations.
- Add deals to the CRM with a single click, assign tasks to agents to drive deals, and track progress on dashboards.
- Easily access contacts, email templates, and company information right in your inbox through Outlook and Gmail integration.
- Easily create Instagram and Facebook lead ads through automated data capture.
Price:
is available for free.
Zendesk Chat
Best for managing large remote teams.
Formerly known as Zopim, Zendesk offers an efficient internal help desk solution. One of its standout features is proactive engagement, which allows chatbots to communicate in real time before a customer has a question.
It also offers AI, automation, and efficient workflows to scale messages faster and serve a large number of potential customers. Its data reporting tools provide actionable insights into satisfaction scores, trends, and response time to help you improve your customer experience.
Key Features::
- Ticket Management offers an efficient ticket management solution that can also answer questions from social networks.
- Explore – Their new reporting tool, ‘Explore’, provides actionable insights and allows you to create a custom report based on the requirement.
- Business Rules – Create an automatic workflow based on the changes present in the complaint ticket.
Advantages: Route
- easily remove tickets outside of workflow rules via internal notes.
- Modify and customize the dashboard based on your business requirements.
- Agents can add notes to tickets, which are used as a reference point for other agents as they pick up the ticket.
- It also makes outgoing messaging easy for agents.
- It offers an open API to seamlessly integrate with third-party applications.
Prices:
you must first use their free trial version before viewing the pricing plans.
Zoho Desk
The best option for companies that have a WordPress website.
Zoho Desk is a context-aware, customer-facing help desk software for agents and managers. Allow agents to turn any live conversation into a ticket if they can’t resolve customer issues. It also allows agents to instantly save the context of their live chat.
You can assign your tickets to trusted experts across multiple channels to enable efficient resolution of customer issues. You can also set a timeout for all chats, so if you miss one, it will automatically turn into a ticket.
Key Features:
- Preplanned Responses: Don’t waste time writing routine responses and courtesies. It can help you focus on helping customers more efficiently.
- Multi-branded chat widgets: You can create a separate branded chat widget for different apps and different communities and knowledge bases.
- Feedback – Get real-time customer feedback during live chat.
Advantages:
- offers a 15-day free trial to help you get familiar with the features.
- Evaluate customer feedback ratings to optimize your support team.
- View and manage communication with customers via Twitter and Facebook.
- Take advantage of cloud telephony to make phone calls.
- Embed a web form so that a customer can complete their queries and submit them as tickets.
Price:
Their paid plans start at around $10 per month and range up to $30 per month billed annually.
LivePerson
Great for AI-enabled real-time customer support.
LivePerson offers powerful live chat solutions, including automated messaging, canned messages, conversational AI, and more. Multi-language support provides live chat capabilities in different countries.
It also comes with a lead generation bot that can help you run effective email campaigns and send out newsletters. Their AI-powered chatbots continuously store customer information to help you facilitate accurate customer service.
Key Features:
- Bot After Hours: Guarantees you to answer the most frequently asked customer questions by facilitating canned answers throughout the day.
- Personalized Messages – Send personalized messages to your customers based on different scenarios to drive sales and conversion.
- Mobile App – Comes with native iOS and Android apps to help you stay connected with your customers regardless of their location.
Advantages:
- its AI-powered bots help you eliminate FAQs by providing an automated response.
- Its smartphone app sends push notifications every time you receive a message.
- Personalize your chat window by matching the color to your brand, add agent images, and change the text or language.
- Use keyboard shortcuts to use saved replies to quickly answer common questions.
Prices:
offers a price plan based on quotes.
Chaport
Best for managing live chat tasks in one window.
Chaport is an easy to install live chat widget that you can install on your website. It comes with a modern user interface and allows you to easily manage your chats, emails, and calls from a single window.
You can also use Chaport to chat with multiple clients at once to increase efficiency and get more leads.
With Chaport, you can modify the chat widget by changing its color, font, operator photos, and more. It currently supports 29 languages and the widget determines your customer’s language and switches to your language automatically.
It also offers a smartphone app, which allows you to engage with customers via live chat on smartphones and never miss an opportunity.
Key Features:
- Multilingual – Offers support in 29 languages to help global businesses serve their customers efficiently.
- Native Mobile App: Offers mobile apps for iOS and Android with device-specific chat features for seamless integration and user interface.
- Message Automation: Send personalized messages to customers based on their number of visits and behavior on the website.
Advantages:
- Efficiently link your live chat software to the CRM to get all relevant customer information.
- It is compatible with mobile and desktop devices, including Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android.
- Leverage Chaport’s mobile widget to easily connect with customers who are always on mobile.
- Use default responses to allow faster interaction with the customer.
Price:
Their paid plan costs $9.80 per carrier/month. Chaport also comes with a freemium plan that offers all the necessary features.
Note: Tools not yet reviewed for this list include FreshChat, ClickDesk, and Chatra.
Executive Summary
Naturally, responding quickly to a customer will increase their loyalty to your business. This is why it is crucial to use a live chat tool to meet your needs faster.
All of these live chat tools offer some unique features that might better align with your requirements.
For example, if you have a small business and are on a low budget, you might go for a free live chat solution like HubSpot that also comes with a free CRM tool. On the other hand, companies looking for a premium tool may choose SnapEngage or LiveChat to meet business requirements.
Be sure to check out all of its features carefully and choose the one that gives you the live chat features you need.
Which of these live chat tools do you like the most? Are there any missing from the list? Let me know your comments below.
