Customers nowadays anticipate prompt replies when they contact a company’s support service, notably during the pandemic since internet usage has increased. As a result, live chat has become an essential component of customer support. More than 41% of customers anticipate live chat on websites. Therefore, failing to provide a live chat option will result in a loss of revenue.
With a plethora of live chat software available out there, one can find it confusing to choose a single software. Therefore, we at SaaSworthy have put together a list of the top 5 live chat software one can use in 2021.
Table of Contents
What is a live chat software?
Live chat software enables businesses to connect with website visitors in real-time through chat windows. Customer service personnel can use live chat software to assist consumers with queries about website navigation or products.
Live chat software enables online companies to provide immediate customer care and support to website visitors. In addition, live chat software allows companies to be the starter of a discussion and easily understand prospects.
Why is live chat software essential?
Live chat software can be utilized by:
- Customer service teams, to rapidly reply to questions.
- Personnel in business development jobs, to reach prospects who may be unreachable via phone or email.
- Administrative staff in the education sector to interact with new students.
Support professionals can either promote user engagement with pop-up chat windows or wait for visitors to voluntarily approach queries or concerns. Reporting and analytics, interactive chat alerts, and chat archiving are just a few of the features available.
- Because of the convenience, customers are more inclined to interact with firms using live chat software rather than phone and email assistance.
- Website visitors do not have to wait long for an answer to a basic query when using live chat.
- Live chat is less expensive than phone calls and requires less work on the part of both the client and the agent.
- Because the informality of live chat makes a sales interaction more comfortable for the consumer, it’s an excellent opportunity to close a deal.
5 best live chat software in 2021
Let’s now talk about the top 5 live chat software in 2021 –
1. LiveChat
LiveChat is a customer service live chat software. It enables businesses of all sizes to engage with website visitors more quickly and aids the efforts of sales teams. It can be implemented across many websites and utilized on desktop, mobile, and web-enabled devices.
LiveChat is used by 33,000 businesses in 150 countries, including industries such as education, HR, travel, automotive, foreign exchange, customer support, and e-commerce. LiveChat is also SaaSworthy’s first choice when it comes to live chat software.
The various features of LiveChat include –
- It enables customer support representatives to converse with numerous customers at the same time, allowing them to be more efficient.
- LiveChat integrates with over 170 third-party applications for CRM, analytics, CMS, email marketing, help desk, and e-commerce.
- Users can use the dashboard to create tickets via email or chat, assign tickets, automate schedule follow-ups, tag related cases, and track open cases.
- It enables businesses to offer 24/7 assistance with ChatBot integration, allowing consumers to obtain answers to their queries at any time.
- It enables prompt replies through real-time conversations, preset responses, and chat previews, which display the message being typed.
- Integration with a knowledge base allows customers to search the company knowledge base straight from the chat.
- Representatives can use this tool to offer information such as sharing tutorials or marketing brochures, and visitors can share files.
- It provides tools for goal planning and sales tracking, allowing managers to estimate and assess the success of LiveChat.
The limitations of LiveChat are –
- It lacks an operator-to-operator chat feature to allow operators to interact with other team members while chatting with the consumer.
- It doesn’t allow you to set up an automated message or customize the design of each chat, unlike its competitors.
2. Intercom
Intercom is a conversational live chat software that helps create a tailored message experience for customers throughout their journey. In addition, it provides self-service features, proactive tours, interactive bots, marketing features, etc.
Intercom’s inbox functionality facilitates cooperation between the sales and support teams. It connects with out-of-the-box components to automate activities, synchronize data, and increase productivity. Users can also design their own configurations based on business requirements.
The various features of Intercom include –
- You can use Resolution Bot to automate responses to frequent queries. You can also manage, prioritize, and route interactions, tailor user engagement with articles and chatbots depending on customer behavior.
- You can create interactive tutorials to orient new customers and explain your service. This can be done using frameless video tours with audience targeting, multipage tours, configurable themes, and a code-free builder.
- It enables you to manage communication through single or multiple displays and personalized messages.
- You can manage and reply to discussions on your website, mobile applications, and using social media platforms and email.
- With Business Messenger, you can provide both self-service and human help through tailored customer support.
- You can deliver messages within and outside the app, target consumers based on product interaction, deliver product messages regarding subscription renewals.
- You can contact inactive users through email or push notifications and automatically answer queries.
The limitations of Intercom are –
- Its pricing plans are not affordable for all business types.
- It lacks fundamental functionality that would improve the user experience, such as automated greetings and navigation.
3. Drift
Drift is a cloud-based live chat software that assists organizations in acquiring new clients and automating sales procedures. By providing a real-time connection with website visitors, it creates leads and increases sales prospects.
It is accessible for both Android and iOS and allows users to run their businesses remotely. In addition, its chatbot assists companies in developing a streamlined sales funnel that allows them to acquire quality leads. Drift is used by over 50,000 enterprises worldwide.
The various features of Drift include –
- It connects users to website visitors, engages target users, assists in lead acquisition, enables conversational analysis, and maintains conversations with various inboxes.
- It compiles and organizes contact profiles with information such as contact details, visitor name, company name, and sector.
- It uses APIs to access bot functionalities, enable widget settings, sync contacts, and aid with data recovery and deletion.
- It generates comprehensive reports on team performance, discussion tags, leads gained, sales data, meetings, website engagement, routing, response time, and other performance indicators.
- To classify and customize consumer information, it gathers user data from third-party sources such as SixSense, Crunchbase, and ZoomInfo.
- With live chat, you can take internal notes, get conversational ratings, and keep track of site visitors.
- Its AI-powered email bots identify human email responses from autoresponders, ensure follow-ups, handle email interactions with customers, enhance sales volume, and monitor responses.
The limitations of Drift are –
- It does not provide customers with a self-service alternative to obtain answers to frequently asked questions 24/7.
- It provides minimal visitor information to its users to tailor the support experience.
4. Comm100
Comm100 is a business-focused communication live chat software that provides real-time, tailored client engagement. A systematic API connects Comm100 to third-party integrations such as CRMs, e-commerce, social networking, and website content management channels.
Comm100 Live Chat is offered in three editions: free, business, and enterprise. Comm100 is used by over 6500 enterprises globally, including Stanford University, Rackspace, and Canadian Blood Services.
The various features of Comm100 include –
- It uses an AI-powered virtual assistant to handle transactions, answer complicated consumer inquiries, resolve problems, and govern interaction with minimal human participation.
- With Agent Assist, you can improve service quality, observe interactions, offer accurate responses, and provide resources from the knowledge base.
- To assist customers, you can create and manage self-service and agent-led resources that are connected with live chat.
- You can connect with consumers regarding feedback requests, discounts and promotions, effective solutions, and automatic answers.
- Its built-in real-time translator eliminates language barriers by automatically identifying and translating conversations into your clients’ language.
- It provides a complete set of enterprise-level tools and reports required to monitor operator performance and quality.
- It includes capabilities such as rating reports, real-time chat supervision, operator efficiency reports, chat takeover, and conversation transcript review.
- For a better customer experience, you can use more straightforward administration tools, integrate pictures, and add hyperlinks.
The limitations of Comm100 are –
- It does not have customer support on weekends and at night times, which can be disadvantageous for 24/7 companies.
5. LivePerson
LivePerson is a cloud-based live chat software that provides real-time intelligent customer interaction solutions and assists organizations in improving their client connections. LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud technology enables AI-powered messaging and chatbots for 18,000+ organizations, including several Fortune 500 firms.
Its AI-powered chatbots interact with human professionals to manage conversations in a single cloud-based workplace accessible from PCs, iOS, or Android devices, making conversations among scattered workforces simple.
The various features of LivePerson include –
- To optimize automated conversation flows with a common UI, you can build native bots utilizing pre-built, industry-specific templates.
- With a point-and-click interface and easy dialogue flows, non-technical personnel can optimize, develop, and observe bots and establish consumer interactions.
- It employs sophisticated reporting tools to keep track of operations, engagement, evaluate revenue, and agent activity.
- You can easily track performance indicators and monitor conversion rates on pre-built, configurable dashboards based on account activity.
- To successfully connect with consumers, you can integrate third-party channels into contact center operations.
- You can create and manage personalized bots, track operational effectiveness with detailed data, and use built-in capabilities to ease centralized messaging from a single platform.
- You can collect feedback from consumers by sending automated, specialized, and restricted text questions using the skill-specific survey bot.
The limitations of LivePerson are –
- It does not offer a dedicated interface for the administrator to see the active chats separately.
- There are no customization choices for the agent, and there is no way to provide chat transcripts to users.
Conclusion
We hope that we were able to throw some light on the top 5 live chat software available in the market. You can select whichever live chat software is best tailored to your needs after considering each software’s pros and cons.
If you are looking for chatbots software for your website, check out SaaSworthy’s list of chatbots software.
Also read:
• Customer Self-Service: All You Need to Know
• 10 Best Strategies for Customer Retention That Your Business Can Use
