25 Best Live Chat Software in 2021

What is Live Chat Software?

Live chat software is an application that helps organizations in providing immediate customer support and information. It is basically an online customer support system with live support, help desk software, and web analytics capabilities. Live chat software also helps businesses manage customer conversation from a single platform. It creates auto-responses to commonly asked questions to address the concerns of their website visitors even during off-hours.

Whether you own a product or run a service, you should provide good support to foster your relationship with your customers, which would eventually help you grow your customer base.

How to Use Business Live Chat Software?

It is extremely easy to use live chat software. All you need to do is embed the application on your website and fill in the required details. After that, you will be able to engage with visitors who are browsing your website via instant messaging. A browser window will appear on your website for the visitors to type into the chatbox and communicate with concerned departments.

Why use Live Chat Support Software?

You should use live chat software because it helps increase sales and conversions, reduce support costs, build buyers’ trust and give a satisfying customer experience. Live chat software also helps improve the website experience and understand your customers’ need in a better way. Live chat software leads to good customer support and good customer support leads to build trust and provides higher chances of online conversion. It reduces support costs and helps to understand your customers better by directly interacting with them on a one-on-one basis.

How does Live Chat System Software Work?

Live chat systems allow you to instantly communicate with your customers via instant messaging. The live chat software works in the same way as any instant messaging software. A chat box simply appears within the customers’ browser window, and they can chat with the operator by typing into the live chatbox.

Key Features of Live Chat Software Solutions

Proactive Chatting

It is a feature where the customer support executives initiate the chat and reach out to your website visitors by offering help instantaneously. This is a very important tool for increasing customer satisfaction and customer engagement. It also comes with a custom message and an image in a small live chat window.

Visitor Tracking

This feature in business live chat software acts as a comprehensive tracking facility that provides you with detailed insight into the behaviour of your website’s visitors. The insights are necessary because your website visitors are also your potential clients. It includes information like the amount of time spent by a visitor during the chat, their overall activity, conversion tracking, a record of transcript reports and many more.

Chat Rating

This feature allows customers to rate their chat conversations. Feedback from your customers will provide crucial information on the quality of your support and if there are areas you can improve on for customer satisfaction.

Trigger Alerts

This feature in business live chat software can send customised and targeted messages to customers. For example, you can help customers complete their purchase by automatically reaching out through the chat.

Operator Monitoring

This feature in web live chat software lets you supervise your operators. By using the insights about their performance, you can see who is performing well and who are underperforming. You can use these insights to train and improve the quality of your chat support.

Automatic Responses

You can speed up your support executive’s response time by allowing automatic responses for frequently asked questions in web live chat software. Saving and reusing these replies save time and increase the efficiency of your employees.

File Transfers

The built-in function for transferring files between chat operators and website visitors ensures convenience. It also gives clear instructions on compatible file types and file sizes.

Easy Integration

You can integrate the online live chat software with any application you're currently using. You can put and retrieve all the data you want from the live chat software.

Reports and Analytics

Using this feature, you can monitor activities such as chat histories, conversion tracking, visitor details, and average time spent on chats. This function is important for determining effective strategies and implementing improvements.

Chat Monitoring

This feature in online live chat software lets you track detailed chat conversations in real-time and see who among your executives are currently on chat. This would increase your employees’ efficiency and productivity.

Queue Time

This feature in support live chat software provides your visitors with an approximation of the wait time before starting a live chat conversation. This feature is suitable when there’s a high volume of chat. Waiting for an indefinite time may lead your visitors to exit the website, which can hurt your company’s customer satisfaction level. It may also mean a loss of a few potential customers.

Benefits of Business Live Chat Software Support For Websites

A better understanding of customer expectations

It is very important to understand your buyers’ needs and then provide the right solution to them. The live chat software gives you the opportunity to close a deal and also give you access to target the right customers.

Increased sales and conversions

No doubt, customers will have questions about your product or service. Live chat software gives you the chance to grab your customer’s attention and also help them reach a buying decision.

Chat routing

With live chat software, you can transfer chats to any of the free operator routes the customer to the right executive. This is beneficial for the efficiency of your employees when the workload increases.

Reduced support costs

In traditional call centres, support executives can just one call at a time. But, with live chat software, an executive can take up multiple chats at once. So, you don’t have to hire as many support executives as you had to earlier.
 

Build trust with buyers

Customers are usually doubtful while buying new products or services. Having live chat software ensures that you engage with the customers and make them more aware of your deliverables. You can also convince them about your product and lead them to a successful sale.

Gives a competitive advantage

Live chat software will provide you with an added advantage over your competitors because you will be able to address your customers’ issues better and quicker.

Increased sales value

With live chat software, you will be able to upsell and cross-sell your products. For example, a customer wants to buy a mobile phone. With live chat software, you can recommend him to buy a better phone. This is called upselling. You can also recommend him to buy a phone cover or earphones to go with the phone. This is called cross-selling. Both upselling and cross-selling would increase your sale value.

Better customer relationship

With live chat software, you are able to offer a better customer experience. Because live chat software ensures an immediate response to the customer’s query. Studies have shown that live chat software provides high satisfaction levels as well.

Getting leads

The live chat software acquires the details of customers who type anything in the live chatbox. They can be your potential leads and contacted later on to be nurtured across the marketing funnel.

A better understanding of customers

The live chat software helps get a better understanding of what the customers want. The success of a company depends on its customers. Hence, understanding what the customers want is extremely important for any business.

Pre-chat & offline forms

By using this feature of pre-chat forms, you can ask visitors for their contact information before starting a chat. This ensures that customer queries can be addressed even while you’re not online.

Chatbots

You can also integrate AI-powered bots into chat using API. This will automate answers to common queries of your visitors with pre-defined templates.

Mobile optimization

A lot of people use their phones for browsing through different websites. This feature lets you provide assistance to the visitors regardless of what device they are using.

Triggers

This feature in top chat software sets customised triggers for various circumstances. While using live chat software, your employees will get notified about a recurring website visitor so that they can start a chat session immediately.

Buy Online Live Chat Software

Finding the best live chat software should be based on what your organisation needs. Depending upon the type of features that you need, your choice of live chat software will change. Along with the need, make sure you also follow the given points to make the right choice of live chat software:

Pricing, Cloud-based vs. self-hosted, third party software integration, infra & security, demo

Live Chat Pricing

Every live chat software come with different pricing plans that would charge you depending on your requirement and the number of features you seek. While selecting a live chat software, you have to keep in mind how many chats you are handling every month, the type of reporting you to require, and on how many websites do you need to have live chat.

Cloud-based vs. self-hosted

In self-hosted services, the applications are hosted on the organization’s infrastructures. Cloud-hosted software resides on a third-party server and is operated with the help of the Internet. There are a few benefits of using live chat software like getting regular updates, no requirement of external IT infrastructure and quick bug resolutions. You can also access a cloud-based software anytime, anywhere.

Third-party software integration

It is important to consider if the software you are selecting is able to integrate with other important application. This is necessary because of the rising competition in the market, you have to stay up-to-date with the latest technology. That is why you need to make sure that your live chat software integrates seamlessly with different business tools, 

Infrastructure and security

Having a robust infrastructure is of no use in today's ever-changing times. If the chat software is cloud-based, you will need to know how often backups are stored, and how well does the application handle load. You should know how is your data protected from unauthorised access, what is the infrastructure used, and what are the privacy policies of the vendor.

Ask For a Free Demo

Before buying a live chat software for pc, you should ask for the online demo. Also, make sure that you inquire the vendor about each and every feature. Live chat software demos are quite helpful, as you will be able to understand the software better and make a sound judgment before buying it.

Live Chat Software Solution Cost