Best Live Chat Software in 2023

There are scores of good quality online chat software programs in the market. This makes it difficult to distinguish the good live chat tools from the average systems. This buyer’s guide aims to help you select the best Live Chat software platforms for small business and large enterprises by giving you pointers on the list of aspects to look for.

Sign up for the free trials or demo and basic unpaid plans offered by leading live chat software providers to test drive the key features of each system. You need not spend any money and you can do a comparison and identify problems with any system right away. Start by shortlisting and checking out the tools that have received the highest SmartScore rankings and customer satisfaction rating in our Customer Support category to discover the best Live chat software for enterprises, medium, or small business: Freshchat, Tagove, CDMessanger, Zopim, Olark, Engage, and NABD.

In the broadest sense, every company willing to provide online customer support can benefit from live chat tools. Still, there are three specific scenarios in which delivering exceptional customer service depends significantly on the presence of such software:

• Small Businesses that want to instill trust. Live chat software follows the example of traditional brick-and mortar stores where there are sales people appointed to help customers find what they need. Personalizing the same experience behind the screen is especially difficult for small companies which can’t afford to appoint a large team for the purpose, and should consider a small team of knowledgeable professionals to make their brand trustworthy instead.
• Medium Businesses that want to anticipate problems. Medium businesses are a specific category of growing and developing entities which can’t really accurately predict questions, inquiries, and problems reported by their customers. For the purpose, they need a live chat system that will simplify the process, track visitors real-time, and offer assistance even without being explained what the problem is.
• Large companies that want to personalize customer experience. The biggest problem of large companies is the lack of transparency, and so-called second-hand customer relationships where users don’t really feel as if they were taken care of. That’s exactly why large companies can benefit from live chat systems: they can track visitors’ behavior, and invite them to chat whenever that seems necessary.

1. Freshchat: a proactive mobile messaging and engagement application developed for sales teams that helps bring chatting experience to a more personalized level.
2. CDMessenger: A popular digital messenger that helps users communicate in a fast, effective, and secure way. It includes alerts, sticky notes, and task management tools.
3. Zopim: An immediate solution for professional and timely support, carefully packed with advanced features and able to determine which are the customers that need assistance.
4. Olark: A well-known chat support platform with clean and intuitive design, that can also gather customer behavior information and report on it.
5. Giosg. An intelligent live chat platform that informs that reveals critical visitor details, and helps companies engage their prospects and improve the quality of their services.

There are three basic types of live chat software, depending on the service companies tend to provide with them:

• Informational Live Chat Systems. These systems are used simply to provide information and answer visitors’ questions at any moment, usually to help them make a decision or to provide some product-related data. Most of the time, chat personnel handles only incoming requirements, but it is not rare for these systems to enable behavior tracking and to allow agents to intervene without being asked to do so.
• Sales Live Chat Systems. These systems were designed for online retailers to help them provide vital information to customers intending to make a purchase. Instead of technicians, there will be sales agents behind the desk with a full suite of information, and obviously a talent for converting prospects into buyers.
• Customer Service Live Chat Systems. Customer service live chat systems are often confused with the informational ones, but the main difference is that they emphasize helping customers who have problems rather than questions, and are therefore operated by technicians and IT departments. Their feature suite is considerably more advanced than those for informal services, and they often enable remote support.

Aside from these, live chat software can also be broken down into two categories depending on the channels:

• Text Only. With this kind of live chat software, agents and customers can only get in touch with each other through chat. Audiences can usually initiate conversations through chat widgets found throughout a website.
• Voice or video. There are live chat solutions that include voice and video calling options. These are particularly helpful for complex customer problems that require in-depth conversations.

Our detailed comparisons show that these are the basic features to expect from your next live chat system:

• API (application programming interface). Due the fact that all companies have a different software infrastructure to blend the system with, they are rarely industry-specific. Rather than that, they offer a suite of open developer APIs that can be used to integrate the system with any third-party platform manually.
• Co-browsing. Co-browsing refers to screesharing, a feature that helps you observe visitors behavior, track their actions, and guide them to the action you want them to perform. As you can guess, this is an invaluable asset for intervening whenever you believe a bit of contact could help.
• Email transcripts. Solid live chat systems transform all of your chats into comprehensive transcripts, and save them on the platform’s database for further usage. The best ones among them, however, are powerful enough to send the data directly to your email address.
• File-sharing. The same as social network chat boxes, corporate live chat systems should offer a file-sharing option, ideally such that can support files of different sizes and formats.
• Mobile support. This is one of the features that doesn’t even have to be mentioned, as it is simply imperative when doing business online. Instead of forcing customers to wait until their reach their computers to write to you, you should choose a solution that offers mobile app for them to be able to access support at any point of time.
• Social media integration. The sooner you integrate your live chat system with the social media you’re using the better – social networks are exactly where people look for you at the first place, so you should make sure to include a connected chat option directly on the profile page, and import that information into your live chat system.
• Surveys and feedback. One of the biggest benefits you could experience when communicating with customers directly is that you can perform surveys based on their feedback, and to evaluate performance based on the conclusion.
• Ticketing. You may think that live chat systems don’t need to include a ticketing option, but for most of them that’s highly recommendable: to start with, you may not have an available agent to offer an answer right away, while the other scenario is for him to deal with a complex problem that has to be transmitted to technical support. What can also be a criterion here are customer preferences: some people simply don’t want to chat with an agent, and prefer to explain their problem in a ticket.
• Visitor monitoring. For on-point support, live chat platforms have visitor monitoring systems. This lets agents know how visitors arrived at the website, which pages they are visiting, and how much time they have spent on a particular section. This way, they can provide personalized assistance and even generate leads.
• Analytics. Live chat solutions provide insights into the performance of the customer support team. With this, team leaders can determine which areas they need to improve to ensure that they provide the best service.

Our live chat software reviews show that these are the main benefits companies experience when using this type of system:

• Reduced Support Costs – Offering phone support is expensive as each agent can handle only one call at a time. However, live-chat agents can manage multiple conversations at the same time which means they can serve more customers in the same amount of time than phone support agents.
• Increased Online Sales – Online retailers learn about visitor behavior on their website through metrics. They can use live chat software to direct visitors to less popular product pages, proactively reply to questions they may have, and use co-browsing to make suggestions about products visitors might wish to buy.
• Improved Customer Service – Though many companies offer self-help tools like a knowledge base and FAQ pages, customers may not be able to use them effectively. These companies can provide live chat help along with the self-service resources to help customers make full use of them. This can boost customer satisfaction, and reduce the company’s expenses on phone support.
• Generating More Traffic – Companies in some industries use their website to advertise their products or services, and hope visitors will contact them. However, prospective customers may be hesitant to contact businesses such as law firms, insurance agencies, and car dealerships until they get answers to their questions. Such companies can use live chat to answer the common questions that may be keeping customers from contacting them.
• Research and Development Ideas – As customer support representatives interact with customers, they can discover what they need and expect from the company’s products or services. The organization can then innovate using feedbacks.

Automatic chat responses. Whenever agents are not available to chat, you can still inform waiting customers using automated responses. This way, they are aware that their concerns cannot be addressed presently and they need to wait for a specific amount of time.

Chatbots. Even if customer service representatives cannot interact with a customer, a chatbot still can. With this, customers can resolve basic issues without delay.

Screensharing. Some live chat software now offer support for screensharing. With this feature, customers can show support agents their desktop and vice versa. Thus, representatives can better understand the issue and provide optimal solutions.

Mobile responsiveness. One thing companies need to think about is the mobile adaptability of their live chat software. Since many people prefer to use their mobile devices for many tasks these days, the live chat widget needs to be accessible on mobile devices and without a cumbersome interface. Either way, organizations may miss new leads or lose existing customers.

Agent tone. Through chat, it can be difficult to gauge the tone of either the support representative or the customer. That is why agents need to make a concentrated effort to seem approachable to ensure that customers are not put off. They have to be extra careful with their choice of words, even with their punctuations.

Third-party integrations. Sales, marketing, and customer support solutions can benefit from exchanging data with each other. If a live chat application does not play well with third-party platforms, it can pose an issue. Businesses could miss valuable data that could assist them in improving their products or services.