Best 5 live chat software for your website in 2021

February 20, 2021

Table of Contents

Overview

An email has long been the most used digital customer service channel. However, the Customer Benchmark Report in 2021 by SuperOffice has revealed that:

62% of companies do not respond to customer service emails.
90% of companies do not acknowledge or inform the customer that an email has been received.
97% of companies do not send a follow-up email to customers to see if they are satisfied with the response.
Only 20% of companies can answer questions in full on the first reply.
The average response time to handle a customer service request is 12 hours and 10 minutes.

The research also shows that a majority of the 1,000 companies in the study (including both large and small organizations across the world) are failing to meet customer expectations and costing millions of dollars in lost customers and unnecessary internal follow-up work.

Meanwhile, along with the need of providing consumers with instant support and quick replies, live chat has grown into one of the most essential functionalities of a website for customer service.

What is live chat?

When you visit a website, you may usually see a chat bubble or small window, which often locates at the bottom right corner of the page. It often starts with a greeting or question like “How can we help you?”, and once you leave your message in the window chat, you can immediately receive the answer instead of sending emails and waiting for a reply.

In other words, live chat is a technology that provides companies with the ability to interact with users when they visit a company’s media properties such as its website. Live chat is usually implemented by javascript code embedded in a website and messages from multiple chat windows will be transmitted back and forth between the dashboard of the live chat software and the chat window.

Live chat can be used as both customer service and marketing channel for businesses. The advantage of live chat is that it is similar to instant messaging conversations. Compared to phone calls or emails, consumers don’t have to navigate to other applications to continue the conversation. Through the live chat window, a user can exchange messages with a company representative or the chatbot software.

Why should your website use live chat?

Increasing and keeping customer satisfaction is extremely important to any business’s survival. Along with the quality of the products and services that you are selling, your customer service performance plays a very big role in retaining and attracting customers. Surfing a website is similar to going to a coffee shop, if you need any support – surely faster is better. Through live chat, you can reduce the waiting time of your customers to give them proper support, or at least provide them with appropriate information and assistance as well as keep them in touch with you by asking for their email address and contact information automatically.

Some web users may prefer calls to chat. Some may prefer receiving a formal support letter via email to a short message. But there are also web users who tend to lose their patience with log-in into their email account for getting service. And some will prefer talking with a real person to a chatbot. With live chat, you can set up your automatic message to give your customer the kind of service that they prefer without much human involvement, which means that the process will take less time. In terms of customer experience, live chat is way doing better than any customer service channel.

live chat statistics 2 — Live Chat service is one of the reasons that make customers want to buy products from a company and stay loyal to it.

According to statistics:

52% of consumers tend to keep loyal to a company that offers live chat support.
79% of businesses state that offering live chat service has had a positive impact on their sales, revenue, and customer loyalty.
63% of people who often spend at least $250 online shopping are the most likely to buy from companies that offer live chat and stay loyal to those vendors.
51% of consumers say that they tend to buy again from a company if they offer live chat support.
38% of consumers prefer buying from a company if they offer live chat support.

How to choose a good live chat software for your website?

There is a handful of live chat software that is easy to integrate with your website. To make it easier for you to choose one that suits your needs, the list below is the best 5 live chat software that are popularly used by small and medium-sized businesses.

1. Live Chat

LiveChat.com is an online customer service software for eCommerce sales, customer support, and lead generation. It now supports online chat in up to 41 languages.

Setup:

Sign up with no credit card required
Paste a piece of code onto your website

Live Chat features:

Live Chat offers a wide range of chat tools and supports many customer engagement features, customization, as well as reports and analytics, and security.

Key features include:

Chat client
Chat agent console
Automatic messaging
Offline mode
Shortcuts/canned messages
Tracking/live analytics
Internationalization
Ticketing system
Integrations and add-ons

Advanced features:

Team management
Mobile support/apps
Ban users
Log creation

Pricing:

(Monthly prices based on a one-year contract for one agent)

Starter	$16/month	For small businesses
Team	$44/month	For a full-time support team
Business	$50/month	For a customer service department
Enterprise	$149/month	A solution for Fortune 500 corporations

Pros&Cons:

Pros	Cons
Well-designed	Pricing – LiveChat is more expensive than most other live chat tools, especially when you need to set up different agent groups or add multiple automatic triggers.
Lots of features and apps	Automations – The automatic greetings are not quite sophisticated as with some other live chat tools. For example, you can’t trigger a live chat when the visitor is leaving the page.
Apps for iOS, Android as well as PC and Mac	Live Chat doesn’t allow changing the Welcome Message without moving up to another tier.
Multilingual support

2. Tidio

Tidio Live Chat is a live chat service that allows you to keep live chat, chatbots, messenger and email in one place. It is designed specifically for the WordPress Community. However, Tidio is also well-supported for Shopify, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, AmeriCommerce and it is considered as a young live chat software with a focus on automations and smart integrations.