Best Live Chat Software

People are always looking for an immediate response. Phone calls with long wait times, email support, and other communication methods don’t provide the same instant gratification as live chat.

That being said, nothing comes close to a personalized live chat service in providing a quality response to customer queries, as 51% of customers want businesses to be available 24/7.

The very best of Best Live chat software can help you in providing instant and adequate customer support.

But with so many options out there, how do you choose the best live chat solution for your business?

Thankfully, we have reviewed the most prominent candidates and narrowed down the list of top live chat solutions in this article, so you can choose the best live chat tools for your business.

5 Best Live Chat Software

Here are the 5 top Live Chat Software that can satisfy your customers’ queries in an instant and make customer support feel like a breeze:

• Zendesk: Best for Customer Engagement
• LiveChat: Best for Converting visitors into Customers 
• Zoho Desk: Best for large volume of frequent Customer Interactions
• Freshdesk: Best for omnichannel service
• LiveAgent: Best all-in-one help desk software

About Zendesk

Zendesk is a leading customer service solution for aspiring businesses. With it, all your customer interactions are packed in a single, dynamic interface with features like web widgets, pre-defined ticket responses, and full customer history. Get up and running quickly, and expect to see results even faster.

On average, Zendesk increases customer satisfaction by 25% and agent productivity by 30% at any scale. Zendesk enables support agents to manage conversations with customers across all channels, in one consolidated Agent Workspace. Using automated triggers, customers can be engaged at the moment support is needed, before they’ve asked their question.

With over 165,000 clients across hundreds of industries of all sizes and supporting over 60 languages, Zendesk is surely one of the best Live Chat Software right now.

Zendesk Benefits

Seamless support

Customers can connect at any time and at any place. That is why you can meet them where they are with Zendesk, which provides sophisticated, seamless support that flows across channels.

Easy adoption

Zendesk offers you effective adoption with no training required. It makes it easy to onboard new agents with existing business systems and software using their open API.

Seamless Integration

With over 700 out-of-the-box integrations with business software such as Salesforce, Google Apps, Atlassian, FreshBooks, and WordPress, Zendesk provides efficient and seamless integration with third-party apps.

Provide a personal touch at scale

Personalize the experience for each customer, even as you scale. Use automation and AI-powered bots to get the context to ensure customers never have to repeat themselves.

Zendesk Features

• Activity Dashboard
• Activity Tracking
• Alerts / Escalation
• Appointment Management
• Asset Tracking
• Assignment Management
• Automated Routing
• Availability Management
• Batch Communications
• Blended Call Center
• Call Center Management
• Call Logging
• Call Recording

Zendesk Pros & Cons

Zendesk Pricing

Zendesk offers 3 different subscription plans for the different needs of various businesses:

• Suite Team: $49 per month for businesses just starting their journey.
• Suite Growth: $79 monthly for growing teams and businesses requiring extra support.
• Suite Professional: $99 each month for professional organizations needing advanced features.

Technical Details

About LiveChat

LiveChat is a premium online chat software that allows customer service agents to contact customers directly on their website, via social media, or in the mobile, web or messaging app. Designed specifically for outstanding customer service, LiveChat is a robust customer chat solution that provides excellent support and ease of service.

Being easy to implement, customize and rebrand, LiveChat is perceived as a simple chat window that sits on a website. Under the hood, it’s a powerful customer service solution that fulfills all the communication requirements of modern companies.

Used by over 26 thousand businesses in over 150 countries, LiveChat handles hundreds of millions of chats a year, and is definitely one of the top online chat software and customer service solutions in the world.

LiveChat Benefits

Support smarter, not harder

LiveChat allows you to see what customers are typing in real-time. You can create message templates to answer with just a single click. Also, you can handle multiple cases at once.

Make the most of automation

With LiveChat, you can add chatbots to answer as many questions as possible. Quickly transfer to live customer support or a ticket form when necessary.

More flexibility for you and your customers

LiveChat allows conversations to start at any time and across multiple channels. Reply at your convenience.

24/7 customer service without a hitch

LiveChat allows you to provide 24/7 customer support thanks to chatbots, ticket forms, and asynchronous communication.

Real-time collaboration

With LiveChat, you can use chat supervision and private mode to train new team members and work together on tough cases.

LiveChat Features

• Alerts / Escalation
• Call Center Management
• Canned Responses
• Customer Service Analytics
• Customizable Branding
• Email Management
• Email Response Control
• Geotargeting
• Knowledge Base Management
• Knowledge Management
• Live Chat

LiveChat Pros & Cons

LiveChat Pricing

LiveChat offers four different plans for various business requirements:

• Starter: $16/month for the needs of a small office/home office.
• Team: $33 per month for requirements of a full-time support team.
• Business: $50 each month for additional features required by a customer service department.
• Enterprise: Customizable pricing for Fortune 500 companies.

Technical Details

About Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk platform designed to help businesses of all sizes manage customer service. It allows you to prioritize, manage and close an ever-increasing volume of requests that reach your organization through a variety of channels. It also helps you build and publish a support knowledge base.

Zoho Desk is a flexible, cloud-based help desk support software with Contextual AI that allows you to provide the support experience your customers deserve. Using Zoho Desk, you can analyze and improve the performance of your customer support team efficiently.

With over 50,000 businesses around the world as proud customers, Zoho Desk is surely one of the top live chat solutions for your business.

Zoho Desk Benefits

Omnichannel Support

Manage your customer conversations across multiple channels such as email, chat, phone, social media, and your website. Respond and perform follow-up activities without breaking a sweat.

Workflow Automation

Automate repetitive manual actions, and manage complex cross-functional service processes. Spot bottlenecks in your processes and track accountability at all times.

Seamless Integration

Connect Zoho Desk with other tools your team uses and add custom capabilities through REST APIs. You can even build your own help desk-based internal apps through SDKs. Be a maker!

Outstanding Self-Service

Embed a knowledge base, user community, and AI capabilities into your website, SaaS product, and mobile app, to help your customers find answers quickly.

Do more with Artificial Intelligence

Proactively triage support tickets, analyze customer sentiments, and spot anomalies in ticket traffic using Zia, the AI-powered assistant for Zoho Desk.

Zoho Desk Features

• Account Management
• Activity Tracking
• Alerts / Escalation
• Appointment Management
• Automated Routing
• Batch Communications
• Call Center Management
• Call Recording
• Canned Responses
• Case Management

Zoho Desk Pros & Cons

Zoho Desk Pricing

Zoho Desk offers 3 paid subscription plans as well as a free plan for different business requirements:

• Standard: $14/month for core customer support needs of an aspiring business.
• Professional: $23 each month for additional features and support of a growing organization.
• Enterprise: $40 monthly for advanced features and requirements of a professional corporation.

Technical Details

About Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based helpdesk system that offers powerful solutions for customer service. It unifies conversations from email, phone, web, chat, and social, and helps you resolve issues across channels effortlessly.

Freshdesk lets you automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, so your team can stay on top of all conversations within a single view. It also delivers a seamless user experience to agents and helps them stay at their productive best.

Trusted by 50,000+ businesses, Freshdesk is an award-winning online chat solution that provides outstanding customer support and is surely one of the top live chat software out there.

Freshdesk Benefits

Customer & agent support made easy

Freshdesk allows you to provide the best, most intuitive support across all channels. Proactively understand the customer needs and serve excellence from the very first time. Freshdesk helps agents in rapidly resolving customer inquiries with workforce automation and knowledge from one, unified platform.

Connect on channels that customers love

Impress customers with availability in their channel of choice, and seamless transitions at any point in their journey by using Freshdesk. You can integrate a blend of conversational experiences including live-chat, web, mobile, and contact center support with the help of Freshdesk.

Answer support calls effortlessly

Freshdesk allows you to have more effective phone conversations and connects customers to the right expert, from the beginning. With Freshdesk, you can take advantage of powerful routing engines that dramatically reduce call wait times and achieve smarter escalations.

Freshdesk Features

• Alerts / Escalation
• Appointment Management
• Assignment Management
• Automated Routing
• Call Center Management
• Case Management
• Cataloging/Categorization
• Collaboration Tools
• Communication Management
• Content Management
• Customer Complaint Tracking
• Customer Segmentation
• Customizable Branding

Freshdesk Pros & Cons

Freshdesk Pricing

Freshdesk offers a free plan as well as 3 paid subscriptions for the different requirements of businesses across various industries:

• Growth: $15/month for basic needs of a small business.
• Pro: $49 per month for growing requirements of an aspiring organization.
• Enterprise: $79 each month for advanced support and features required for a large support team.

Technical Details

About LiveAgent

LiveAgent is the ultimate solution for providing outstanding customer support. Equipped with more than 180 service features, you can link every channel of possible support inputs like fetching emails, Facebook comments, Tweets, contact forms, live chat or phone calls.

LiveAgent provides a fully-featured live chat tool that helps you personalize customer communication. It harnesses the power of a universal inbox, real-time live chat, built-in call center, and a robust customer service portal that helps you provide quality customer support.

Established in 2006, LiveAgent was the first solution to offer live chat and help desk capabilities and as of 2021, it is the one of best-rated and most reviewed help desk solutions on the market, serving over 150 million users and 40,000 businesses worldwide. That is why LiveAgent is one of the top live chat software right now.

LiveAgent Benefits

Effective engagement 

LiveAgent helps you increase engagement and make buying easy with their stylish live chat widget. Provide personalized real-time support and invite your customers to chat based on the time they’ve spent on your site, location, and visited pages.

Cloud phone support for modern businesses

With LiveAgent, you can improve your customer’s satisfaction by decreasing hold times with our cloud-based call center software. Enjoy more flexibility, more significant savings, and higher efficiency with callbacks, IVR, ACD, and video calls.

Ticketing simplified

LiveAgent allows you to save time by managing all customer messages in one app. Keep track of all conversations, integrate your favorite tools, automate repetitive tasks, work as a team, and make better business decisions based on real data insights.

Unified Platform

LiveAgent integrates all support channels into one environment so that everything is neatly sorted in one place.

LiveAgent Features

• Account Management
• Activity Tracking
• Agent Interface
• Alerts / Escalation
• Assignment Management
• Automated Routing
• Batch Communications
• Blended Call Center
• Call Center Management
• Call Recording

LiveAgent Pros & Cons

LiveAgent Pricing

LiveAgent comes with a free plan and 3 paid subscription plans for the various needs of different businesses:

• Ticket: $15 each month for core support tools and email ticketing.
• Ticket+Chat: $29 per month for additional features including robust multi-channel live chat and ticketing solution.
• All-inclusive: $39/month for a powerful omnichannel helpdesk with 180+ features.

Technical Details

What is Live Chat Software?

Live chat software is a specialized software that allows companies to communicate with their website visitors in real-time through chat windows. Customer service representatives can use live chat software to provide support to users who have queries regarding the respective products or website navigation.

Features of Live Chat Software

Live chat functionality can vary from product to product. The following are some core features within live chat software:

• Analytics
• Visitor Monitoring
• Customer Feedback

Analytics

Reporting related to live chat analytics gives administrators insight into customer service metrics such as support response time, overall support performance, and customer satisfaction. These insights help managers understand the highs and lows of the customer experience and the team’s performance.

Visitor Monitoring

Real-time visitor monitoring tracks where visitors are on the website and how long they stay on a certain web page. These insights give a sense of where visitors are gravitating to on a web page and can even help generate leads.

Customer Feedback

After a live chat conversation, a customer can rate the conversation and share feedback on whether or not their question was adequately handled. Managers can use this feedback to further understand the quality of an agent’s work.

Who Uses Live Chat Software

People who communicate with clients directly, such as customer support teams as well as sales teams, use live chat tools to instantly chat with clients or gather pertinent data on customers who are conversing with other customer service agents.

• Customer support
• Sales

Customer support

Customer support supervisors use live chat solutions to communicate with potential customers who use the feature to ask questions or voice concerns. If any complaints need to be escalated, chat agents can use routing features to transfer the conversation to a manager. When purchasing a live chat solution for customer service, businesses should remember to look for products that integrate with the company’s existing support software.

Sales

Sales teams can use live chat software to generate important leads. Since the buyer is showing interest in the company by starting a conversation through the live chat feature, it’s a great opportunity to spark a sales discussion. If a company wants to implement live chat to accelerate sales and improve conversion rates, it’s important to find a product that integrates with the CRM or system of record.

Software Related to Live Chat Software

Some of the related software which can be implemented along with live chat solutions include:

• Help desk software
• Customer self-service solution
• Social customer service software
• Conversational marketing software
• Chatbot software

Help desk software

Help desk software offers a ticketing process for customer service teams to organize and respond to inquiries involving a company’s products or services. Traditionally, help desks take in customer inquiries from email and web forms, but these solutions are increasingly supporting omnichannel customer service by incorporating other channels such as social media, live chat, SMS, and call center technology. As a result, many help desk solutions include a live chat tool.

Customer self-service solution

Customer self-service solution provides a platform for clients to access relevant information and execute tasks without needing the assistance of a customer support member. It can take on many different forms and may include chatbots, intelligent virtual assistants, knowledge bases as well as FAQs.

Social customer service software

Organizations use social customer service software in helping their customers through social networks and social messenger apps. These solutions collect customer queries from social media and assign them to appropriate support members. While live chat software allows customers to receive support when visiting a company’s website, social customer service enables support teams to react proactively to customer complaints or questions.

Conversational marketing software

Live chat tools can integrate or include features of conversational marketing software. Conversational marketing assists companies in improving conversion rates by identifying and engaging with potential customers throughout their buying journey. These products accelerate the buying process by transferring qualified leads to sales members or facilitating follow-up conversations if a customer is not yet ready to buy.

Chatbot software

Chatbots, which are also called virtual assistants or agents, are used in the place of a real person to carry out particular tasks or deliver information based on written or spoken requests.

Challenges with Live Chat Software

As with any specialized software, live chat solutions also come with their own unique problems. Some of the challenges with live chat software include:

• Scheduling for live chat support
• Increase in live chat service requests
• Displeased live chat customers

Scheduling for live chat support

Creating a schedule for live chat support is no joke. With live chat, customers naturally expect a speedy, real-time response from your service agents. This means having enough agents to handle requests so the chat queue doesn’t become too long.

If you have limitless resources, providing live chat customer service around the clock is simply a matter of tracking properly. But, what if you’re a humbler organization that can’t afford 24/7 service? Even if you have finite resources, it’s still a positive idea to provide live chat support. The crucial point, though, lies in laying out actual expectations. If you only provide chat during fixed hours, make that detail clearly visible on your website.

Increase in live chat service requests

Opening a new customer communication channel will generally lead to more requests. However, a slow response rate is not a great choice when it comes to your live chat support, as late responses are quoted as one of the major causes of clients leaving a company’s website.

Displeased live chat customers

Angry customers are a disheartening part of any customer service platform. Besides, when unhappy customers are hiding behind a screen, they feel especially empowered to treat customer support agents with disregard.

The starting point in dealing with this is ensuring your people so that they feel empowered to stop overly aggressive discourse and then report it. If the conversation gets too unpleasant, then the ultimate solution is to block them.

How to Find the Best Live Chat Software For You

There are a number of aspects you should consider when choosing the ideal live chat solution for your business. Some of these essential factors are:

• Size of your team
• Core Features
• Automation
• Specific Requirements

Size of your team

Several plans include minimum and maximum agent restrictions. So, you’re going to be handling live chat service by yourself, there’s no reason in paying for a plan that comes with 6 agent seats.

If you’re planning to scale your team, try to look for software that charges on a per-user basis, with the ability to add on as your organization grows.

Core Features

Besides basic live chat functionality, there are several additional features that you can keep in mind:

• Third-Party Integrations
• Website monitoring
• Customizable widgets
• Concurrent chats
• Customer details and CRM data
• Chat analytics
• Team management tools
• Timely Scheduling

Automation

Automation is an important part of live chat. The top automations ensure that your website visitors get a fast response, even if a live agent is unavailable at the time.

Advanced automations go as far as routing customers to the right department or agent. Some AI-powered chatbots can answer questions and guide customers through the conversion funnel without ever connecting to an actual human.

Specific Requirements

Many chat solutions specialize in sales, while others are more focused on customer service or lead generation. Some chat tools even specialize in omnichannel or multilingual support.

If you have a specific need in mind, make sure you choose a live chat solution that caters to those requirements.

Conclusion

Live chat solutions have the ability to enhance your customers’ experience, and the right live chat software for your business can mean the difference between mediocre results and excellent customer support.

To recap, we analysed the best live chat solutions as well as their benefits, features and their downsides as well. Here are the top live chat software according to their respective business types:

• Zendesk: Best for Customer Engagement
• LiveChat: Best for Converting visitors into Customers 
• Zoho Desk: Best for large volume of frequent Customer Interactions
• Freshdesk: Best for omnichannel service
• LiveAgent: Best all-in-one help desk software

Needless to say, your job of searching for the ideal live chat software according to your business has become much easier.