What is live chat software?

The marketplace for consumer engagement is saturated with live chat software of all shapes and sizes. If you google “live chat software” in Google Search, you will get over one billion thirty million results!

But you don’t have to parse through the entire cosmos of Google Search results to pick the right tool for your business. The most effective way to identify the right chat solution for you is to define your requirements and map them back to the tools that match them. There are a few must-have, non-negotiable things that you should look in a live chat software when you are evaluating to purchase one:

Don’t pick a live chat vendor that host their solution on-premise, unless you have strict operational and regulatory requirements that require you to do so. A cloud-based live chat software is faster to deploy, easier to set up, and integrates well with most modern tools.

Pick up a live chat software that offers cross-channel capabilities such as mobile-readiness and integration with the top marketing and customer support software. Live chat shouldn’t be a siloed system; hence, it is necessary it works well with other players in your software stack to improve customer experience.

When it comes to picking up a good live chat software, it’s very important to judge the book by its cover. Be very picky about the user interface, both on the end-user side and the agent side. Also, evaluate the level of customization the tool offers. E.g., changing the chat widget color, adding your brand logo, disabling features that you don’t want, etc.

Most businesses struggle to find the right chat tool mostly because of the confusion around pricing. Avoid live chat vendors whose pricing are vague and confusing, or at least get on a call to understand the plans clearly. Our advice, go for a SaaS-based live chat tool that has clear agent-based pricing.

This depends hugely on your use cases. If you are going to use the live chat software for your engagement team, you might want to have features such as automated campaigns, chatbots, and event-based messaging. If your use case is support-heavy, you want to look for intelligent chat routing options, co-browsing and screen-sharing, and priority inbox.

Although most live chat tools come with some level of reporting features by default, not all vendors do a great job at it. Make sure to demo the reporting feature of a live chat tool to understand what advanced insights (e.g, CSAT rating) it offers that could help you improve your existing processes.

As customers spend more time on mobile (4bn people in the world have a smartphone) and more time messaging (68% of smartphone users use messaging apps to communicate) they also expect to talk to brands using the same channels. This expectation is dramatically rising, as in-store footfall decreases and more and more brands move the business online. For a brand — offline, online, or both, this means opening and sustaining their business on accessible and convenient digital channels.

In such times, where digital channels such as a website become a vital point of contact for sales teams, using live chat software provides a 150% increase in collecting information, 3X higher website conversions, and a 75% increase in demo requests and meetings. When it comes to customer support use cases, live chat software provides 73% customer satisfaction, much better than email (61%) and phone (44%), while costing 60% less than calls per interaction on average.

To fully gain the benefits of live chat software, it’s best experienced when integrated with messaging channels like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, or Facebook Messenger. This allows a brand’s customers to contact the business from wherever they are, resulting in average customer satisfaction of 4.7, which is around 60% more than those brands that didn’t.