And what does best live chat software mean anyway? What’s perfect for one business is overly complicated for another. Or not enough. The live chat landscape is competitive and the functionalities available are exciting for marketers. It’s definitely a big plus to add a live chat to your website, whatever the industry.

This comparison of the leading providers of live chat software will help you find the one service that best fits your business needs and budget.

The Benefits of Live Chat Software for Business

Among all digital marketing tools, you might be wondering why live chat is important. Above all, it’s a customer support and direct communication tool. Directly connecting with website visitors increases customer engagement, improves the customer experience, and directly or indirectly, increases your sales.

A live chat tool:

• streamlines customer support;
• can answer inquiries outside office hours thanks to automation;
• can offer self-help resources to decrease team members’ workload;
• lets you contact leads without an email signup form;
• enables you to initiate direct contact proactively;
• keeps a customer on the site for longer and even converts them;
• delivers better user experience thanks to real-time support, a targeted approach, and personalization;
• gathers customer insights for continuous improvement.

Who should use live chat?

Live chat can be used to help grow businesses of all shapes and sizes. Having a live chat software is an effective way for ecommerce shops, B2Bs, SaaS companies, and start-ups alike to connect with their customers and drive conversions. 

What makes live chat so helpful is the ability to communicate with website visitors in real time. It’s like having a dedicated customer support agent for each of your visitors. 

And thanks to automated chatbots, even the smallest of teams can deliver great chat experiences for customers. 

If you’re looking to get started with live chat, try Sendinblue. Our forever free plan includes everything you need to launch a chat window on your website and manage your support team.

Live Chat Software Comparison

Let’s take a look at the top live chat tools on the market and what businesses we think they’re most suitable for.

Chatra — best live chat software for websites

LiveChat — best live chat for big teams

LiveAgent — best customer service platform for large businesses

Zendesk — best live chat for tech scale-ups with knowledge management needs

Gorgias — best live chat software for ecommerce

Freshdesk — best customer support tools for big companies working both offline and online

Tidio — best live chat software for small business

Intercom — best live chat for SaaS

Olark — best live chat app for businesses dealing with people with disabilities

Hubspot Service Hub — best live chat for sales teams

Free Live Chat Apps

The 10 Best Live Chat Software Compared

1. Chatra

Chatra is a complete live chat software for websites and ecommerce stores. It streamlines conversations from the most used channels — email, messenger, and website, for better organized and faster customer service. 

Chatra lets you talk to website visitors in real time or automate engagement with triggered messages and answer at your own pace. This takes the pressure off you and your support team while still enhancing the customer experience.

Another great feature is the ability to target visitors on specific pages — like a product page, where you can help them choose in real time and boost your conversion rates. 

And on top of that, Chatra integrates with most major ecommerce platforms and lets you see what the visitor has added to their cart. This way, you can help them pick the right size, the best shipping option, and answer other checkout-related questions. This makes for happy customers and also opens opportunities for upsells!

Some of Chatra’s notable live chat features include:

• Over 1000+ integrations with web services like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Salesforce so you can manage all your leads and chats from one place
• Visitor details — location, what pages they’re on at the moment when you’re talking to them
• Shopping cart contents — if your ecommerce store is on Shopify, BigCommerce, Ecwid, or WooCommerce, you’ll be able to see what they’ve added to their cart on this visit
• Targeted messages and triggers — proactively contact visitors on certain pages or after they’ve been stuck on a page for some time
• Typing insights — you’ll see what the visitor is typing before they hit send so you have more time to prepare your answer while keeping response times to a minimum 

Price: Free plan available; starts from $21/ month per agent

2. LiveChat

LiveChat is positioned as a multichannel customer support service. It covers Facebook, SMS, email, WhatsApp, and Apple Business Chat on top of its website chat window. It also integrates with many tools and most ecommerce platforms. 

LiveChat offers a ticketing system, notifications, chat routing (assigning chats to support agents), team management tools, and sales goal tracker among many other features. This makes it suitable for bigger teams of reps, looking for a live chat software to service a large number of website visitors and customers.

What makes LiveChat stand out as a live chat solution is the ability to add clickable buttons, quick replies, and cards and carousels in the chat window. This is great for customer satisfaction, as it makes chat conversations even more engaging and helpful to visitors.

However, LiveChat’s automation features leave something to be desired. If you want to use chatbots, you need to add another app. ChatBot is made by the same company and works seamlessly with LiveChat, but it’s a separate thing to buy and set up.

LiveChat features worth mentioning:

• Product cards let you feature and recommend products directly in the chat
• Extensive reporting available
• The chat widget for websites is customizable by page — for example, the pricing page can benefit from more eye-catching colors, while a welcome message on the home page doesn’t need to be that intrusive
• You can add a “Chat now” button to pages instead of having the chat widget pop up. 
• Being able to save answers to FAQ and reuse them is quite a useful feature.

Price: 14-day free trial; plans start from $19/month per agent

3. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is another 360-degree live chat software. In addition to live chat, it boasts a ticketing system, built-in call center, knowledge base builder, and a customer access portal. These additional features provide self-service help options so visitors and customers can find the answers to FAQs and check the status of their support tickets without having to reach out to a team member.

LiveAgent’s website chat software offers customization options, video chat, and multilingual chat boxes. It also lets you set chat assignment rules so customer questions get answered by the most suitable agent. 

Proactive chat invitations are another interesting feature. They’re set up to reach out to visitors on a specific page with a follow-up from one of your chat agents in real time. LiveAgent uses AI to trigger those proactive invites once your agents are free to engage with another customer. 

LiveAgent integrates with multiple communication channels such as Slack, Twitter, Viber, forums, and Facebook to bring all help desk queries under one roof.

Price: 14-day free trial; ticketing + live chat app starts at $29/month

4. Zendesk

Zendesk is a live chat for customer service made by the same company as Zendesk Sell, a Sales CRM platform. With AI and automation focus, a ticketing system and reporting, Zendesk’s chat software is suitable for companies looking to scale up. 

It’s geared towards bigger teams, offering routing, collaboration tools, and knowledge management to allow for the shortest response times possible. 

Zendesk brings conversations from messaging platforms, social media, website, email, and voice over into one agent workspace. And chatbots, known as Answer Bot, are available on all of those channels too. You can also create various workflows for the bot to follow in different situations with customers.

It also has tools to reduce customer service load coming through the business chat software. You can create a help center, a knowledge base, or a community forum to allow customers to help themselves.

Price: free trial available; plans start from $19 per agent per month, billed annually

5. Gorgias

Gorgias is positioned as live chat software for ecommerce. It offers detailed customer reporting and sales tracking. Gorgias combines a ticket help desk software with live chat to provide support and increase sales. Through integrations with Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, you can update customer orders and refunds in real time as you chat with them.

Gorgias pulls conversations from Facebook, Instagram, email, and SMS into one unified live chat app. It also lets you respond to comments on Instagram ads and social media posts to speed up the conversion process. 

Gorgias stands out because of its pricing. It’s not based on agent number — the plans include unlimited chat users. 

While automations like instant answers and self-service scenarios are available, they’re an add-on to the monthly plans, starting at $75 per month when coupled with the Basic plan.

Price: 7-day free trial; plans start from $60/month

Read more: What is Ecommerce Marketing? 10 Strategies to Get Started in 2022

6. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a customer service solution, not just a live chat tool for websites. That’s why it’s geared more towards bigger teams and complex organizations working both offline and online. It includes a few separate products: Support Desk, Messaging, Contact Center, and Customer Success. You can get them separately or all combined in the Omnichannel Suite. 

A few features to mention are:

• a comprehensive big-team ticketing system, 
• a support platform unifying email, phone, chat, social media, website, and WhatsApp
• field workforce management tools,
• call center system,
• detailed reports.

As a live chat app, Freshdesk offers automation through a chatbot, powered by AI. It can understand the intent of a question and deliver ready answers, engaging website visitors for as long as possible before handing over to a live agent. 

There’s a help widget that can be triggered on pages of your choice to offer proactive assistance or deliver resources. Standard customization options and contextual support based on where the visitor is on your website are also available. 

Price: 21-day free trial; free plan available, Messaging plans start at $18/month per agent

7. Tidio

Tidio combines chatbots with live chat for customer service. It’s focused on sales and customer satisfaction, which makes it a suitable live chat software for small businesses. Plugins are available with popular platforms like Shopify, Wix, and WordPress.

Tidio connects email, Messenger, Instagram, and website chat. It also lets you collect emails for further communication. The quick reply feature lets support agents reuse answers to frequently asked questions and save time. There are also automation templates and a drag-and-drop editor for building chatbot workflows. 

Here are a few reasons why Tidio could work for your support team. The tool allows you to:

• send a welcome message and give a discount;
• reach out proactively to hesitant shoppers and prevent cart abandonment;
• catch people about to leave and keep them on page,
• welcome returning visitors,
• suggest products in the chat window.

Price: Free plan available for up to 3 chat operators; Chatbots plans start at $39/month

8. Intercom

Intercom is probably the most popular live chat software, especially among SaaS businesses. In addition to live chat, it offers chatbots, product tours, app integration (like scheduling a Google Meet meeting), and help desk tools. It keeps customer history handy, too, to be referenced when needed for future chats.

Intercom’s live chat makes automating customer engagement in real time easier than ever. You can set up promotional banners, proactively reach out on particular pages, and broadcast outbound messages. Announcing a new feature or drawing attention to a product is made easy with in-app messages.

The self-support functionality makes it possible to send help articles or automatic templated answers in response to certain questions. In addition, the resolution chatbot gives visitors a few options to choose from and guides them through an automated help service. Yet another great customer support feature to help you improve user experience.

Price: 14-day free trial; starts at $67/ month, billed annually

9. Olark

Olark is a live chat software with a friendly appeal. It provides team management tools like shared canned responses and chat distribution to help small teams manage the customer support load. 

For example, the automations by location and browsing behavior are handy for quickly answering inquiries and resolving issues. Custom chatbox forms are another good feature. They ask the visitor predefined questions so you have more information about their needs before you start chatting with them. 

Customization options for the Olark chat widget for websites include design and language. The reporting is also quite advanced, showing insights about activity to help you make staff schedules and sort conversations by topic. There are also transcripts where you can search through chat history for insights.

A notable feature of Olark is the accessibility of their live chat widget. It’s usable with a keyboard only and readable by screen readers. It also supports large text. This can be a competitive advantage if your website is frequented by people with disabilities.

Price: 14-day free trial; plans start at $29/month per agent

10. HubSpot Service Hub

Service Hub is the live chat support software, part of Hubspot. It includes a chat widget, help desk automation, ticketing, knowledge base, feedback surveys, and reporting. 

The live chat features include chat window customization options and the ability to reach certain audience segments. You can also build your chatbots inside Hubspot to answer questions, book meetings, or qualify leads.

Thanks to the CRM integration, services teams have all customer data in front of them when chatting, dealing with support tickets, making calls, and so on. It’s not just a live chat tool, it’s a sales management and customer satisfaction platform. Features like VoIP calling, self-service customer portal, video messaging, and team management add to it too. 

Price: free plan available; Starter plan from $45/month

How About a Free Live Chat App for Your Website?

For many small businesses, adding yet another digital tool to their website can be overwhelming. That’s why Sendinblue offers live chat together with all other digital marketing tools (email, email automation, landing pages, signup forms, CRM, SMS marketing).

Sendiblue’s live chat app takes just minutes to set up on your site and can be customized to match your branding. You can start talking to your site visitors right away and keep track of customer interactions in a single inbox. With the page tracking feature, you’ll know where exactly people are so you can answer their questions and needs as quickly as possible.

The best part? It’s free. Sendinblue’s free plan includes free live chat software for one user. It’s perfect for small businesses or ecommerce stores looking to grow on a budget. 

The post The 10 Best Live Chat Software Compared (2022) appeared first on Sendinblue.

In the past couple of years, more and more brands have started to utilize chatbots in their digital communications with customers. This has allowed companies to scale tedious tasks like customer service triage, answering FAQs, and even sales.

Companies have even started using chatbots in their marketing efforts as well. They can be a very powerful tool for amplifying the effectiveness other aspects of their strategy — notably, email marketing.

In this article, we will explore the relationship between email marketing and chatbots, as well as how you can use them together to grow your business.

More on Chatbots

Before we get into how email and chatbots can work together, let’s take a little deeper look at what chatbots really are.

The main concept

Chatbots have been around for a while, but they only recently started gaining mainstream popularity. This is largely due to vast improvements in technology surrounding chatbots, as well as the platforms that support them, effectively lowering the bar of entry.

They are designed to simulate real conversations with the goal of completely understanding interactions with humans, both semantically (what they mean) and emotionally (what is the sentiment behind a given interaction).

Thanks to improvements, chatbots have evolved to include very simple programs that use keywords to follow a “script,” to much more complex software that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to “understand” complex inputs.

Simple chatbots

Simple chatbots a preprogrammed database or associative array (a set of key-value pairs) comprised of keywords and corresponding responses to move a conversation along.

This type of chatbot doesn’t use any artificial intelligence and is simply following a script of sorts, sending the preprogrammed responses when the associated keyword shows up in conversation. If inputs do not contain the necessary keywords to evoke a response, there is usually a generic response to encourage the contacts back in the right direction.

Complex chatbots

Although artificial intelligence technology hasn’t quite gotten to the level of human intelligence, it has certainly progressed enough to make some pretty sophisticated chatbots — just take a look at all of the virtual assistants out there: Google’s Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, etc.

Complex chatbots use machine learning to better understand different inputs and find the right solution in real time. That means they’re “smarter” and more capable of understanding varied inputs — even accounting for spelling errors and different permutations of the same request — and providing more natural outputs.

If you’re interested in learning more about how machine learning can be applied to create “conversational” chatbots, check out this article from the Stats and Bots blog.

What are the benefits of using a chatbot?

From the user standpoint, chatbots offer 3 main benefits:

• Solve a problem without leaving their messaging app or switching web pages
• Get desired information without having to take the time to research
• Interact with a brand in a dynamic and “humanized way without having to wait

Chatbots can serve to reinforce a company’s brand image by adopting a specific tone and unique personality.

This technology enables brands to easily capture new audiences like millennials, while still maintaining your relationship with email subscribers through email marketing.

How do you create a chatbot?

Creating a chatbot can take you anywhere from a couple of minutes to weeks, months, and even years!

It all depends on how complex the its objective is: creating a simple chatbot that welcomes visitors to your site is much easier than implementing a complex chatbot designed to give personalized product recommendations.

Depending on your needs, as well as the amount of time or budget you’re willing to spend, you can either hire an agency to develop your chatbot or create one on your own.

If you decide to take the second route, there are several platforms that help you create chatbots with relative ease — and they don’t require a ton of technical knowledge either.

We are familiar with three of these platforms:

3 Ways Chatbots and Email Marketing Can Work Together

Now that you have a better understanding of what chatbots are and how they work, it’s time to take a look at how they can help with your email marketing.

These two technologies work very well together because they communicate with contacts at different points in the conversion process. So, why not use them together?

Here are 3 scenarios in which you can use chatbots and email marketing in tandem to increase your conversion rate.

1. Email list subscription bot

This is probably one of the easiest strategies to implement because the goal is simple: get new leads to sign up for a email list.

Once the conversation is triggered, the bot can ask for a few details (gender preference, areas of interest, preferred frequency, etc.) in addition to the subscriber’s email address. Then, all of this information is transferred to the email database where a company can access this information and use it for sending marketing emails.

As you can see in the example above, the conversation is triggered once the customer likes the company’s Facebook page. The bot collects some extra information for segmentation (what types of content does the subscriber want to see), asks for an email address, then ends the conversation.

This is a really easy way to grow your subscribers and extend the reach of your email marketing.

2. Lead nurturing process

Not all sales result from a spur of the moment decision. For larger or more important purchases, customers often take time to reflect and research options before buying. If your offering has a longer purchase cycle, you can use lead nurturing to give leads a “nudge” in the right direction.

Using email marketing and chatbots together in this process allows you to address the conversation on two fronts:

• Email – Send important documents and detailed information that potential customers need to make a decision
• Chatbot – Respond to questions and communicate information quickly when leads are close to conversion

3. Online purchases

Chatbots can even be setup to handle online purchases. If a customer already has an account, then the process can be as simple as selecting products they want buy and confirming delivery and payment details from their account.

Where do emails fit in? Transactional emails that follow the purchase of course.

Emails confirm the purchase details, notify customers of shipping information, and verify delivery with a receipt. These emails can also serve to communicate other marketing initiatives such as seasonal sales, special offers, and loyalty programs.

Conclusion

Chatbots present an excellent opportunity of opening up a new channel with customers to increase conversions and develop better relationships. Using them in conjunction with the rest of your marketing stack will ensure that you keep your customers satisfied and improve the overall performance of your marketing campaigns.

Are you using a chatbot in a different way than those mentioned above? Let us know in the comments below!

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