After extensive testing and re-testing over the past few years, these are the five best live chat apps. I made sure to test everything from basic setup to some of the more advanced options, like integrations and automated chat routing. To test each app, I installed the chat widget on my personal website and tried it out. At least for this list, I prioritized tools that allow for your customers to talk to a real human. It's a neat feature, but it works best for larger businesses that have to handle the same customer queries over and over again. While many of the apps in this category are exploring different AI features, most of those are aimed at automating customer service using your existing chats or knowledge base as training data. Of course, it's also almost impossible to talk about something like live chat without considering AI. I made sure that all my selected live chat apps integrated natively or through Zapier with popular CRM, help desk, marketing, and eCommerce platforms. Other features include ticket management, multi-channel chatting (e.g., SMS, social, video), bots, chat transfer, and automated messages. Even better is a publicly-shared knowledge base, where customers can help themselves from a search of articles. For example, having a knowledge base a few clicks away can help agents help customers solve their problems quickly without having to engage a more experienced teammate. To help make your service staff more efficient, I looked for apps with advanced support features. You'll find a combination of these and other management-related tools in the apps I selected.Īdvanced support options. Some of the features that can help are staffing prediction, real-time activity reporting, chat monitoring, and automated chat routing. I looked for apps that allow you to monitor, measure, and improve your team's chat performance. Yes, live chat can improve your customer service, but it's still just a tool. I made sure, during my testing, that each of these apps was easy enough to deploy and use without feeling like you were learning a new language. That said, some customer service chat software makes the user experience better than others. Live chat is designed to be user-friendly even if tech isn't your thing. Several even offer free plans that are sufficient for a lot of situations.Įase of setup and use. Most of the apps on this list start at around $20/user/month and don't go higher than $100, except in the case of enterprise plans. In addition to making it possible for you to chat with your customers, I was also looking for:Īffordability. In my testing, I didn't find a single reasonable-looking app that didn't at least pull off the basics of allowing you to message your customers directly. The good news is that almost any app that bills itself as a live chat app works well. While there's obviously some overlap between the categories, this list prioritized apps that will give you the tools to help your existing customers. There are other live chat apps designed for sales teams, chatbot builders to automate customer service, and full-service help desk apps that often integrate live chat. While there are lots of apps that allow you to message with your customers, for this article, I'm specifically focusing on customer service-focused live chat. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.
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