According to ServiceBell, 41% of customers prefer live chat support, as it helps customers clear their doubts about the product by interacting directly with a live agent or chatbot that helps find the correct information. Implementing live chat support on your website is one of the best decisions one can make to improve customer experience.
This post covers the top 10 live chat tools used for Customer support. Using these tools, you can drastically enhance your user experience, impacting your business growth and sales. At ClearFeed, we build the best in class software to provide live-chat Support over Slack, a communication tool preferred by many businesses for supporting and engaging their customers. We also give a brief synopsis about our product at the end.
Criteria
To begin with, we identified the top live-chat support software using Google, G2 Crowd and other tools measuring popularity. Then we sorted these tools into different budget categories based on the pricing for two agents. These categories are:
- High Budget Tools - Total annual price greater than $1000
- Medium Budget Tools - Total annual price less than $1000 and above $100
- Low budget tools - Tools that have a free tier option.
Most of the tools listed here price based on the number of agents (or have an all-inclusive model). Let's go through all these tools one by one.
High Budget Tools
UseResponse is a complete suite of 4 tools (Feedback, Help Desk, Knowledge base, and Live chat software). In this post, we will only review it's Live Chat software.
UseResponse has multi-channel support. It supports platforms like WhatsApp, Viber, Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, and Telegram. It also has a File attachments option so the user can share the screenshot of the error he is facing. Inside this tool, You can manually assign agents to customers to handle and solve their queries. It also has the option to accept or reject specific responses.
You can also provide support while your agents are sleeping. UseResponse makes it possible to set up automation by creating a chatbot that helps the customer by fetching the answer from the knowledge base - while also capturing lead information at the same time. It also has a feature of satisfaction rating that some live chat tools lack. Satisfaction rating helps to monitor and keep track of an agent's performance. Finally, it is very secure and protects live chat from spam messages.
Pros:
- Set up business hours. When out of the office, the chatbot will handle the work of capturing leads and answering the questions asked by the users.
- You can create your Integration using REST API provided by UseResponse.
- Integrate UseResponse for any devices.
- Personalized branding
- You can revisit the chats with the help of Chat History.
- Display answers to Frequently-Asked-Questions using canned responses.
Cons:
- You need to buy additional tools of UseResponse (Feedback Software, Help-desk Software, and Knowledge-Base Software) to use features like CSAT, SLA rules, Integration with the Knowledge-Base, and Integration with Slack.
- Pricing is very high.
Pricing:
- Only Live Chat Tool - $62/agent/ - billed monthly Or $745/agent/ billed annually
- Complete Suite( Feedback, Knowledge base, Help desk & Live chat) - $83/agent/month or $995/agent/year
Note: Free options are not available, but you will get 14 Days free trial to try all pro features.
Medium Budget Tools
With the HelpCrunch SDK, you can easily integrate live chat support inside your product website or app. It has multi-channel support, using which you can solve customer queries directly from the Help Crunch dashboard without switching apps.
If you have a massive user base and fewer agents to solve user queries, you can implement a self-service option with a built-in knowledge base for frequently asked questions.
It's your brand, your way of presentation. You can customize the Help Crunch as per your liking. You can implement a Help Crunch chatbot on your website with custom workflows to answer your customer questions when your agents are out of the office. You can capture the user's attention by enabling popups, and it also has some built-in marketing features like email marketing to capture the leads.
Pros:
- CSAT Survey available
- A shared inbox feature is present so team members can collaborate and help the user.
- Slack Integration is available.
- Knowledge base integration available
- Multi-channel support
Cons:
- SLA Breached report not available
- For the basic paid plan, the user will have to use Help Crunch branding
Pricing:
- Basic - $12/month / 1 team member / Help Crunch Branding
- Pro - $20/month / 1 team member / no emails
- Unlimited - $495/month / unlimited team members / 50K emails
- Note: You will get a 14-day free trial to test all the pro features and verify whether this tool suits your business needs.
Intercom is a worldwide famous customer engagement tool. Using its SDK, you can implement Intercom directly inside your digital product, like an app or website.
You can provide customer support based on the user's segment. For example - free users can be a lower priority, while premium users will get first preference from agents. Users can be tagged with appropriate labels to achieve this kind of behavior.
Pros:
- Businesses can easily add an intercom chatbot for self-service and a canned response.
- A customer satisfaction survey option is available.
- Custom events and triggers to popup chat widget.
- Knowledge base integration is available
- Team collaboration
- Ticketing and routing
- SLAs reports and rules
- Slack, Hubspot, Pipedrive, and 250+ more in the app store.
Cons:
- Pricing is relatively high - particularly for small businesses - compared to other CS tools which provide similar features for a lower price.
Pricing:
- Small Businesses: $37/agent/month/ - billed annually
- Most Businesses: You need to contact intercom support for the demo.
- Note: You will get a 14-day free trial to test the "Small Business" plan
Zendesk is one of the most popular Customer Support tools. Small businesses, Startups, and Enterprises use Zendesk to support their customers. Many of the world's leading brands like Siemens, Wine.com, Staples and Four Wind Casinos use Zendesk.
To integrate on your website, you can use the Zendesk web widget and implement it on your website. If you are a global brand, you probably have a diverse customer base. You can provide multi-lingual chat support by using this tool.
Pros:
- Option to integrate with Slack and 1000+ pre-built integration
- Ticketing and Routing
- Canned responses
- Track progress over Email, SMS, and live chat
- Automation workflows
- Team collaboration
Cons:
- Pricing is very high compared to its available features.
- Features like Integration with the knowledge base, SLA Rules, and Report, Self-Service are not available with Suite Team paid plan, so you need to pay a little extra to get all these features.
Pricing:
- Suite Team - $49/month - billed annually
- Suite Growth - $79/month - billed annually
- Suite professional - $99/month - billed annually
- Note: You need to contact the Zendesk support team to get a Free Trial for the specific paid plan.
The Front app is a renowned customer engagement tool that popularized the concept of a Shared Inbox. Using this tool, you can monitor your Teams performance, set up multi-channel support, and integrate with your favorite CRM tool. You can start chatting live with your customer from your website using Front’s web widget. This tool is developed for teams to focus on what matters.
Pros:
- Shared Inbox for team collaboration
- Canned response
- Custom tags for chats
- Grammarly correction for spelling-error-free chat
- CSAT survey and report
- SLA report
- Integration with Slack
- Ticketing and Routing
- Shift management
Cons:
- CSAT and SLA reports are not available for “Starter” paid plans. You need to upgrade to a “Growth” paid plan. You need to pay an extra $20 to avail yourself of these and many other features.
Pricing:
- Starter - $19/user/month - billed annually
- Growth - $49/user/month - billed annually
- Scale - $99/user/month - billed annually
LiveChat is another popular customer engagement tool, with a 93% CSAT Score. Businesses using LiveChat have seen 50% growth in lead capturing. Education Institutions and many companies -large orsmall - use LiveChat to help their customers.
You can start helping your customer from your website by enabling the Live Chat web widget. It also has a feature of multi-channel support, so no matter where your customer is chatting from, you can solve their queries from the Live Chat dashboard.
Pros:
- Slack Integration and 200+ Integrations
- Ticketing and Routing
- Agent Assigning
- Custom branding
- Chat history & Supervision
- Artificial Intelligence Automation
- CSAT Survey
- Team collaboration
Cons:
- Knowledge base integration is unavailable for Live chat software, and you need to purchase their Knowledge base product with it.
- Even Paid plans like Starter comes with limited features.
Pricing:
- Starter - $20/month – billed annually
- Team - $41/month - billed annually
- Business - $59/month - billed annually
- Note: Free 14-day trial is available to try all the pro features. An enterprise option is also available.
Low Budget Tools
Tawk.to is a top-rated live chat tool used by all kinds of businesses, even by bloggers, to grow newsletter subscribers.
You can implement live chat on your website in under one minute. All you have to do is copy and paste the JavaScript code provided by Tawk.to inside your website's HTML file, so the chat widget starts working.
To start chatting, log in to its dashboard, and if you have team members, invite them to your workspace and start interacting with your website visitors. You can monitor your team member's progress and review chat history to analyze the team's performance over time.
You can set up localized language for live support, supporting 45+ local languages. Using its mobile app, you can respond to user queries and solve customer doubts from anywhere.
Pros:
- Integration with the Knowledge base
- Solve customer queries using Tawk.to android app
- Team Collaboration
- Desktop notification
- Unlimited agents
- Detailed reporting
- In-chat payments ( beta )
- Canned responses
- Ticketing and Routing
Cons:
- No Slack Integration
- CSAT survey option unavailable
Pricing:
- Free - All features included - Tawk.to branding
- $19/month - All features included - No branding
Chatwoot is an emerging Open-Source customer engagement platform. You can easily add a Chatwoot widget to your website. It is a unique customer engagement tool as it has the option to self-host Chatwoot. You can deploy Chatwoot on your server and use it.
Link to Self-hosted installation guide.
You can also integrate with chatbots to reduce the workload on your agents. Chatwoot has another exciting feature: a shared inbox where team members can collaborate for a conversation and solve the issue. That happens mainly in the digital marketplace, where the marketing and engineering teams collaborate and solve the problem.
You can also build a custom pre-chat form, so the user can fill the form before initiating the chat so the agent and customer can be on the same page. You can customize the chat widget according to your brand guidelines, and for distraction-free messages, users open the chat in the popup window. This tool supports a typing indicator that signals the other end agent/user is typing.
Pros:
- Integrate with Slack + other tools
- Canned responses
- Shared Inbox for Teams
- Automation
- CSAT survey and its report
Cons:
- The free plan has limited features, like using only the web widget to provide customer support. To have multi-channel support, you need to upgrade your account.
- Only the Enterprise plan can have custom branding.
- Pricing is very high compared to its competitors.
Pricing:
- Hacker - $0/month/ 2 agents
- Startups - $19/month /agent - billed annually
- Business - $39/month/agent - billed annually
- Enterprise - $99/month/agent - billed annually.
- Note: You will get a 15-day free trial to try all the pro features. And also, all the plans come with a Refund Policy. If you are not satisfied with the plan you can ask them for a refund.
Freshdesk is a part of Freshworks. Freshworks is a Technology company that develops software to solve customer problems on the internet. Many popular brands like Dunzo, MakeMyTrip, and Travix uses these tools to serve their customers.
Pros:
- Multi-channel support
- Slack Integration
- Automated Bots for Self-Service
- Knowledge base integration
- Canned Response
- Ticketing and Routing
- Live translation of chats
- Team member support
- CSAT Surveys and reports available
- SLA Management
Cons:
- The free plan does not have CSAT, Multi-channel, or SLA management support.
Pricing:
- Free - $0/month/100 agents / billed monthly and annually
- Growth - $15/month/agent - billed annually
- Pro - $39/month/agent - billed annually
- Enterprise - $69 month/agent - billed annually
- Note: You will get a 21-day free trial to try all the pro features.
ProProfs chat is another popular live chat tool. You can easily integrate its widget on your website and start chatting with the customer instantly. This tool has many built-in features that help businesses solve customer queries, and let's look at them individually.
ProProfs allows you to enable pre-chat forms to capture leads, and also has a unique feature for agent monitoring so you can efficiently train new agents and track their performance.
Pros:
- Canned responses
- Chatbots for 24*7 Self-service
- SLA settings
- Automatic chat routing
- Custom domain
- Integration with the knowledge base
- CSAT survey and report available
Cons:
- Slack Integration unavailable
Pricing:
- $29/month - billed monthly - All features included
- $19/month - billed annually - All features included
- Note: You can try all the pro features in 15 days free trial it provides.
What about Slack and Teams ?
An emerging trend in the Support landscape is the use of Slack and Microsoft Teams for engaging and supporting customers. These tools are quite different from Live Chat or Ticketing solutions - and are significantly better for building a close rapport between vendor and customer teams and collaborate closely on projects. At the same time - scaling Support on Slack and Teams can be challenging. At ClearFeed - we have built a software solution that helps solve these scaling challenges.
Using ClearFeed, you can:
- Convert requests from multiple customer Slack channels into a single queue of requests.
- Define SLAs and get AI-generated reminders for potential SLA breaches.
- Track each customer request, assign it to team members, make sure it's closed out
- Craft and send announcements to multiple customers in one shot
- Connect and sync chat conversations with tickets in Zendesk/Salesforce/ServiceNow so customers can get support while on Slack/Teams.
- Connect and sync chat conversations with Jira/Github etc. - so updates from engineering teams can be relayed back to end users.
- Get Service metrics to understand request volume, responsiveness, SLA breaches and more.
Check out our page on Scaling Customer Slack Channels for more details and do write to us at hello@clearfeed.ai if you are looking for a partner to help you scale Support on Slack and Teams.
Conclusion
We live in a world that has been dramatically altered by the advent of social media. Users everywhere expect more authenticity and transparency. At the same time - progress in AI technologies has made it much easier to understand natural language using machines. Both of these trends point to the future of Support being Chat oriented. The tools covered in this post - and ClearFeed - can help businesses of all sizes succeed in providing such support.
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