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, we looked for apps with advanced support features. You'll find a combination of these and other management-related tools in the apps we selected. Some of the features that can help are staffing prediction, real-time activity reporting, chat monitoring, and automated chat routing. To find success, you'll need 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. We made sure, through our 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 vendors make the user experience more enjoyable than others. Live chat is designed to be user-friendly even if tech isn't your thing. Most of the apps on this list start at around $15/user/month and don't go higher than $100 except in the case of enterprise plans. What makes a great live chat customer support app?įor consistency, we evaluated each platform using the same five criteria:
HubSpot for free live chat integrated with a free CRM.Zendesk Support for a full-featured service suite.LiveHelpNow for tracking customer satisfaction.Smartsupp for understanding how visitors are engaging with your website.tawk.to for a free, full-featured live chat app.LiveChat for overall ease of use and functionality.The 9 best live chat apps for customer support in 2021 From there, we selected the nine best live chat apps-from free to full-featured, with some special ones in between. We researched and evaluated over 30 live chat apps for customer support, and we thoroughly tested the most promising. To help you navigate, we've done some of the heavy lifting. It's also a relatively affordable app to add to your existing technology stack.īut because there are so many choices for live chat apps, it's hard to know where to start. Live chat is the preferred customer channel for handling service issues, and it produces one of the highest satisfaction rates of any channel. A customer-centric strategy touches all parts of your business, but you can improve your customer service almost instantly-and at very little cost-with live chat.