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Many businesses find it challenging to respond promptly to customer inquiries and concerns. When response times are slow, it leads to poor customer experience, resulting in more chances of churn. Since customers like instant responses, your business just can’t afford to be slow.
You need to improve your customer service efforts. You need a customer service solution that helps you connect with customers in real-time and enhance their experience with your business. You should consider using a live chat for website.
Live chat tools help you connect and engage with website visitors via direct messages or video chat. Customers too prefer live chat over email or phone support as it helps them connect immediately and get quick responses. What’s more, 82% of customers feel satisfied with their live chat experience.
When you have live chat on your website, customers are less likely to face delays or issues with navigation. You can use it to deliver personalized support as and when customers need it. On top of that, live chat is a great tool to proactively address customer concerns and improve satisfaction.
In this blog, we will understand live chat for websites in detail, and analyze its key features, benefits, and use cases. We will also compare top live chat software for websites.
Before moving further, let’s understand the definition of a live chat for websites…
Live chat is a software application to connect, engage, or interact with website visitors in real-time. It integrates into websites and enables text-based interactions between website visitors and support agents.
Users like live chat a lot as it does not require them to install anything on their devices. For example, REVE Chat’s live chat software is AI-powered and feature-rich, and it lets website visitors chat with agents seamlessly.
You can add live chat on your website and save users the inconvenience of waiting for an email reply or picking up a phone. With live chat software, you can be available for customers all the time, deliver canned responses, and instantly solve their problems.
Live chat is an excellent tool to engage customers through various stages of the journey. It makes it easy for agents to serve customers by being there as and when needed. So, you can select one with advanced features and deliver value to visitors.
Let’s look at the key features of website live chat –
This feature helps you automatically transfer queries to the most suitable agent based on pre-defined rules. It also helps direct queries based on customer data and context so that the right department can handle customer issues. With intelligent routing, you can deliver faster resolution and personalized assistance to customers.
This feature helps you tailor the live chat interface and communication to align with your brand identity. You can easily modify the look & feel of your live chat widget and have it matched with your website branding. The customization feature is key to setting automated greetings and messages that reflect the style and tone of your brand.
The queuing feature can empower you to put incoming chat requests on hold when agents are not available. You can then accept the requests or specify the maximum number of chat requests in a queue. You can smartly organize and manage incoming chats when all your agents are busy and also inform customers about their expected wait time or position in line.
This feature helps you deliver specific messages or start specific actions based on customer behavior or set conditions. You can use it to proactively engage visitors and elevate their experience with your brand. Chat triggers help you connect with visitors by sending personalized messages at the right time.
You can create and manage departments, route chats faster across teams, and ensure quick responses by using this important feature. This feature ensures that customer queries are handled by departments with the relevant expertise, resulting in improved efficiency and customer satisfaction.
This feature is key to getting visitor analytics and real-time insights about customers. It makes it easy to understand the website journey of your visitors and have better conversations. Visitor analytic feature is important as it gives insights into the behavior and preferences of your customers. Visitor analytics can help you meet customer needs better.
This feature is essential to get instant feedback about your team’s performance right after every chat session. You can gather feedback on the quality of live chat interactions that your team has with customers. This feature is also helpful for encouraging customers to rate their experience with agents. This is how you can measure and improve agent performance.
Having a live chat on the website can positively impact many areas be it sales, support, or customer service. It can help serve customers better by being available 24×7 and enhancing their experience with the brand. When your website has live chat integrated, you’re assured of better customer engagement.
There are many website live chat benefits for your business.
Support agents feel empowered with live chat and thus offer quick responses and proactive assistance to visitors and customers. Customers can easily connect with a business and all this can improve their experience in a big way. This is why companies using live chat can achieve conversion rates as high as 40%.
Live chat software comes with a complete toolkit that agents can leverage to offer contextual support. Tools like co-browsing software and video chat can help agents gain context and therefore deliver personalized solutions.
You can set up automated personalized messages with the help of live chat and start conversing with visitors proactively. In fact, agents can guide visitors in the right direction through proactive conversations. That’s why 83% of customers feel satisfied when using live chat.
The smart use of live chat by agents can help reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment in various ways. You can answer queries quickly, start a proactive chat session with visitors based on the search history, and target them according to their interests and stage in the sales funnel.
Businesses now combine live chat with an AI-powered chatbot to automate routine customer queries and ensure round-the-clock availability to customers at different stages of the journey. Engagement can be made round-the-clock so that customers can get help as and when needed.
Live chat has emerged as a powerful tool for businesses to serve their website visitors well and improve their satisfaction. You can use live chat for many aspects of the business, be it support, sales, or marketing.
Let’s look at how to use live chat for website –
Approximately 66% of customers expect quick replies to their queries. Most customers want to reach agents quickly and get instant responses. Maybe that’s why they prefer live chat over email or phone.
Plus, live chat ensures real-time support which other channels can’t. And when customers get quick replies, they feel delighted and decide to stick with a brand.
When you use live chat, you make sure customers get attended to at every touch point and are delivered with better experiences.
The Commercial Bank of Kuwait (CBK) is a good example of how to use live chat for real-time support. Their agents use the advanced features of REVE’s live chat software like canned responses & tags and easily handle multiple conversations simultaneously.
The support teams organize chats better by routing them to the right agent and this often improves the first contact resolution (FCR) rate. The live chat helps it provide round-the-clock support, achieve quick response times with interactions, and enhance user experience.
Le REVE is an eCommerce platform that uses REVE Chat’s product to drive engagement for its users. It assists website visitors with product searches and also helps them track orders and locate stores conveniently.
Its chatbot, which is integrated with the live chat software, is available all the time and ensures support even outside business hours. The company actively engages customers through personalized experiences.
The live chat features help it provide customers quick responses and interactive shopping experiences. This is how the company keeps customers engaged throughout their shopping journey.
Kuwait Telecommunications Company (STC) is a subsidiary of the Saudi Telecom Company or STC Group. It operates the largest 5G network in Kuwait and it knows the importance of delivering a more seamless experience to customers.
STC has implemented REVE Chat’s AI-powered chatbot and live chat solutions to significantly enhance its customer service operations. The live chat helps it respond to customer inquiries quickly while the bot helps it provide context-aware and highly personalized responses.
Its live chat software and chatbot use AI and natural language processing (NLP) and also incorporate large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
Customers feel bad when they face hassles with the checkout process. They don’t mind leaving the purchase mid-way if things don’t move smoothly in the buying process.
This is why cart abandonment happens and poses a big challenge for brands all across the world. No business like the cart being abandoned but most of them don’t know how to stop that from happening.
An online live chat for the website can help with that. It can minimize the chances of customers leaving the cart before completing the purchase. Live chat can empower brands to answer customer queries in quick time and solve those issues that often occur in the checkout process.
Live chat can help brands target customers based on their interests, search preferences and stages in the sales funnel which can bring down the cart abandonment rate. It’s easy to connect a tracking tool to live chat and get key stats about the customer journey.
Some 3 in 10 customers on your website will expect live chat.
Many companies now combine live chat with an AI chatbot to ensure hybrid support to customers. This proves a great way to improve operational efficiency and reduce customer service costs.
Live chat for support becomes very handy for situations where a chatbot alone can’t handle complex queries. In such scenarios, a hybrid approach can help a lot as bots can take care of routine queries while a person can tackle hard issues.
When there is a bot and human-powered support together, brands find it easy to delight customers and win their trust.
You can monitor agents’ performance with the help of live chat analytics. There will be tons of useful visitor data to easily evaluate the effectiveness of your chat and agents that engage with customers.
More so, live chat analytics can be used to make the support team more efficient and ensure value to customers. There will be key data like chat history, agent performance report, and wait-time report to get a deep insight into the way your team handles customers.
When there is a continuous measurement and analysis of the key chat KPIs, it becomes easy to boost the team productivity and also the chat performance experience of visitors.
You can measure the “Response Time” and understand the total time spent from the start and finish of a chat, giving you a good idea of how agents engage with visitors.
There will be the metrics of “Final Contact Resolution” to better understand how well your team handles the chats and resolves customer issues in the first contact itself.
Businesses can also know the total number of resolved conversations out of the total chats assigned to an agent.
Live chat boosts website engagement and reduces wait times, resulting in a lower bounce rate.
Using a feature-rich live chat tool lets you connect with visitors in real time and respond to their queries immediately, resulting in better engagement and a lower bounce rate.
You can place the live chat smartly over various pages on a website and help visitors easily navigate through the pages. This is how their experience with your brand grows.
Your business can set up automated personalized messages with the goal of engaging with visitors proactively as this often boosts the engagement rate.
Multiple chats can be handled together, therefore, reducing the wait time for visitors and enhancing the experience with your brand. Live chat tools can help you gain key insights about visitors’ journeys and serve them better.
There are many quality live chat software available around. You can choose from them for your website and drive the engagement and conversion rate for the business. However, you need to know the top features of each live chat software and how they can add value to your business in many ways.
Let’s look at the top 5 live chat software for websites –
|
Parameters |
Details |
|
Best For |
Businesses of all sizes and from across industries looking for a feature-rich customer engagement solution with live chat, video chat, and omnichannel messaging. |
|
Key Features |
Voice & video chat, AI chatbots, co-browsing, omnichannel messaging, and ticketing system. |
|
USP |
Real-time collaboration with customers and easy integration of live and automated conversations |
|
Integrations |
Quick integrations with websites, social media platforms, and mobile apps with mobile SDK support. |
|
Pricing |
Standard starts at $13.5/agent (annually billed) |
REVE Chat ranks among the best live chat software for websites as it blends advanced features with cutting-edge technologies. The software delivers tons of user-friendly features that businesses can use to engage better with customers. It enables real-time communication.
The software is great for providing real-time support to customers whatever channel they use to reach out to businesses. More so, it’s suitable for businesses no matter what volume of support they need to provide.
A business can leverage its top features like intelligent chat routing, proactive triggers, and in-depth analytics. This will help them deliver personalized support at each stage of the journey.
Using the live chat solution, it’s easy to seamlessly engage customers over their preferred channels such as website, and social media, to deliver an omnichannel messaging experience.
Key features of REVE’s live chat include voice & video chat, co-browsing, chatbots, Omni channel messaging, and advanced customization.
Using live chat software, a business can streamline its customer support across channels and deliver an omnichannel experience. A feature-rich chat platform can be used for enhanced support whether you need it for eCommerce, banking, or automotive segments.
Olark is a dedicated chat tool that comes with a variety of features for support. This chat software is ideal when you plan to use live chat heavily. You can leverage its advanced chatbot features together with automation capabilities and chatbots, to better engage with customers. Live chat translation and co-browsing are also available for enhanced chat experience.
You can also expect productivity features with Olark live chat like canned responses, chat routing, and automatic new chat assigns. There will be pre-chat surveys that you can use to better understand your team’s performance.
Intercom is among the top live chat solutions as it is trusted for advanced customer communication and support features. As a versatile live chat software, it helps businesses engage their customers through real-time chat and automated messaging.
It’s suitable for businesses of all sizes as it blends live chatbot functionality with advanced features like targeted messaging, automation, etc. The software comes with plenty of support-focused features like team inboxes and ticketing features. Its features have a higher emphasis on using chat for marketing and sales.
Userlike is an excellent live chat & customer messaging solution. It’s a unified messaging solution that helps messages from different channels converge in a central inbox. This kind of solution is great for enhanced support as agents can easily access chats and provide customized support. Some of the powerful chat features of Userlike include canned messages, file sharing, video calls, voice calls, and live translations.
TeamSupport is a top option when you need multi-channel chat options for improved engagement with customers. When you use this live chat solution, it is always easy to chat with users from different channels be it Facebook Messenger, Twitter or SMS. From routing chats, and canned responses, to supporting proactive messaging, it enables all.
Live chat is an important tool for any business looking to improve its customer support efforts and ensure better experiences for customers. It adds a new meaning to engagement and communication. Using live chat for the website, you can proactively address customer concerns and improve satisfaction.
In the blog, we understood the definition of live chat for a website and explored its key features. We found how an advanced live chat has features like intelligent routing, widget customization, chat queuing, automated triggers, department management, visitor analytics, etc.
Moving ahead, we also discussed the benefits of using live chat for website, and those include –
In addition, we also looked at how to use live chat for websites and touched upon various use cases of live chat. We saw how a business can use live chat for many purposes and add value to customers who reach out to them. The blog analyzed various ways in which we can use live chat, including – ‘
In the end, we explored the top 5 live chat software for websites. In this section, we did a detailed analysis of the best live chat platforms or solutions available on the market. We explored REVE Chat, Olark, Intercom, Userlike, and TeamSupport.
At REVE, we realize how live chat is a wonderful tool when it comes to engaging visitors on the website and turning them into prospects. You can also add a new meaning to customer engagement with it. Now start a free trial of our live chat and achieve a long list of happy customers.
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Praveen Singh is a content marketer, blogger, and professional with 15 years of passion for ideas, stats, and insights into customers. An MBA Graduate in marketing and a researcher by disposition, he has a knack for everything related to customer engagement and customer happiness.
As a writer and analyst, he pours the heart out on a blog that is informative, detailed, and often digs deep into the heart of customer psychology. He’s written extensively on a range of topics including, marketing, AI chatbots, omnichannel messaging platforms, and many more.
Mr. Singh also has a passion for subjects that excite new-age customers, be it social media engagement, artificial intelligence, machine learning. He takes great pride in his learning-filled journey of adding value to the industry through consistent research, analysis, and sharing of customer-driven ideas.
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