LiveChat

LiveChat is primarily a customer support software based online but this software can be used by sales teams to grow the average value of order and number of transactions through your website. It's very easy to begin using LiveChat so you can start offering customer support quickly. All you have to do is embed a snippet of code on to your website. You can do this manually which is going to be easy for most to figure out, or there is an option to have this done for you too. LiveChat works in real time so you have instantaneous access to customers engaging your website at any given moment. You can respond to their inquiries through the LiveChat pop-up which appears on your site, or you can be more proactive and initiate contact. In this way LiveChat acts as a sales tool in addition to a customer support tool. You can also setup various greetings on your website with the ability to ask for a name and email address prior to chatting, which is a powerful feature that allows you to follow up with them easily. LiveChat has great support themselves offering 24/7 customer support all year. By all accounts the software gets updated and upgraded with new features over time though I'm a new user and cannot speak to this quite yet. I like how you can give customers a point of support contact. It's a very customizable software and relatively user friendly too. The analytic reporting is solid with several variable matrix's available for viewing. You can view archives of communication with unlimited history in all but their most basic paid plan. There are many useful integrations available when using LiveChat such as Woocommerce, Wordpress, Zapier, TeamViewer, Twitter, SugarCRM, Shopify, PrestaShop, SalesForce, Segment, MailChimp, Magento, KissMetrics, Joomla, Highrise, iContact, Google, Freshbooks, Facebook and many more. This functionality allow LiveChat to be so much more than a customer support software. It allows you to use it as a core hub for your business and portal to many other useful third party software services which is awesome.

The chat box designs are a bit limited. You can change themed colors but they are relatively similar in overall design. It's simple and works fine but would be nice to allow for more customization options in this area to suit your branding. Pricing is a bit on the expensive side compared to other software in their market. But with the integration options you can make this much more of a sales tool so this is more than likely the reasoning for the costs jumps for the top paid subscriptions plans available. The live chat functionality will time out after five minutes which is unfortunate because there are several situations which would require quite a lot longer. For example, should you have to contact another department for information such as the billing department and then relay this information back to the customer.

There are a lot of features available in LiveChat beyond customer support including integrations which make it much more of a sales tool which differentiates this customer support software from a lot of others. The pricing is reasonable on the lower end but can get quite costly in their top paid plans. Unless you have plan right from the start to use this software at the core of your business as a portal for third party softwares which integrate into LiveChat that you will use the basic paid plans will likely suit your customer support needs.