9 Amazing Live Chat Apps For Customer Support

Today, excellent customer support is critical to customer satisfaction for any ecommerce business. While there are several ways to provide your customers with swift and helpful support, few are more beneficial than live chat support. Along with improving the customer experience, live chat software can help reduce support tickets and your customer support team’s workload. It also serves as a revenue-generating channel for ecommerce businesses — one that not many are tapping into (yet).

To help you take advantage of all the benefits of an excellent live chat solution, we’ll explore what to look for in a live chat app before covering the eight best live chat apps available today.

What features should you look for in a live chat app? Several

There are a lot of different apps that enable you to install a chat box or chat widget for your website visitors. There are even a number of free live chat apps available for download. However, not all live chat solutions are created equally. There are even AI agents for eCommerce that can put the entire customer service process on autopilot. Before you go to the trouble and expense of installing a live chat app on your ecommerce website, make sure that it meets the following criteria:

Easy to set up and use for all your team members

One of the biggest benefits of live chat support is that it can make life easier for your support agents. If a live chat solution is overly complex and difficult to use, this defeats its purpose.

Check out an app’s reviews to see what other users say about its ease of use, and be sure to choose an app that makes life easier for your team members — not more complicated. Websites like G2 and Capterra offer many details about thousands of business apps, including genuine customer reviews.

When weighing your options, reviews will also give you insights about how much technical know-how is needed to set it up. Do you know if coding is required? Would you like help from your IT team to roll it out to all your agents, or can setup be handled within your customer service department? Make sure that whatever you choose is reasonable and realistic for your organization.

Integrates smoothly with other tools

The best live chat apps can integrate with many other tools, providing powerful new capabilities. For example, a live chat app that integrates with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other social media messaging platforms allows you to offer live chat support to customers on social media. Meanwhile, a live chat app that can integrate with Google Analytics ensures that your support agents have easy access to the customer data they need to offer exceptional support.

Has a transparent pricing model

Before purchasing live chat software, please ensure you fully understand its pricing model. Sometimes, it may seem that a subscription to a live chat app is highly affordable — until you read the fine print and get hit with hidden fees.

Most of the apps on this list range in pricing from about $10 to $50 per month. However, every platform does things differently — some charge per user per month, some charge a flat rate, and others charge per ticket. Determine what your organization deems “affordable,” and remember this figure as you compare tools.

Offers reliable, accessible customer support

Live chat apps are designed to enhance customer support, but the companies behind those apps must offer excellent customer support. There are plenty of instances where your live chat app might need to be fixed, whether it’s difficulties installing the app, getting it to integrate with another tool or any other issues. In these cases, you want reliable, fast support — so it’s essential to prioritize apps that offer it.

Eight amazing live chat apps for customer support

Now that we’ve covered the top criteria to look for in a live chat app let’s look at some of the best live chat solutions available today. If you want to start offering customer support via real-time chat conversations, you can go right with the live chat tools below.

1) Gorgias

Given that 38% of customers report saying they’re more likely to purchase a product if they offer live chat support, live chat can be an excellent way to drive sales and increase revenue (in addition to improving your customer support). Gorgias is an all-in-one customer support platform offering a fast-loading live chat widget and a wide range of other tools.

With Gorgias, support agents can conduct chat conversations with multiple customers at a time from a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Gorgias also empowers multi-channel live chat support by integrating with SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other messaging platforms.

Check out our live chat solutions here to see why Gorgias is the leading customer support service for revenue-focused ecommerce stores.

Key features

• Centralized customer support dashboard
• Helpful metrics like first response time and resolution time
• Fast-loading live chat widget that won’t slow down your website
• Seamless integrations with a variety of messaging platforms for multi-channel live chat support
• Automated workflows for creating canned responses to common customer questions
• Chat campaigns to help boost conversions
• Works for Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce (with more ecommerce platforms on the way)

Pros

• Provides a broad range of customer support tools and features
• Exceptional customer support that is available 24/7
• Easy to install, set up, and use

Cons

• Can’t get a standalone live chat app
• Some reported issues with a mobile app for iOS and Android users
• No way to pause your subscription when undergoing integrations or updating your website

2) HubSpot Live Chat

Since 2006, HubSpot has provided ecommerce stores with some of the best tools available — and HubSpot Live Chat is yet another excellent offering. With HubSpot Live Chat, you can easily install a chat button on your ecommerce store. When customers contact you, agents can reply via an integrated messaging service like Slack or Facebook Messenger.

HubSpot Live Chat also allows you to create automated templates and AI-powered chatbots for responding to common questions. Easily route customer inquiries to other support channels such as email or phone, create targeted, customizable welcome messages for different pages on your site, and automatically save your chat messages/chat history for future reference.

Key features

• Customizable live chat widgets
• Offers a no-code chatbot builder
• Live chat support agents can access data from HubSpot’s CRM to guide customer conversations and get the full context about the customer while chatting

Pros

• Free to download and use for unlimited chats
• Seamless integration with other HubSpot tools
• No coding required to customize the live chat widget

Cons

• Limited number of features compared to other live chat solutions
• Only integrates with Slack and Facebook Messenger
• Chatbots are not as advanced as some competitors’; they don’t use artificial intelligence or natural language processing

3) LiveChat

LiveChat is a live chat solution for both sales and customer support? It lets customers contact a live representative via chat when they have a question or issue and lets sales agents proactively get website visitors during the buying process. Along with enabling live chat support via a chat box, SMS, email, Facebook Messenger, and more, LiveChat also allows you to create AI chatbots for sales and for responding to common customer inquiries.

Key features

• AI chatbots to greet customers and quickly route chats based on their response
• Automatic visitor segmentation based on the pages that they visit for targeted, personalized messaging
• Message sneak-peek allows agents to see what a customer is typing for faster responses

Pros

• Offers 200+ integrations with other ecommerce tools and platforms
• Provides detailed reporting and analytics
• Features an intuitive and easy-to-navigate UI

Cons

• Pricing plans are somewhat on the costly side
• Reported glitches within the notification system
• Difficult to install and set up

4) ThriveDesk

Online stores often deal with many customer questions about products, shipping, and orders. A good Live Chat for eCommerce helps solve these questions quickly and improves the buying experience. ThriveDesk is a customer support platform that offers a fast live chat widget, shared inbox, and AI chatbot to help eCommerce businesses respond to customers in real time.

With ThriveDesk, support teams can manage conversations from live chat, email, and tickets in one dashboard. Agents can chat with multiple customers at the same time, answer questions faster, and guide shoppers during the buying process. The AI chatbot can also handle common questions automatically, helping teams save time and reduce support workload.

Key features

• Fast and lightweight live chat widget designed for eCommerce websites
• AI chatbot to answer common customer questions automatically
• Shared inbox to manage chat, email, and support tickets together
• Knowledge base suggestions during chat to help customers find answers quickly
• Customizable chat widget to match your store design
• Integrations with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, and more

Pros

• Simple and fast setup for online stores
• Helps reduce support workload with chatbot automation
• Shared inbox keeps all customer conversations organized
• Works smoothly with popular eCommerce platforms

Cons

• Advanced reporting features are still growing
• Mobile apps are limited compared to larger platforms

5) Pure Chat

Pure Chat is a great option if you are looking for a straightforward and affordable live chat solution. With Pure Chat, you can look forward to unlimited chats, a user-friendly dashboard, and a chat widget that is easy to customize. Pure Chat might offer a different range of features in more expensive live chat apps, but it does offer everything you need to start offering live chat support.

Key features

• Excellent chat widget customization options
• Unlimited chat history transcript storage
• Real-time analytics and visitor tracking

Pros

• Takes a matter of minutes to set up and is easy to use
• Affordable, flat-rate pricing
• iOS and Android mobile apps

Cons

• Only capable of supporting up to 10 live chat agents
• Limited features and integrations compared to more comprehensive live chat solutions
• Does not allow you to attach documents or images to a chat conversation

6) LiveHelpNow

LiveHelpNow offers feature-rich live chat tools for both customer support and lead generation. With LiveHelpNow, you get features like SMS and text-to-chat, detailed reporting, customizable proactive chat triggers, conversion tracking, and more.

Key features

• Automatically translates over 100 different languages
• Auto chat tagging to simplify organizing customer interactions
• View chat transcripts in real-time and send agents messages that are visible only to the agent

Pros

• Free training and implementation support
• Provides AI tools such as canned response recommendations to speed up response times and reduce agent error
• Offers a long list of valuable integrations

Cons

• Chatbots only available as a paid add-on
• Somewhat prone to bugs and glitches
• UI is a little messy and confusing

7) Olark

Olark offers everything you could want from a live chat app, including a highly customizable chat widget, automation rules for sales and customer support workflows, a transcript archive, and detailed live chat analytics. In addition to an impressive list of features included with Olark’s base plan, the app also offers additional “PowerUps,” such as automatic language translation, visitor insights, and visitor co-browsing that allows agents to see a customer’s screen.

Key features

• Custom chatbox forms for collecting information from customers before they connect with a live representative
• Real-time analytics for chat volume, customer satisfaction, and support agent activity
• Live chat automation rules for automatically greeting customers, sending messages based on customer behavior, routing customer queries to the correct department, and more

Pros

• Chat transcripts are easy to search and navigate
• Offers 25 different integrations
• Easy to set up and use

Cons

• Additional costs to remove Olark branding from your chat box
• Does not provide AI chatbots
• Automation features are limited

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8) Chatlio

If you are already using Slack to communicate with your team members, Chatlio is a great way to use Slack as a means for communicating with your customers. Once you install Chatlio on your website, visitors can connect with support agents via a live chat window, and support agents can then manage and respond to these messages directly from their Slack dashboard. Chatlio doesn’t offer the extensive list of features and tools provided by many apps on our list. Still, it is affordable and easy to use — especially if you and your team are already comfortable using Slack.

Key features

• Fully customizable chat widget
• Triggers for proactively engaging customers
• A user-friendly live chat support dashboard complete with helpful analytics

Pros

• Affordable flat-rate pricing
• Effortless to install and set up
• Offers lots of customization options

Cons

• No chatbots and limited automation features
• Heavily dependent on its integration with Slack
• Pricey, given its limited features

9) LiveAgent

Established in 2006, LiveAgent was one of the first live chat solutions for ecommerce to hit the market and is still renowned today as an app that is feature-rich and easy to use. With a LiveAgent subscription, you can look forward to proactive chat invitations with many customization options, chat analytics and customer tracking features, unlimited, customizable chat widgets, and an easy-to-navigate chat history database.

Key features

• Fast-loading, customizable, and reliable chat widgets
• Allows you to create canned responses for swift resolutions to common customer inquiries
• Website monitoring for tracking both customer and support agent activity

Pros

• Offers a free plan that includes one chat button and a limited yet helpful list of features
• Great customer support that is available 24/7
• Easy to install and use

Cons

• Limited automation features
• Doesn’t offer as many integrations as comparable apps
• Mobile app UI is a little clunky

Live chat seamlessly with Gorgias.

According to a 2021 survey, 65% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today than three to five years ago. Beyond improving customer satisfaction, live chat widgets can be a powerful sales tool. They enable you to proactively contact customers and guide them through the buying process, increasing revenue.

At Gorgias, our live chat solutions are ideally suited for customer support and lead generation. We help your organization be proactive about support, leading to happier customers and more revenue — get started today.