If you have a live chat facility, that’s the icing on the cake because customer support is a vital aspect of running a business.
By providing a live chat option on your website, you can assist customers without making them wait for emails, which can contribute to a boost in revenue, since a company that offers live chat assistance is preferred by 38% of customers when making a purchase.
Setting up a live chat facility on your website immediately should be persuaded by this one statistic alone. To reduce expenses and have greater flexibility, you have the option of choosing either a SaaS solution or a self-hosted open source one.
Let us examine some of the top choices available to us.
7 Best Open Source Live Chat Software to Talk to Your Customers
1. Chatwoot
Over 1,000 organizations utilize Chatwoot for their live chat support, enabling them to manage conversations, build relationships, and ensure customer satisfaction.
2. Live Helper Chat
Even beginners will find it easy to set up Live Helper Chat, which offers numerous enterprise-level features that effectively fulfill the requirements of customer support.
You can seamlessly incorporate any external REST API into it without the need for any coding. Additionally, their live chat feature incorporates video, voice, and screen sharing capabilities, and you can synchronize it with AI software like Rasa and DeepPavlov to enhance its performance.
3. Helpy
Helpy, which is a self-hosted live chat software, enables efficient real-time customer support. Even if you are unavailable for an immediate chat, you can continue the conversation through emails whenever you have free time.
By offering the option to collect customers’ emails and other data, you can avoid missing opportunities to engage with potential clients. Additionally, you can assign specific chat queries to members of your support team who have more expertise on the issue, enabling you to provide optimal customer support.
4. Papercups
Papercups simplifies the management of chat, emails, and SMS in one place, allowing you to respond and continue conversations with your customers through various channels like Slack or their mobile app.
The dashboard is both powerful and feature-rich, helping you streamline customer support. Despite its various features, it remains user-friendly and easy to navigate.
Without needing coding skills, you can customize their chat widget extensively, including color and text modifications.
5. Chaskiq
Chaskiq enables various forms of customer support, such as web chat, video calls, and one-off messages.
Below are the key characteristics of this software:
- Schedule repetitive tasks with bot actions to save time
- Embed videos, zoom meetings, and other media
- Easily find messages and customers from the support panel using attributes
- Use segment filters to trigger messages to the right people
- Integrate social media channels into the system to communicate via several sources
- Create your knowledge base with articles
- Insights on every campaign and conversation
Chaskiq employs JWE encryption, enabling the reception of data solely from trusted sources.
6. Tawk
Although not an open-source platform, Tawk is a free-to-use option that offers a range of impressive features, making it hard to ignore in this list.
This live chat software can be set up effortlessly by simply copying and pasting a line of JavaScript on your website, and it starts functioning immediately. Even when on your mobile, you can manage and supervise it conveniently through their app.
7. Tiledesk
Tiledesk offers another great alternative for live chat that includes an integrated chatbot and supports both web and mobile assistance.
The chatbot operates in an intelligent manner by utilizing content from your FAQs to respond to customers, subsequently transferring control to one of your support staff to expedite the process in the event of recurring inquiries. It effectively locates precise answers with the assistance of machine learning techniques.
BONUS: Live Chat Benefits You Have to Know
In today’s world, live chat is an essential tool for any organization. This blog post will explain why it is necessary and highlight the key benefits of live chat software. Without further ado, let’s get started.
1. Improve Customer Service and CX
To gain a clearer understanding of customers’ appreciation for live chat, the eDigital Customer Service Benchmark survey of 2000 consumers demonstrated that it achieved the highest level of customer satisfaction at 73%, surpassing email support at 61% and traditional phone support at a mere 44%.
2. Reduce Support Costs
Phone support has traditionally been the way that companies are available for customers; however, it is expensive due to toll charges and person-per-hour costs. On the other hand, live chat is not much more costly than using a quality email provider and is considerably cheaper than phone support. In fact, Forrester research has demonstrated that live chat customer service is 17-30% more affordable compared to a phone call.
3. Increase Sales
Multiple studies have consistently demonstrated that the utilization of live chat is advantageous for boosting sales, and companies are experiencing the advantages of this technology. Research has indicated that live chat has the potential to generate 3 to 5 times more conversions and provide a return on investment (ROI) of up to 6000%. Additionally, according to the same report, customers who engage in live chat are three times as likely to make purchases compared to those who do not utilize this feature.
4. Discover Customer Pain Points
In certain cases, it can be challenging to identify the pain points of your customers when using conventional support systems such as email or phone calls, as these concerns may only reach or be received by a single team or individual.
Administrators and supervisors can utilize live chat to access, sort, search, and filter all chat histories in order to promptly identify customer pain points.
5. Faster Problem Resolution
Customers or users may struggle to locate or utilize knowledge bases and help articles efficiently if there is a large number of such documents available online. However, these resources are valuable for offering support and resolving customer issues.
By utilizing live chat, agents can promptly provide links to help or training documents through the chat window, thus eliminating the need for guiding users through troubleshooting and resolution procedures in a step-by-step manner. Instead, agents can directly direct the visitor to the appropriate document or content.
6. Expand Market Reach
We have previously mentioned that live chat is the preferred customer support channel due to its speed and convenience. Therefore, it should not be surprising to learn that implementing live chat can quickly increase your interaction with prospective customers.
Live chat is also beneficial for organizations to connect with individuals overseas and in various time zones. Through chat, customers from anywhere in the world can effortlessly contact an organization without incurring costly international call charges or enduring lengthy waits for email responses. Additionally, certain live chat software provides auto-translation features, enabling agents to communicate with customers in any language and further expanding their market reach.
7. Proactive Outreach
The importance of live chat’s instant communication feature cannot be emphasized enough. What truly sets live chat apart as a valuable tool is its capability for proactive outreach, which is one of its main advantages.
Although your website visitors can reach out to you by clicking the chat button, more advanced live chat systems also enable your agents to initiate chats. The finest live chat software permits agents to start conversations by employing advanced monitoring and tracking features. These live chat platforms can notify agents when visitors arrive on websites and provide them with valuable data to initiate meaningful interactions.
8. Reporting and Data Insight
By having email support, you can keep a record of the messages exchanged with your customers or individuals seeking information, which allows for some level of accountability and the opportunity to assess staff performance.
Reviewing staff performance with phone support can be challenging unless you have the ability to record every call and find time to listen to a portion of the discussions.
By having access to custom reports and chat histories of all your agents, quality live chat providers allow you to track various visitor metrics. This includes information about the number of visitors your site(s) receive, the acceptance or ignoring of chat requests, and other important data. Such information can be valuable in devising effective marketing strategies to attract more traffic to your website(s).
Live chat analytics provide valuable insight into your agents, allowing you to couple visitor data with access to chat histories, agent performance reports, wait time reports, and more. This enables you to monitor agent performance and make necessary adjustments to staffing and training.
