LiveChat Review: The Best Features

What are some of the features that come to mind when considering the requirements for a live chat solution? Initially, I would desire a customizable interface, ways to receive customer ratings, and the ability to interact with customers on the move. Fortunately, LiveChat meets and surpasses all of these criteria. Let’s examine it in detail.

Customer Priority

There are certain customers on your website who demand more attention than others. Occasionally, you find yourself in a situation where numerous chats are running simultaneously, making it difficult to differentiate between customers seeking advice and those who are confused on your website.

LiveChat offers an exceptional feature that displays a circle alongside customer profiles. It utilizes various colors to signal which customers are inquiring and further distinguishes those who are actively engaged on your website and likely to make a purchase. This enables you to efficiently allocate your time without engaging individuals who don’t require assistance. Moreover, it allows you to swiftly provide support to those who genuinely need it, creating the impression that you are consistently proactive and prepared to aid others.

Customize the Look of Your Chat Box

Initially, chat box customization may not be a major concern, but eventually, it becomes important to align your box with your website’s branding. Several remarkable tools allow a complete transformation of the default LiveChat design. For example, modifications such as incorporating your company’s logo or adjusting the colors to match your customers’ familiar elements can be considered.

By examining the screenshot provided below, you will observe that the design on the right diminishes the chat box size while incorporating an innovative badge that indicates to customers the immediate accessibility of live chat with just a click.

Grades for Your Agents

At a certain stage, it is important to assess the performance of your customer support representatives. One effective method to assess your employees is to request customers to rate each chat session. Consequently, each chat module includes a section where customers can provide quick feedback by selecting either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Further details on agent statistics will be covered later in this article, but employing this approach enables you to monitor your agents and identify strategies for enhancing your customer support.

Mobile Customer Support

LiveChat meets my needs for mobile chatting perfectly with its applications available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android; ensuring it remains one of my essential features for live chat plugins and apps.

By utilizing this feature, an agent can initiate a conversation while being present at the workplace and continue providing assistance even during their commute home, ensuring uninterrupted communication. As a growing number of customer support representatives work remotely and companies offer around-the-clock support, possessing this tool is highly advantageous. Moreover, the mobile chat capability is especially beneficial for smaller businesses where customer support is often managed by busy founders with numerous other responsibilities.

Stats for Managing Your Agents

LiveChat offers detailed statistics and reports for managers to analyze and grasp the customer support team’s performance. You obtain charts that assess your customer service effectiveness, as well as data on the frequency of negative ratings given to your agents.

There are several benefits to this feature, the most noteworthy being the ability to access information on average response time and overall ticket satisfaction. These insights can serve multiple purposes. Firstly, it allows you to evaluate agent performance and make informed decisions on potential recruitment or termination. Moreover, tracking these details enables you to identify areas for improvement, such as enhancing response time and other aspects, as your brand expands.

LiveChat Review: Pricing Details

On the LiveChat website, there is a section available for registering a free account. This complimentary trial period spans over a duration of 14 days, offering you the chance to assess the features before potentially transitioning to a paid subscription if it aligns with your company’s requirements.

The pricing plans appear to be quite fair afterwards. The great thing about these pricing plans is that instead of charging per agent, you are charged based on the number of agent seats in use. Therefore, if desired, you could create five agent accounts but only utilize two of them, and you would only need to pay for those two agents.

This is how the pricing plans appear.

• Starter – $20 per month per logged in agent. This plan is great for small businesses and those working from a home office.
• Team – $41 per month per logged in agent. You’d jump up to this plan if you have a fulltime support team.
• Business – $59 per month per logged in agent. If you’re running a complete customer service department, this is the plan for you.
• Enterprise – This plan is best for Fortune 500 companies and you need to request a call in order to get a quote.

It should be noted that the prices mentioned above are applicable if you opt for an annual subscription. In case you prefer monthly payments, the monthly rates slightly increase. In essence, you can enjoy a 15% discount when you choose to pay in advance for a year.

Apart from that, LiveChat does not entail any additional charges throughout your membership duration. It demonstrates a high level of transparency by not attempting to lure you into purchasing extra upgrades or add-ons.

LiveChat Review: Customer Support

Given that LiveChat specializes in selling customer support tools, it is logical to expect exceptional support services from the company. Notably, the LiveChat blog provides a wide range of information and articles focused on enhancing customer service and employing lead generation techniques to attract a larger customer base.

You can utilize an Experts Marketplace to locate and engage reliable individuals and companies capable of assisting you with your conversions, marketing, customer support, and various other needs.

The LiveChat website features a live chat box that allows you to communicate with someone at any given time. This chat box remains available 24/7, confirming that the live chat company utilizes its own product.

In addition, a Help and Support page is available which offers FAQs, knowledgebase articles, and other documentation for you to search through and conduct your own investigation. Although there is no telephone support, the LiveChat website provides access to webinars, documentation, a marketplace, API docs, and various other resources.

LiveChat has multiple social media pages available for you to stay updated on the latest happenings related to the company.

More Live Chat Apps for Ecommerce in 2023

Implementing live chat can significantly impact your ecommerce store in a positive way.

Improving the customer experience, driving sales, and enhancing customer retention can be achieved by actively engaging and offering real-time support to your customers.

According to the statistics, customers who engage in live chat tend to experience higher conversion rates, average order values, and lifetime values.

Finding a suitable live chat application for your ecommerce store can prove to be challenging, given the abundance of options available. Just on the Shopify app store alone, there are over 500 listings to sift through.

We will assist you in analyzing the top 15 ecommerce live chat software options by outlining their major advantages and disadvantages.

By the conclusion of this article, you will have the ability to choose the ideal live chat solution for your online business.

Let’s dive in!

DelightChat

DelightChat is a customer support tool designed for SME brands in ecommerce that empowers them to provide exceptional customer service. Its primary focus is on facilitating conversations and allows you to effortlessly handle customer queries and manage support for your store, all within a unified interface.

Advantages:

• Omnichannel inbox that helps you manage WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Emails & Live Chat.
• DelightChat enables you to respond to customer queries & collaborate with your team, all from a single screen.
• DelightChat offers great value for money being significantly cheaper than the other options on this list. 
• DelightChat doesn’t penalize you when you add more users to scale up your customer support operations. 
• Most importantly, you can collaborate with your team right within the app itself. There is no need to toggle between tabs, which leads to a loss in productivity & loss of work hours. 

Drawbacks:

• For now, DelightChat only integrates with Shopify that allows it to access your Shopify admin dashboard data. However, it will soon be available for other ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce & Magento. 

Tidio

Tidio, the highest-rated live chat app on the Shopify store, is an excellent ecommerce software that enhances your conversations with customers, enabling you to promptly and effectively address their inquiries. Connect with your customers and resolve their concerns seamlessly using Tidio.

Advantages:

• Tidio enables you & your team to monitor conversations from live chat, messenger, and emails from one screen.
• Tidio’s live chat allows you to connect with visitors in real-time through customizable widgets.
• You can also automate the most frequently asked questions by your customers helping your agents save time.
• Tidio has integrations with most top business software that you’ll be using in your daily workflow. 

Drawbacks:

• Tidio is not a tool keeping only ecommerce store owners in mind. This means your specific set of requirements can’t be met by using this tool.
• You can’t view messages from multiple properties on one Tidio tab, this could be extremely inconvenient if you’re managing multiple ecommerce stores. 
• Tidio’s ‘Communicator plan’ starts from $18/month but with an additional fee required for every additional user, this could work out to be quite expensive. And many reviews suggest an ‘unreasonable and unscalable’ pricing model.

Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service software specifically created for ecommerce stores, offering seamless integration with Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Particularly with Shopify, they have an excellent integration feature that enables support agents to efficiently provide top-notch customer support.

Advantages:

• Gorgias integrates with Shopify like no other. This enables them to pull customer data right into the dashboard. Additionally, it also helps in modifying an order, initiating refunds, and a range of things that you otherwise need to visit the Shopify admin dashboard to execute the same. 
• You can use custom tags and use them to tag conversations for future reference in Gorgias. 
• You can see full live chat and message history with a specific customer across different channels in one view
• You can create highly customized Macros to automate replies to commonly asked questions. 
• Finally, they have intent-detection, which enables you to detect customer intents like shipping, refund, exchange, and many others. You can then set up automatic replies or route the tickets with tags.

Drawbacks:

• Gorgias is not very easy to use. There’s a steep learning curve to draw value out of the product properly.
• It’s super expensive. The plan with all the features costs $750/month with a cap of 6000 tickets/month.
• Collaboration is not easy on Gorgias. It’s difficult to hand over a conversation to a different support rep or ask someone for help when you need it. You might end up using another internal chat tool to collaborate within your team. 
• A lot of customers say that Gorgias is more of a ticketing system than a conversation tool. Additionally, many reviews suggest that it can be hard to get issues resolved by their support team.

Reamaze

Reamaze, an excellent choice for ecommerce brands, is considered the top rival to platforms such as DelightChat, Gorgias, and Richpanel. It facilitates the smooth resolution of customer inquiries for your team, with its live chat function being a key highlight.

Advantages:

• Reamaze is known for its live chat feature owing to its customizable chat experience and instant ‘check order status’ bot. It also boasts other functionalities like FAQ-search, status page (you’ll know if your order’s delayed), pre-built bots, and more. 
• Their chatbot feature, Cues, can help you trigger messages based on URL/UTM, time on site, Shopify activities, etc. This equips you to personalize your customer’s experience at a deeper level. 
• You can see the users that are currently interacting with your site through their live dashboard. Armed with this, you can try and send a personalized message to generate a sale or simply help them better. 
• It’s also one of those tools that integrate with almost all ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress, Magento, and the likes. It’s also good with GDPR compliance that gives you peace of mind while selling in the European market. 

Disadvantages:

• The collaboration functionality within Reamaze isn’t exactly user-friendly. To manage customer support seamlessly, you might need to collaborate on a completely different tool like Slack or WhatsApp by sharing screenshots from Reamaze.
• The onboarding process and user interface leave a lot to be desired. 
• Reamaze charges on a “per user, per month” model. This can turn out to be expensive when your support tickets grow, and you’d need to add more reps to the team.
• It’s more geared towards resolving tickets than having a conversation with a customer and building a relationship. 

Richpanel

Richpanel provides ecommerce businesses with a seamless way to handle customer service. By using Richpanel, you can effortlessly monitor, handle, and resolve inquiries quickly. You have the ability to oversee all of your support channels, including live chat, email, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. This streamlines the process and allows support representatives to effectively manage their time and increase productivity.

Advantages:

• Richpanel saves you countless hours by bringing the most used support channels onto one dashboard. This includes live chat, email, Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp. 
• You can eliminate up to 30% of repetitive support requests with its self-service feature. It offers a personalized experience where customers can view/track orders, peruse FAQs, and start a new conversation too.
• The live chat messenger can help you enable your customers to see orders, track packages & browse FAQs. Plus you can customize the branding to match your website.
• In Richpanel, you can create self-service workflows to resolve the commonly occurring scenarios for your support.

Drawbacks:

• According to a lot of customers, Richpanel can be quite difficult to navigate. To put it simply, it’s not exactly intuitive. 
• Their pricing starts at $249/mo for just 1000 customer conversations and can work out to be quite expensive.
• Richpanel isn’t built for seamless collaboration with your team. You might still have to use an additional tool to collaborate with your teammates for day-to-day activities. 
• Richpanel caps the number of orders you can process on the platform. In their lowest plan, you can process a maximum of 1000 orders per month.