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Table of Contents

• What is Live Chat Software?
• The benefits of Live Chat Software
• Typical features of Live Chat Software
• The cost of Live Chat Software
• Considerations when purchasing Live Chat Software
• Relevant Live Chat Software trends

What is Live Chat software?

Live chat software helps organizations connect with their customers in real time. Live chat applications can be used for customer support, lead generation, customer engagement, and more. This type of software includes widgets that can be integrated into existing websites, as well as more robust stand-alone solutions that allow businesses to track customer interactions, response, and conversion rates.

The benefits of Live Chat Software

• Improved sales conversions: Live chat software accelerates the sales process as customer queries related to a product or service are addressed in real-time, translating into faster checkout and increased sales volume.
• Reduced cost of customer support: Traditional methods of customer support through phone and email often prove expensive and inefficient, as agents can handle only one customer query at a time. Live chat software allows agents to address multiple queries at the same time.
• Increase innovation: In this age of fierce competition and evolving customer needs, small businesses need to keep an eye on new innovations, ideas, and areas for improvement. A live chat program provides businesses with a log of customer inquiries, complaints, requests, and suggestions, which can be analyzed to come up with new ideas for their products and services.

Typical features of Live Chat Software

• Customer engagement: Speak with prospective and current customers via your eCommerce platform in real time.
• Customer service: Fulfill requests from prospective and current customers before, during, and after product purchases.
• Online CRM: Manage all of your company’s relationships with prospective and current customers, with the goal to track and improve all relationships.
• MSP: Help remote teams manage IT infrastructure and end-user systems.
• Remote work: Support teams and customers that do not interact from a shared office space.
• Webinar: Host online workshops, lectures, and presentations.

The cost of Live Chat Software

Most products in the market are priced on a per user, per month basis. Pricing can be divided into three tiers based on their starting price.

Price ranges*:

• $5 - $17
• $17 - $26
• $26+

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest priced offering found on vendor websites on May 8, 2020. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products.

The above list includes pricing for base plans of most live chat program software. An enterprise or premium product that is priced higher may include additional features such as work scheduling, post-chat surveys, multi-website deployment, and audit log.

Considerations when purchasing Live Chat Software

• Mobile-responsive interface: To make the best use of a live chat program for sales and customer support, businesses cannot afford to miss out on the customers who use smartphones. Without a mobile-responsive interface, customers will need to use their laptop or desktop to access the live chat support.
• Third-party integrations: Small businesses use a number of customer-facing solutions to support their sales, CRM, marketing and customer success efforts. Any live chat software you purchase should integrate with as many of these tools as possible. For example, an integration between your email marketing integration and live chat software will allow you to embed a live chat button in the body of your customer-facing emails. This allows readers to transition from an email marketing campaign to using live chat software on your website.

Relevant Live Chat Software trends

• Live chat will be used for sales more than customer support: Live chat software serves as a written record of queries from people at all stages of the sales cycle. Businesses can analyze these queries as a tool for lead generation; when used strategically, live chat software can increase sales leads by 40%.
• Chatbots will be included in live chat software: Chatbots are conversational interfaces built with machine learning technology. Expect live chat software vendors to start including chatbots in their products. They’ll allow your company to answer common customer queries without involving a live chat agent. Using chatbots along with live chat software will reduce time and money for your business.