The 10 best live chat software every business should know about!

Marketing today is the art of having a conversation with your customers. It's about understanding their needs and helping them to achieve their goals. It's about inviting them into an ongoing dialogue with your brand and making them feel like they're part of your team.

Why is it important in 2022?

Conversational marketing or live chat has been around for decades — but thanks to advances in technology, it's now easier than ever to engage with customers on a personal level.

With over 2 billion people using messaging apps monthly, businesses have many opportunities to build relationships with their customers through chatbots, SMS, social media, and other channels.

If you are looking for a live chat service provider, you've come to the right place. Here are the top 10 live chat platforms you should know about in 2022!

What is Live Chat?

Live chat is an online communication application or a customer relationship management tool that offers businesses round-clock availability and your website visitors to chat in real-time. Some key features of live chat are Message sneak-peek, Canned responses, Chat tags, and Rich messages. Moreover, you also get File sharing, chat archives, and Inactivity messages.

Characteristics of Live chat.

1. Domain Knowledge & Product Knowledge
2. Live Support and Language Competency
3. Proper and Accurate use of Canned Messages in Live Chat
4. Proactive Invitation & Reduced Response Time during Live Support Interactions
5. The Marketing of Live Engagement
6. Positive User Experience through Live Chat

Ten best Live Chat software you must know about.

BOTPENGUIN 

BotPenguin is an AI chatbot creator platform and a dedicated query management chatbot software. It allows you to use incredible chatbots to communicate with customers and offers live chat capabilities to keep engaging your customers on your business website or others. It also allows involving the Live Chat component in the chat flow for human interaction by default to direct the user after a set number of intercommunications.

Features:

1. Natural Language Processing
2. Zero Development Time
3. Zero Setup Cost
4. Conversational UI
5. Deep Analytics
6. Easy to Integrate
7. Cost-Effective
8. Easily Customized
9. Strong Validation
10. Human Handover
11. Multiple Messaging Channels
12. Branching
13. Capable of Being Trained

Integrations:

1. Jira
2. groove
3. Help Scout
4. HelpDesk
5. Zendesk
6. Freshworks
7. happyfox
8. Timetrade
9. Mindbody
10. ClickMeeting. 

Cost:

BotPenguin has a reasonable pricing range. Customers who want a single chatbot can easily sign up and use the platform for free.

1. Free
2.             Baby – Free
3. King – Starting From $5/month 
4. Emperor – By quote

DRIFT 

It is a sales and marketing live chat platform. It is a cloud-based solution designed to increase client income by adding live chat windows to websites to automate sales processes. It produces increased customer satisfaction, Experience, and loyalty. It allows qualified leads to be captured as the drift chatbot assists firms in developing a streamlined sales funnel. 

Companies or firms may increase by using their manner or method of keeping prospects engaged with the brand at all times. 

Features:

1. Drift widget
2. Teams
3. Chat routing
4. Mobile application
5. Drift automation and qualification bot. 
6. Reporting and tracking user data. 
7. Personalized Playbooks. 

Integrations:

1. Demandbase
2. Zendesk
3. Salesforce
4. Slack
5. Marketo
6. Okta

Cost:

1. The Free Plan: Get one seat and free live chat. 
2. Premium: You will pay six hundred dollars monthly for ten seats; You need to pay $80 for extra seats.
3. Enterprise: Best For Big Organizations.
4. Startup Program: Starts at $500 for ten seats.

ZENDESK 

Zendesk is a service-first customer relationship management company or software that lets your company quickly respond to incoming customer inquiries by improving customer relationships. It maintains to offer a lively and effective conversational experience that would bring the customer back. As a company, Zendesk is a self-service knowledge-based solution.

Features:

1. Real-time updates.
2. Agent collaboration.
3. Help desk automation.
4. Macros.
5. Request forms and ticket fields. 
6. Custom views. 
7. SLA management. 
8. Mobile apps.

Integrations:

1. Slack
2. Asana
3. Typeform
4. Trello
5. Zapier
6. Google sheets. 

Cost:

• Suite Team

           US$ 49

           per agent/month billed annually

• Suite Growth

           US$ 79

           per agent/month billed annually

• Suite Professional

           US$ 99

           per agent/month billed annually

INTERCOM

Intercom is a sales, marketing, and support solution platform that develops business messaging, providing businesses a way to chat with customers and unifying every aspect of the customer experience. Intercom is a simple-to-use application for web and mobile businesses to engage with users. It uses live chat to bring a human touch to the conversation. Intercom allows the cooperation between sales and support teams.

Features:

1. Live chat
2. Customer Data
3. Outbound Messages
4. Chatbots
5. Help Centre
6. Reports
7. Ticket and Case Management · 
8. Communication Channels ·
9. Self-Service Experience · 
10. Self-Service Platform · 
11. Communication

Integrations:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook 
3. Zendesk Support
4. Salesforce
5. Google · 

Cost:

1. Start: $39 per month with one seat; additional seats $9 per seat per month
2. Grow: $99 per month 
3. Accelerate: $499 per month—an annual plan only—with ten seats; additional seats $49 per seat per month
4. Scale: $999 per month—an annual plan only—with ten seats; additional seats $99 per seat per month
5. Early Stage Program: $49 per month for the Accelerate plan and Product Tours add-on

TIDIO

Tidio is a cloud-based, all-in-one customer service live chat platform that improves your customer experience, and levels leads. It is available 24/7 with its easily accessible live chat widget. It allows a straightforward setup and some intelligent automated options. Though its pricing is a bit more expensive than others, it is worth it as it increases sales, generates leads, and much more.

Features:

1. Customer Database
2. Customer Experience Management
3. Customer Support
4. Customer Surveys
5. Customizable Branding
6. Email Management
7. Event-Triggered Actions
8. Feedback Management
9. File Sharing
10. For Sales / Marketing
11. Geotargeting
12. Help Desk Management
13. Interaction Tracking
14. Lead Capture
15. Lead Qualification
16. Live Chat

Integrations:

1. WordPress
2. Mailchimp
3. Wix
4. Shopify
5. HubSpot CRM
6. FreshBooks
7. Zoho CRM
8. Pipedrive
9. Zendesk

Cost:

Price starts from

16

Per year

Pricing options

1. Free plan
2. Subscription
3. Free trial

 TAWK.TO

Tawk.to is a customer relationship management and free live chat software that helps sales automation and business communication with clients and website visitors to provide customer support. 

Features:

1. Live Chat
2. Hired chat agents
3. Virtual Assistants
4. Chat pages
5. Knowledge base. 
6. Ticketing. 

Integrations:

1. Discord
2. Slack
3. Google sheets
4. Mailchimp
5. HubSpot
6. Lasso CRM
7. Facebook

Cost:

1. Hire Live Agents: From $1 per hour
2. Hire Virtual Assistants: From $7 per hour
3. Remove tawk.to Branding: $12 per month
4. Video, Voice, & Screen Sharing: $29 per month 

OLARK 

Olark is software with specialized chat applications that boost conversions by talking to website visitors with questions. Olark allows artificial intelligence systems and automation capabilities that replace humans while communicating to clients or customers. Additionally, it helps in organizing plans to utilize live chat frequently. They provide complex services to gain context and in-depth data to better understand where you're succeeding and lacking. 

Features:

1. Automated email reports.
2. Automation Rules.
3. Disable visitor information.
4. Emojis.
5. File Upload.
6. Get Feedback with Chat Ratings.
7. Groups.

Integrations:

1. ActiveCampaign
2. Slack
3. HubSpot
4. Zapier
5. Google sheets. 

Cost:

• Free plan

            $0 

• Self-service

$29 per agent/month (monthly billing)

$23 per agent/month (yearly billing)

$19 per agent/month (billed every two years)

• Olark pro

Available upon request

PURE CHAT 

Pure chat is a software specifically designed to help and allow small and midsize businesses to add chatbot functionality and provides different website features. Pure chat is probably known to be the quickest live chat software. Its native Android and IOS applications help the organization deliver and assist anywhere. 

Features:

1. Proactive chats and triggers. 
2. Transcriptions. 
3. Multi-chat management. 
4. Visitor information and location details. 
5. Chatbox assignment. 
6. SSL security. 
7. Canned response

Integrations:

1. Zapier
2. HubSpot
3. Infusionsoft
4. MailChimp

Cost:

Pure chat offers two pricing plans:

Free Plan

1. Unlimited Live Chat
2. Unlimited Users

Pro Plan – $99 per month

1. Unlimited Websites
2. SMS Notifications
3. Remove Branding

PODIUM 

Podium is an all-in-one communication and interaction management software that allows customers to be a seamless online to in-person transition. It improves customer interaction by monitoring customer sentiment and messaging. The podium includes customers over 45000 in healthcare, retail, home, auto, professional, and hospitality.

 Features:

1. Integration
2. Webchat widget
3. Collect payment via text message. 
4. Complete guidance
5. Executes tool
6. Navigate your inbox

Integrations:

1. Dentrix
2. Booker
3. OpenDental
4. MindBody
5. Athena Health
6. Eaglesoft

Cost:

1. Essentials: $289 per month 
2. Standard: $449 
3. Professional: $649 per month 

HELP SCOUT

Help scout is an international cloud-based remote company that provides help desk software. It, too, helps small business companies and small teams manage their customer relationships. Help Scout allows users to create multiple mailboxes or manage several products and brands from a single account.

 Features:

1. Access Controls/Permissions.
2. Alerts / Escalation.
3. Alerts/Notifications.
4. Archiving & Retention.
5. Automated Routing.
6. CRM.
7. Call Center Management.

Integrations:

1. Docs
2. Slack
3. Mailchimp
4. Google Apps
5. Shopify
6. CircleLoop
7. Olark
8. Capsule
9. Highrise

Cost:

1. Standard

$ 20

per user per month

     2.Plus

$35

per user per month

      3.Company

$60

per user per month

Conclusion

Today, Brands use chatbots to deliver sales and promotional offers, build brand awareness, and gather user feedback. Conversational marketing will continue growing in the coming years, and competition will be more fierce. Only 10% of companies today have a chatbot-ready website. Still, it's projected that 90% of companies will set up a live chat service in the next five years.