LiveChat review

Not sure which chat software is right for you? This LiveChat review should help clear things up. LiveChat offers the best live chat software to enable you to instantly connect customers on your website with support staff through an online chat box. Throughout this LiveChat review, we'll outline the pros and cons of choosing this piece of software out of an increasingly competitive chat software field. 

While a lot of helpdesk platforms include live chat solutions, LiveChat stands out by going all-in on this feature. It boasts tons of customization options, plus the ability to integrate messages from across your online channels in a single dashboard. However, it can be very expensive if you have multiple support agents.

Not ignoring the latest technology hype cycle either, LiveChat uses AI to empower your customer service communication. Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, the excitement around AI's potential has scaled new heights. Already, there are a wide range of solutions vying to be crowned the best AI tool, from AI website builders to AI productivity apps.  LiveChat's AI writing assistant is similarly impressive.

So, can LiveChat help your business connect with customers? In our LiveChat review, we’ll cover everything you need to know to decide.

LiveChat Review: Plans and pricing

For almost all pieces of business software, cost is a key consideration. That's why this LiveChat review takes an early look at plans and pricing. LiveChat offers three basic plans, each of which is available through a month-to-month or annual subscription. 

The Starter plan costs $20 per agent per month (paid annually) and is impressively full-featured. The biggest limitation is that you can only keep 60 days' worth of chat history. You also miss out on some customization and reporting features. This is a shame as customization is often a key reason why some business tools stand out from their competitors. This is certainly the case when looking at the best CRM software, where the advanced customization options of tools like Salesforce help is out-perform its rivals.  

The Team plan costs $41 per agent per month and unlocks unlimited chat archiving, chat tagging, and file sharing through your chat box. You can also create reports to monitor your support activity and identify pain points for customers.

The reports are especially useful as they give managers added visibility into the performance of their support channels. With the reports and analytics features on offer, you can gain a general overview or in-depth data about your chat and agent activity.

The Business plan costs $59 per agent per month and offers SMS messaging from your chat box along with more advanced reporting. You can also add single sign-on to the Business plan for an additional $20 per agent. For larger businesses, LiveChat also offers an Enterprise plan with custom pricing.

You can test out the Team plan for 14 days for free before committing to LiveChat.

Features

LiveChat boasts a huge array of features to help you connect with customers seamlessly and monitor your support experience over time.

To start, the chat box itself is very versatile. You can share files back and forth with customers, send link buttons or a calendar to schedule a meeting, or set up canned responses to quickly answer common questions. LiveChat also enables you to easily transfer chats between support agents, which is helpful if your business has multiple departments with different specialties. In this sense, LiveChat can serve as an effective collaboration app between support agents.  

Even better, LiveChat seamlessly integrates messages from across all the platforms your business is using. You can use LiveChat on multiple websites and mobile apps, even with a Starter subscription. You can also import Facebook Messenger, email, SMS, and Apple Business Chat messages into your LiveChat system to make managing support requests easier.

Another thing we liked about LiveChat is that it helps you ensure that your customer support is high-quality and consistent over time. The software comes with several premade surveys that you can send to customers after a chat, and Team and Business users can create custom surveys as well. There are numerous reports available to show how long it takes for agents to respond to new chat requests and whether chat support is leading to more conversions. 

Business users also get access to a handy scheduling prediction feature, which uses past chat data to estimate how many agents you will need on hand for an upcoming surge in web traffic.

Integrations

Another of LiveChat's major strengths is the way it integrates with more than 200 different apps. For instance, if you're the owner of an ecommerce platform, LiveChat lets you display your products directly in the chat, organize tailored conversations with customers, and streamline the checkout process. Integrations include the ecommerce heavy hitters Shopify and BigCommerce.

There's even Zoom for LiveChat, because sometimes it's easier to discuss customer issues on video. Given the rise of hybrid work, more customers are likely to have become familiar with using video conferencing on a regular basis so may be more inclined to take option of using it within the LiveChat solution.

For marketing too, LiveChat offers some useful integrations. For example, it's easy to integrate with Mailchimp making it easy to send personalized marketing to customers following a chat. Other email marketing integrations include Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign.

Whether a CMS, CRM, messaging tools or marketing platforms are key to your daily operations, there is likely to be a native integration with LiveChat. This is hugely helpful for many businesses as they are likely to already have a suite of business tools that they use on a daily basis. The tight integrations offered here mean they won't have to change their existing tools to provide a seamless experience for customers.

Interface and in use

The LiveChat web app was, for the most part, seamless. The most important aspect, the messaging interface, uses a similar layout to Facebook Messenger. You can easily see all of your current chats and queued chats in a column on the left-hand side of the window, and then focus on a single chat in a center column. On the right, you’ll get a detailed overview of the customer you’re messaging that includes what platform they’re messaging from, what pages of your site they’ve visited, and whether they’re a returning customer.

LiveChat also enables you to track hundreds of visitors to your website in real time. You can initiate a chat with any individual visitor and personalize your message based on the pages they’re currently exploring. 

We found that LiveChat paid attention to a few details that make the support system easier to use. Canned responses can be accessed instantly using a predefined tag, for example. You can also add tags to a chat for archiving purposes at any time, rather than having to remember the details of a chat and tag it at the time it’s archived.

Support

As you might expect from a company focused on customer support, LiveChat’s help is excellent. The company uses its own product to provide live chat support 24/7. We were also impressed with the amount of information offered in the platform’s online help center. The tutorials are extremely detailed and include screenshots for every step when explaining how to do something with LiveChat.

Security

LiveChat takes the security of your account very seriously, and all chats are protected by 256-bit encryption. Team and Business users can enable two-factor authentication, although we’d like to see this feature made standard for all users. (If you're unsure exactly what two-factor authentication (2FA) is, be sure to check out our post, "What is 2FA and MFA?" and everything should become clear.) 

As a plus-point for LiveChat's security, administrators can also limit the number of IP addresses that can log into LiveChat at once to prevent unauthorized use of your support line.

To protect your customers, credit card numbers are automatically masked in chats and aren’t archived along with the rest of your chat history.

The competition

While many helpdesk tools offer live chat, one of the closest competitors to LiveChat is SnapEngage. SnapEngage is dedicated to live chat and offers the same multi-channel support as LiveChat. It also offers HIPAA-compliance as an add-on feature (this is only available with a LiveChat Enterprise plan). However, we think LiveChat offers better value for most users since SnapEngage charges extra for many features, including SMS messaging, and doesn’t offer 24/7 support.

Of course, with the emergence of increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled chatbots, this is an increasingly competitive field. Other contenders for the title of best live chat software include HubSpot Live Chat and Tidio. However, in those cases, the software is either overly limited in its free version or simply overly expensive.

Final verdict

LiveChat is an extremely powerful and flexible tool for messaging with your customers across all of your online channels. The platform integrates chats from multiple services, makes it easy to work within teams of support agents or across departments, and takes a proactive approach to support and security. The only thing we don’t love about LiveChat is the price tag, but given the quality of this software, we think it’s still solid value for your money.

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