What live chat services can I use with my website?
8th August 2024
posted 8th August 2024
Live chat has become an essential tool for businesses looking to enhance their customer service and engagement with customers. In this article, we're going to look at a few services that you can easily integrate into your website.
What is a live chat?
A live chat is a service that allows a customer to talk to a support team or sales representative in real-time via a text chat window. This not only improves the customer experience by offering quick solutions without having to wait in long phone queues, but also helps businesses increase conversions, reduce bounce rates, and build stronger relationships with their audience.
What live chat should I use?
There are many live chat service providers on the market, however, here are a few that we've used over the years that have worked well for our customers. Some of these services also offer a free version of their software making it accessible to everyone. There is no right or wrong service to choose, pick the one that fulfils the needs of your business and budget.
Tawk
First launched in 2013, Tawk claims to be one of the most widely used live chat services on the market with over 5 million users. They offer easy integration and are a 'free forever' service. However, if you'd like to remove the Tawk branding or add AI integration, there's a monthly fee. Tawk also offers a mobile app that allows you to receive notifications and reply on the go. It's a great solution for smaller companies or start-ups as it's very simple to use and is also free!
Olark
Olark is another great live chat service that we've used ourselves for many years. Olark is a premium service that does have a monthly fee but includes advanced features such as customisable chat boxes, reporting and allows you to have multiple agents.
Zendesk
Zendesk provides business software for customer engagement and offers a suite of tools that help you manage your customer service needs. Zendesk is a premium service that has a monthly fee but does offer integrations with other channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook. They also allow you to set up 'bots' who can automatically reply to your customer's queries 24/7.
Amazon Connect
Amazon provides a very sophisticated contact centre solution that integrates phones, live chat and other channels. If you have a team of people managing your communications, then it might be the solution for you. While Olark and other services provide a friendly interface to their platforms, Amazon Connect can appear quite complex at first, due to its comprehensive feature set. If that's what you're looking for this can be great. For us, we decided our in-house development capacity and the extensive feature set of Amazon Connect made sense, so we recently migrated from Olark to Amazon. Unlike other services, you don't pay an ongoing fixed fee for each user; you pay according to how much you use the service e.g. how many messages, how many calls etc.
How do I add it to my website?
Once you've signed up to your chosen live chat service, they'll provide you with a section of code that you can either copy and paste into your website settings yourself, or send over to your favourite tech geeks, or web developers as we like to be called.