Live Chat Support Software Review

Live chat support software, like LiveHelpNow, Velaro and WebsiteAlive, will bridge the communication gap between you and your customers. Before, you may have offered your customers the option to call your technical support, billing and sales departments or send an email describing their problem. Whether they had to wait to connect to a phone representative or had to wait 24-72 hours for a returned email, your customers had to wait for help, which can be frustrating, particularly when dealing with a technical issue. Plus, through these methods, it is difficult to track and monitor certain key elements crucial in creating a successful marketing campaign, such as customer information and their interaction with your site.

With the best live chat support software, from the time that a visitor lands on your site, your chat operators can monitor their progress and see them flit from page to page. This silent monitoring will enable agents to capture customer information before sending a proactive pop-up chat to see if they need help checking out or finding a specific product. Geographic location, browser and keyword referral are must-have pieces of information that you can use to help set marketing goals, create pay-per-click campaigns and increase traffic on your site.
Live chat support software is the answer to keeping your customers coming back to your site and purchasing your products again and again. You could sell the best software on the planet, but if your customers encounter a problem and are unable to connect to customer service, your product won't sell. Live chat support captures critical data that will set your company on the right track. It will even play a hand in the site's overall design and page flow.

To obtain the best results, we recommend that you use the best software. LiveHelpNow, Velaro and WebsiteAlive are our top three live chat applications, and they each offer powerful reporting and monitoring tools, as well as the live chat features you need to successfully engage with your customers. To learn more about live chat support software, or to help decide which live help application is right for you, please read our comprehensive reviews of each application and read additional articles on live chat support software in our Learning Center.

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Live Chat Support Software: What to Look For

Host Environment
The inside of your home says everything about who you are. The color of your walls, the pillows on your couch, the food inside your fridge; your home is a blank canvas where you can express yourself. Those who enter your home will immediately be able to tell something about you. When a customer comes to your website, they too have an initial reaction. You have designed your website to represent your company and your brand. That design should carry through the entire site, including your live chat window. Look for a live chat support software that allows you to customize everything about your chat window, from the pre-chat survey questions to the color scheme, buttons, canned messages, logo and more.

Some of the live help options that we have reviewed are web-based applications, while others are downloadable software. Most live chat services provide both options. The main difference between the two, besides where they are hosted, is price. The live chat companies sell operator licenses, which determine how many operators can be signed into the application and helping customers at one time. The price for an on-demand, web-based application is usually a monthly fee for the license, while the live chat support software is a one-time fee and covers a lifetime of service. If you are planning to grow as a company, you need to consider live chat options that will grow with you. When deciding whether to purchase a web-based or software application, consider this information.

Since the advent of the internet, the world has gotten smaller. People from around the globe can communicate with one another as if they are standing right next to each other. As an eCommerce business, you may produce products that appeal to customers on an international level. If so, you need to choose a live chat support software like LiveHelpNow, which has built-in, real-time language translation.

Operator Capabilities
You need to choose a live chat support application that offers the features you need to successfully communicate with your customers. It's that simple. If you are a small business, you don't need a laundry list of features to connect with your customers. We do suggest that you choose an application with features that both the operator and customer benefit from, such as sound and visual alerts for incoming messages, a built-in spell checker and a typing indicator.

Tracking & Monitoring
With the right tools, you can collect rich information about online visitors, including the website or browser that referred them to your site and their click-through path. You can also see if the visitor has been on your website before, and if so, you can look up their past purchase and chat history.

Ease of Use
Not everyone is an HTML/JavaScript/CSS master, able to whip up a customized code in minutes and place it on your site. As the owner of a small or medium-sized business, perhaps you have never had experience using coding software. If this description fits your situation, then have no fear because the majority of the live chat support applications that we reviewed are simple to use and require no coding experience. For the on-demand, web-based live help applications, the company will provide you with the code and API.

Help & Support
With live chat support services, you have all the tools you need to turn a first-time web visitor into a lifetime customer. You want to provide them the best service available. This is possible, of course, if your software functions properly 100 percent of the time. In a perfect digital world, this would be the case. But, as you well know, nothing is perfect. You need a live chat service that is also dedicated to providing you with the best help and support. Choose an application that has all the essentials, including access to a technical support telephone number and an email address. And, of course, a live chat support software should have live chat support.

Using live chat support software can be as easy as sending a text message from your phone or participating in an instant message conversation. And, not only can you answer the questions your customers have, but you can also retrieve statistical information that will benefit your company in marketing strategies. You can keep track of all the information and use it to increase the productivity of your online presence. Overall, this product will benefit your company and increase its web presence in the technically demanding market.