Best live chat solutions for websites

Disclosure: I’m part of the HappyFox Chat team. We launched recently on Product Hunt and was voted No.1 among the most popular Live Chat software.  This post explains how HappyFox Chat is a new and better solution and how it answers some of the problems in today’s live chat/customer support industry.

There are several live chat providers out there that are “Free” and pretty much does what you want – enable you to talk to customers. After all, that is what live chat has been, all these years.

But now, things are changing. Live chat has evolved from just an engagement/support channel to a significant conversion channel, where visitors are converted to leads/customers faster than any other marketing channel. Also, Live chat in my opinion, is one of the most frustrating channels to get support, even though the most efficient.

For a customer, most of the times, Live chat is a painful experience for obvious reasons. Some of them being..

• Being asked the same question all over again…Who are you? Customer ID, Email address etc
• Having to explain the same problem all over again when talking to another agent.
• Agents not being able to help efficiently, so on and so forth..

And things are not the same for agents as well…They face problems such as..

• Not being able to add more team members to the support channel.
• Not being able to know who you’re talking to.
• Not being able to look up the customer info on other platforms. (or in a difficult way)
• Cluttered user interfaces making it tough to do multiple chats.

So, the crux of the problem is that, both with agents and customers, there are problems and nobody has been addressing these issues in a race for features and market share. Hence, Live chat turned out to be a frustration mostly and widely accepted to be a bottle neck, even though it is accepted to be a faster way to business-customer communication.

So, deciding what live chat software works for you is a subjective thing. However, HappyFox Chat, I believe brings in a lot of clarity and answers to many of the above mentioned problems in a revolutionary way. Let me explain.

1. Speed – Faster response times = Happier customers.

I spoke to a live chat, customer support evangelist while doing my research and she openly admitted that for the hosting company she worked, there was always a delay of 3 – 10 seconds between chats (to and fro) and this caused her team to always have a response time lag no matter how they tried. The problem here is that, most live chat software available in the market today are made using technology stacks that are at least 3-5+ years
old. The result is that, most live chat software available today, is slow and sluggish.

At HappyFox Chat, we pushed the limits of our Engineering and were able to achieve really fast response times, in the league of your most popular IM chat software like GTalk or iMessage and cross the 1/4th of a second mark!
(Less than the blink of an eye).

What does this mean for the customer?

He’s able to get super fast responses from the agent, and experience something very similar to IM chat clients he has used.

2. Agent Experience – Snappier, Faster, Easier!

When we designed HappyFox, the primary goal was to create a software where customer support agents will be able to help their customers in the most easy and efficient way. One where the agent doesn’t have to keep the customer waiting and will be able to find information easily in fewer clicks.
If you look at the UI and UX of most Live chat software out there, you’ll see that they’re all mostly clunky and cluttered.

We made something sleep and easy to eyes that finding information is super easy and child’s play. Be it, finding chat history or switching between chats or finding customer information, it’s all available right where you want it and rest assured, agents don’t have to open 10 different tabs while serving a customer.

On HappyFox Chat, you can chat to any number of customers at the same time and don’t have to switch windows or move between tabs. Here’s how it looks.

 

3. Integrate Live chat w/ apps you already use (Shopify, Slack, MailChimp, Salesforce etc… 100+ apps by 2015)

This is the revolutionary concept I was talking about earlier. At HappyFox Chat, we decided to bring in the goodness of your apps directly in to the chat window. No band-aid solutions or work arounds but solid deep integrations with apps that will give you the data right within chat window without you opening up ten different tabs and searching for customer info.

For example, when you integrate with your Helpdesk software, you’re able to view previous tickets from the customer, check what’s in his shopping cart via Shopify or figure out which email newsletter has he subscribed to, all within the chat window.

The idea is to keep the focus on conversations and keep them in context. This offers a much more superior experience for both agents and users.

• Customers don’t have to repeat their previous issues or ask the same questions.
• Agents don’t have to ask the same rhetorical questions, instead go straight into solving the problem.
• Better response rates and happier customers.

 

4. Fully loaded product, Free for life w/ up to 10 agents

Probably the most amazing feature of HappyFox Chat is that it’s FREE for life and comes with all the features you’d expect in a premium product/paid plan. There is no reason why you should get a stripped down “lite” plan when your use cases haven’t changed.

We were able to engineer the product in such a way that, we’re able to keep the software Free for up to 10 agents with all the features fully loaded.

There are paid plans available for those who need integrations with big data apps (like Salesforce) but other than that, pretty much all the features are available in the free plan.

Apart from these core differentiators, HappyFox Chat comes with a full set of cool features such as…

• Customizable widget.
  (colors, text, picture etc), light weight, in browser widget (no popups) that does not affect your page load time.
• Smart triggers. 
  (Automatically popping up chat widget when your criteria is met. Ex: Visitor spends more than X minutes on pricing page)
• Quick 1 Minute installation.
• Native Apps for Mac OS and Windows. (iOs & Android in development)
• Canned Responses.
• Easy chat transfers between agents.
• Chat history and live dashboard.
• Unlimited chats.
• Concurrent chats.
• Free for up 10 agents w/ full features enabled.

I’d highly recommend HappyFox Chat for your live chat needs, be it sales or customer support. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Here are some websites already using HappyFox Chat, so you can check with them how the experience is.

1. Gathering.
2. Recommendo.
3. Influence & Co.
4. TreadFast.
5. Redstage.

Plus, we’re voted No.1 on Product Hunt among live chat software.

Hope it helped.

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