Last updated on September 24th, 2018
The popularity of live chat software has grown at an exponential rate in recent years, an estimated 20% of all businesses operating online have implemented a live chat app. There is an estimated 3 million ecommerce stores operating globally that generate 2.3 trillion U.S dollars in revenue, this represent an unprecedented 600,000 stores using live chat apps.
Adding a live chat app to your opens up a whole new line of communication between your potential as well as existing customers and can redefine many areas of your online company.
Today we will teach you everything you need to know about live chat solutions including, who are the main live chat companies, are there any free live chat apps? we will be asking questions like, what should I look for in a live chat app? And we will delve deep behind the scenes and find out how live chat works, what technology is used by live chat software companies and a brief history of live chat.
LiveChatSuite is the ultimate all in one real time messaging platform. Provide instant real time support to your customers. You`ll benefit from then most complete customizable chat widget and buttons, a beautifully designed agent interface helps your staff spend more time helping more customers with much more effeciency.
There is a free account which allows your to have up to 20 chats per month with out being charged. Get started today!
LiveChat Suite Starts at $19 per agent ($16 yearly, billed annually)
Drift touts itself as the first conversational marketing platform. This product really is packed full of great features. It is primarily designed to assist sales teams using very clever automation techniques. Any conceivable chatbot can be rapidly deployed.
This is one of the more expensive options starting at $360 per month, enterprise level accounts can cost upwards of $5000 each month!
Intercom is often seen as a drift alternative or visa-vera. They pitch their product as an all-in-one solution for customer communication. It is possible to simply use Intercom for live chat alone, however there are many excellent features in their arsenal such as lead capturing, boarding and customer retention tools.
Intercom starts at $56 per month.
LiveChat was founded in 2002 and is one of the largest chat providers today. LiveChat comes with a customizable chat widget and clean designed agent interface. This is a great solution for large ecommerce support departments. This service boasts real-time reporting, team reporting and time management tools. One great feature of this service is a predictive staffing levels tool, which is great for larges companies trying to reduce outgoing and optimize staffing productivity.
Pricing start at $16 per agent per month and can reach $156 per agent per month for large enterprises.
The term Live chat relates to the real time communication via the internet. Primarly, live chat software is used for website owners, brands and companies to communicate with their existing or potential website users.
Live chat has transformed the way business communication, customer support and online sales operates. It is credited with massively reducing admin time, boost productivity, increasing customer satisfaction and retention so you can see why live chat is a big deal in 2018.
Why are website owners using live chat? Let`s look at the main reasons for using live chat software on your website.
Simple put this is the fastest way for customers to connect with your business and that is a valuable thing!
The more efficient your support department is the healthier your business will be. Traditional phone or email support can be time consuming, expensive and generally clunky. The average live chat length is 4.2 mins and the average amount of chat an agent can hold is 6.
Studies have shown that customers are 60% more likely to place order at a website following a live chat. Additionally, these tools can be used to assist potential buyers at the most critical stage of the buying process. Proactive tools can help automatically start conversations with users who meet certain pre sales criteria.
Shopping cart abandonment is a big problem within the ecommerce sector and live chat may just be able to help.
Lingering and indecisive customers can be engagement. Also proactive chat bots can be setup to offer a discount or coupon code to a buyer who has spent over 5 mins on the cart page and has X amount in their basket.
Allowing your customers to talk instantly to your company creates a more personal, human user experience. Improve customer satisfaction.
Vital customer feedback can also be collected helping you quickly find pain points and bottlenecks. Also, positive reviews can be collected at the end of a positive chat experience, these can then be used for social proof, increasing customer confidence and in turn conversion rates.
Traditional phone based customer support can be expensive, enabling chat will dramatically reduce the cost of your customer support department.
Not only that, you will increase the speed of support resolution, one staff member can handle multiple request at the same time. Statistics show that the average agent can successfully process six simultaneous conversations. An average saving of 55% is expected to by made following a software migration.
Live chat technology has become more complex in recent years, like most innovation in software, complexity was born out of neccesity. With the emergence of big data and the rapid growth in active internet users. Live chat has had to overcome big problems. And we mean big. Picture this, a live chat app has 10000 companies using their software, imagine its black Friday and 100 of these companies where major online retailers. Enter the problem, concurrency. There may be hundreds of thousands of chat requests, messages and live conversations happening at any one time.
Checking for new chat messages.
The old way, Polling.
In the old days of live chat, software companies would use a technique called polling to repeatedly send a request to a server every 1 second or so. One of the many problems with this process is that regardless of the presence of a new message, constant request will be sent to the live chat server. This simply will not scale to the demands of the modern internet and the only way to operate this would be to increase server hardware.
The better way, Long Polling.
Things started to get a little better with long polling, major instant and realtime messaging players like gmail, MSN messenger and AOL were all using long polling to give the illusion of realtime chat applications.
Long polling works by sending one request to which the server does not respond straight away like tradition polling. Instead, the server keeps the connection open until there is some data to send back. Once a new message is found a response is sent back and the process is repeated.
The New Way, Websockets.
According to Caniuse, 97% of web browsers support HTML5 websockets.
Websockets represent a major change in real time communication at scale, basically they open one simple persistent connection between the client browser and the live chat server. Data, i.e. messages are passed through the websocket without the need to periodically send requests every second to check for new messages. This greatly reduces server load and allows thousands of clients to be connected at any one time. As always, there is however a few caveats, certain web technologies like PHP are unable to maintain a persistent connection at scale, anything over 2000 concurrent websockets on a php server will cause it to crash.
Often to overcome what is know as the C10k problem (Handling 10,000 concurrent connections) with the technology, new coding languages are needed, such as node.js, C++ and Erlang. The new problem is now called the C1000K, yes that`s 1 million connected and chatting users to handle at any one time and Erlang may just be the best answer to this problem. This is known as a functional coding language and it was designed for this very purpose concurrency. The telecoms company Ericsson created this way back in 1986 and it`s made a comeback. Messaging companies are employing this tech to handle 1 million connections!
The typical software stack used for the front end and administration side would be a LAMP stack, Linux,Apache, Mysql,Php. Nginx is often used to serve static files or speed up the delivery of PHP. For the actual chat application, Javascript is almost always used along with C++, Node.js and Erlang.
Another very important element of an instant messaging software stack is data storage. Imagine, storing chat messages from ten thousand businesses, every day from 1 year to lifetime storage. That`s an incredible amount of messages, it is almost inconceiable to visualize three billion data rows! Let alone manage them effectively all whilst allowing quick retrieval, and full text searchable at any time by any number of agents, it really is a feat of modern coding technology.
So the question is, how is data stored and with what tech? There is no short answer to this, however there are many different storage engines and coding processes uses by software vendors to store conversations and chat data. Cassandra, Hbase, MongoDB, Mysql and Couch DB are reported to be the most used database storage engines used by a modern live chat app.
When a user requests a chat, often a cookie or a web storage object is stored in the customers web browser, this will contain a unique id for that user and another id for the current chat. These are placed in a row within the software`s database. This ID is then references for subsequent messages and data operations for this user and their chat. Generally speaking each message has its own row and stored along with a timestamp, response time data and other metrics.
Software vendors often employ caching tech that stores frequently used data in system memory, resulting in faster more lightweight queries and operations. Caching tools like Memcached and Redis are frequently used by chat vendors.
The most used coding language in 2018 is PHP and JS. However, when dealing with a high load situation PHP is not a good option as it was not designed for this purpose. Coding systems that follow non blocking, or concurrent princepels, such as Node.js, C++, and the infamous Erlang and the three best options and something to look for when selecting a live chat solution.
When installing live chat software as a service, (otherwise known as SAAS) the software consists primarily of four main elements of each which can be broken down into sub elements. This is the typical structure.
This is the web interface that allows company administrators to manage, customize and setup all the aspects of their brands live chat widget.
This is either a desktop or web based interface for chat agents to login, handle chats and proactively approach customers on your website. This is where your chat staff will be spending most of their time. A good agent interface should be clean, clutter free and of clear design. It should provide a way to start chats with online shoppers, handle multiple chats at the same time, quickly search past chats and provide historical, analytics, stats and geolocation data about the customer who you are currently engaged in communication with.
This is where the magic happens, it`s the part that facilitates the customer contact on which every page it is installed on. Usually a graphical icon is placed in the bottom left corner of the client`s website. Once clicked, a chat window pops up allowing the user to initiate a live chat.
The chat widget is installed on a website via a Javascript embed code snippet placed inside the website`s HTML code usually at the bottom on the page before the closing BODY tag. This placement along with asynchronous js practices ensures that the clients website`s page load speed is not affected.
Native live chat apps are often distributed across IOS, windows and Android platforms. These apps allow clients to facilitate their chat agents to communicate with customers on the go anywhere in the world. A great tip is to always look for livechat companies who provide free live chat apps with their software.
There are an estimated 200 live chat software solutions but there not all made equal. Many simply offer a basic chat window, whilst some offer a full suite of products, here we will list the best features to look for in your next live chat app.
Live chat in theory dates back 50 years ago, instant messaging in it`s most basic form was entirely possible in the early days of the internet.
Fast forward, a few decades and major instant messaging service like MSN Instant Messenger and AOL AIM where born.
It is difficult to pinpoint the first use of live chat on a website, however records indicate that the first live chat software company was Live Person, founded 23 years ago in 1995. They are still operating now with their flagship product LiveEngage.
Post millennium more software companies emerged with their real messaging platforms including companies such as Live Agent, MyLiveChat, Provide Support Live and Whoson. Between the year 2000 and 2010 there were approximately 15 live chat providers serving online businesses globally.
Today the live chat sector is valued at $900 million globally and is showing no signs of slowing researches have predicted positive growth at 8% annually.
This market is being served by an estimate 200 privately held live help software vendors. With every iteration, new innovation is seen within this tech, with the emergence of AI, Chat bots, Automated chat, Chat Triggers and Pro active chats the race to offer the most complete software platform is on.
Do I really have to pay for a live chat app these days? The search term "free live chat" is one of the most queried terms within this remit, which suggests that thousands of people each month are looking for a free live chat option.
Free isnt always Free. Many companies advertise free chat software, however there is almost always a catch. 90% of all vendors operate a Freemium business modal. This usually means it`s free to join, but use of the service is restricted in some way. Usually the number of active agents, the storage of chat history, conncurrent chats and limited branding customizations and features.
Choosing the right live chat app can be difficult, it really does depend on the type of website you own and the reasons behind installing chat on your website.
Most of the major platform have been mentioned in this report, so our best piece of advice when choosing a chat provider would be to ensure that they offer some sort of free trial period because if it doesnt feel right you can just move on the the next. Create a checklist of your requirements, then make another list of your optional extras. Good luck selecting your next live chat software.
