Everyone’s now living in the age of e-commerce where customers can interact with most businesses online. While they’re shopping online through your website, they may have questions concerning a product, how to make payments or any other related questions.

As the business owner and primary customer care professional, you’re expected to respond instantly to their questions since any unnecessary delays may lead to the loss of the sale.

With the urgent need to service your customers, thus the live chat app was developed especially for this purpose.

Why Are Live Chat Tools Important?

Apart from using live chat tools like a live virtual receptionist with customers, you can use them for staff collaboration like video and audio calls, file sharing, project management, and among other features live chat apps provide.

Because of the ability to work in real-time, live chat apps are better for communication than emails. Live chat facilitates seamless communication and collaboration, with your colleague or counterpart just a few keyboards clicks away.

Your workers can share ideas, remotely solve company problems, and plan
for your business’s future activities.

Thus, in this article, you’ll learn 10 live chat tools that you can use in your small business. 

JivoChat

First on our list is JivoChat, a high-end app that you can use in your business for customer communication anywhere. You can use it for email, live chats, phone calls, and social purposes.

You can use JivoChat with your favorite customers’ websites and social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram to foster better and accessible communication. Moreover, you can download it on your phone and suggest your customers to do the same to facilitate internet of things communication.

Microsoft Teams 

This software is available to Office 365 subscribers. It offers you real-time collaboration through its chat workspace.

You can use it for meetings, chats with coworkers or friends, pair it with Office 365, to add notes, and use it with extensions such as Poer BI, Planner, and other tools. You can also do private chats as well as open chats.

Moreover, Microsoft Teams allows you to integrate Microsoft’s Skype video and invite other people to join your calls.

Facebook Workplace

Facebook has established a social network dedicated to businesses where it’s estimated that around 30,000 organizations are signed up and connect over one million groups.

Facebook also has a desktop app known as Workplace Chat that enables you to screen share and video chat with a maximum of 50 people. Additionally, Workplace Chat can also be used for video broadcasting.

One great advantage of Workplace Chat is that it can be used on multiple platforms such as Android and iOS. While Workplace Chat is free, some features might be only available on paid subscriptions or for larger corporate accounts.

Cisco WebEx Teams

This application is owned by Cisco and is very ideal for small businesses. It has an embedded meeting software, a chat tool, a collaboration tool, a whiteboard, and a calendar app. You could add images in the dynamic chat app, while the whiteboard is perfect for creative collaboration.

ChatBot 

ChatBot is a live chat software that takes live chatting to the next level. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance your customer engagement and elevate your customers’ experience. It’s designed with a drag-and-drop interface for creating your own chatbot.

User experience is exceptional because it gives you many ready-made templates for different kinds of industries and enables you to customize your conversations and chat routing to align with your business’s needs.

For instance, the embedded lead generation bot can be used to book calls and sales. The sales bot template can be used for selling your products within the chat window. The e-commerce template can be used to train your customers on how the buying process works.

There are also other templates, including restaurant bots, customer service bots, coffee shop bots, package tracking bots, and recruitment bots. ChatBot now enables you to include a virtual assistant for your Facebook pages, messaging apps, and websites.

In case your customers want to chat with a real person, you can refer them to the customer support agent, phone call support team, Facebook Messenger, or any of the other live chat tool integrations. ChatBot works very well with WooCommerce and WordPress too.

LiveAgent 

LiveAgent is designed to offer you the best experience in help desk and omnichannel live chat. LiveAgent’s capabilities include video chat, an email ticketing system, time tracking, live chat, call center features, among others.

In case your business doesn’t have a support desk system, then LiveAgent is the best bet for you.

LiveAgent can be embedded in WordPress, email marketing services, customer relationship management (CRM) software among other marketing platforms which are key for your business success.

Intercom  

This app is excellent in capturing leads, engaging with users, and boosting conversions. Its messaging capabilities also come with automatable live chat widgets.

Apart from the live chat option, it has a support assistant tool, onboarding tool, marketing automation tool, lead generation tool, and user-engagement software. Intercom easily integrates with CRM software, Google Analytics, email marketing services, and Slack.

LivePerson

LivePerson can greatly enhance your customer engagement and level up your sales. You can use LivePerson to live chat with your customers on your website, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and SMS. It could also be used to automate conversation flows and store customer data in other third-party applications.

Slack  

Slack is robust in its use for small businesses, which offers support for group chat, one-on-one chat, video conferencing, and team audio calls. It enhances collaboration among your staff as they can carry out multiple projects by different teams with different hashtags. Slack can also be used for file sharing using the drag-and-drop option in its platform or using third-party applications like Dropbox, Google Drive, or any other file-sharing platform.  

You can sync, archive, search and edit your files on other people’s screens. Moreover, Slack can be integrated with Google Sheets, Slides, and Docs.

Kayako  

Unlike several other apps, Kayako’s live chat services support multiple languages and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The shared inbox provides your business an easy way to collaborate and provide expert support across multiple channels. Plainly said, Kayako is an omnichannel service that could also handle offline scenarios.

Final Thoughts 

Live chat services have become essential for the success of any business—so much so that you can’t overlook what it could provide to your small business. Depending on the needs of your business, you have the option to choose from the live chat tools in this article.

In this day and age, a live chat tool that gives you the most capabilities is the best for your small business. Choose the best live chat tool that provides video calls, audio calls, messaging, file sharing, automation, works across multiple channels, can be used with different operating systems, and has a good user experience.