Top 5 Factors to Consider Before Purchasing Live Chat Software

You do not necessarily need to be a marketing expert to realize that stellar customer service is the backbone of long-term business success. Your customers are highly effective if you would like to spread a word about your services or products. The best way to enhance experience with your customers is to install the best live chat software for website. The app will enable you to provide real-time answers to the customers’ queries. The live chat not only builds the confidence of your customers while they shop online; it boosts conversion rates as well.

Here are the factors to consider before purchasing live chat software:

1. Self-hosted or cloud-based?

Starting by figuring out whether you need a cloud-based or self-hosted live chat app. The self-hosted means the organization hosts the application on its own premises. On the other hand, cloud hosted software means it resides on a third party and the internet facilitates. Most businesses prefer a cloud-based live chat service because:

• It can be accessed anytime, anywhere
• There’s no need to invest in costly infrastructure since third party servers host it
• It’s cheaper with flexible payment options, allowing you to pay only for what you use

2. Onboarding

Select a live chat application that is user-friendly, and one that you can integrate live chat to your website in minutes. For the most part, you should simply copy and paste the chat code to the website and initiate chats within minutes.

3. Mobile-friendly

Many people now access websites and shop through their mobile devices. Therefore, it is important to ensure a live chat tool is mobile compatible. While shopping for the live chat software, you should ask if it is mobile-friendly, and if it works on apple and android devices. At the very least, you should go for a mobile responsive live chat application.

4. Advanced features

While most types of live chat software offer numerous useful features, you should always ensure the app you choose has certain essential features. Some of them are:

• Proactive chat - It allows your chat operator to reach out to website visitors and offer to help them instantly even before they initiate the chat. Most visitors end up responding.
• Canned responses - It allows the chat operator to save snippets of frequently used text for reuse in subsequent chat sessions with a few keystrokes.
• Queue time - The feature allows visitors to approximate the wait time before beginning a chat with the live chat agent.

5. Pricing

Good chat applications usually come with a competitive and flexible pricing plan that bills you according to your needs. They also give you room to change plans if needed. Ensure you look out for that when scouting around for the best live chat software. While deciding on the budget, you should try to figure out the number of chats you can handle in a month, the number of websites you would like to install the live chat on, discounts, recurrent payment plans and more.

Final words

After deciding to integrate a live chat application on your site, you have made a step that will enhance and enrich your customers’ experience. Now it’s time to find out which providers have the service that suit your requirements.