Websites have a huge role in helping businesses communicate with visitors in real time. They can contribute greatly to providing visitors with an engaging and personalized experience. For that reason, more companies leverage website chat apps to provide better customer service and increase sales.
By using a web chat app, a company can enhance its online presence and also achieve a competitive edge in the market. These apps are also very helpful in gaining valuable insights into customer behavior, resulting in an improved experience for customers.
More companies use web chat apps to create an interactive and engaging experience for website visitors and improve engagement levels. When engagement is better, it can always ensure increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.
In addition, website chat apps can help businesses provide 24×7 and efficiently handle customers in different time zones. Plus, these apps make responses prompt and can enable automated answers as well, which can delight customers.
In this blog, we will explore everything about website chat apps, their features, and what they do for the business.
But first, let’s get started with what exactly is a web chat app…
What is Website Chat App?
A website chat app ( or chat widget ) is a software application for user engagement. It allows website visitors to engage with a business through a chat window on the website. For both customers and businesses, these apps are very useful in interacting with each other and engaging in a conversation on the website itself.
Live chat and chatbots are two elements of a website chat app where either can be used separately or both can also be used together. For that reason, website chat apps can enable real-time communication between users and human operators, or ensure automated support to users.
While using a website chat app helps visitors easily get in touch with a support team, it also allows businesses to quickly respond to queries and improve support. These apps are very helpful for providing personalized support and help to website visitors.
Key Features of a Website Chat App
Website chat apps can offer a wide range of features that help businesses provide improved service and build stronger relationships with customers. The features available in a chat app will depend on the specific software and may vary in tune with the business needs.
Some key features of a website chat app include –
- Real-time conversation – A web chat app can enable real-time conversations between visitors and support agents. This can boost the response rate, resulting in an improved service experience. 89% of customers can make repeat purchases if the service is improved.
- Automation – AI-powered chatbots can simulate a conversation with a user and offer automated support. The use of a chatbot can also help in automating a variety of tasks across service, marketing, and sales.
- Visitor tracking – Using a web chat app, a business can track visitor behavior and measure engagement. This can provide helpful data on visitors’ activities, their search history, and preferences.
- Analytics – A company can get analytics and reports on chat interactions between visitors and support representatives. This can help track team performance and make improvements.
- Integration – Website chat apps come with the feature to integrate with other helpful software and applications such as CRM tools. This integration capability can help organizations better manage their customer interactions.
- Customization – It’s possible to customize the look and feel of a website chat and match it with the style and branding of the website. Customization can add value in providing a seamless experience to users.
Why Does a Business Need Website Chat App?
Communication is vital to engaging with customers and providing them with timely help. Since 81% of customers prefer to use live support to reach a business, it becomes important to use a chat app and make the engagement smooth. Website chat apps have clearly redefined the way both users and organizations engage, interact and converse.
There are many reasons for a business to have a website chat app, including –
- To better engage with customers – A website chat app is very useful for businesses for engaging with customers in real-time, offering quick answers to their queries, and ensuring help as and when needed. It will increase customer engagement rate dramatically.
- To provide improved customer support – A business that uses a chat app on its website can be more responsive, provide quick responses and reduce wait time for customers. When the support is responsive, it can add to the overall customer satisfaction, resulting in a low churn rate.
- To make data-driven decisions – Using a website chat app can provide helpful data and analytics, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. It will also be possible to make data-driven decisions across sales, support, and marketing.
- To boost conversions and revenue – When companies use a website chat app, they can better engage with customers and understand their tastes and needs better. These apps also help in offering personalized support and ensure a targeted sales approach, resulting in superior conversions and revenue.
- To offer personalized experiences – Website chat apps offer an opportunity to gain an edge over the competition and provide customized experiences to customers. Such experiences always drive more loyalty and trust from customers.
Popular Website Chat Apps For Customer Engagement
Web chat apps have become vital tools for businesses that take customer engagement seriously. These apps are very helpful for engaging with customers, guiding them through problems, and ensuring round-the-clock support.
Here are some top web chat apps for customer support –
1. REVE CHAT
REVE Chat is an AI-powered customer engagement platform to help businesses enhance the quality of support and drive sales. It’s a complete customer engagement solution with a range of tools to elevate the delivery of service. Using this artificial intelligence chat platform, organizations can deliver 24×7 support and qualify website visitors into leads.
The REVE platform has a suite of live engagement tools like video chat, co-browsing & live chat that can help businesses engage with customers across their entire journey. Using this platform, a business can seamlessly engage with its customers over their preferred channels and deliver an omnichannel support experience.
Key features
- Voice & video chat is the key feature of the platform that helps in starting personalized customer conversations on any channel.
- The use of video chat can help in starting a visual engagement and boost the value of support.
- The use of the co-browsing tool can help in collaborating with customers in real time and offer quick solutions.
- AI-driven chatbots can be used to automate support FAQs and enhance the speed and efficiency of support.
2. Intercom
Intercom is a customer messaging platform that provides various tools and features to businesses for customer engagement. Its live chat is powerful and can be used for offering personalized support and improving customer satisfaction. The use of Intercom’s web app chat can enable businesses to engage with users in real-time, offer quick assistance, and contribute to boosting customer satisfaction.
Key Features
- Its web chat app allows personalized conversations with customers where agents can see past interactions with customers and their profiles, resulting in more relevant support.
- The live chat includes automated messages that businesses can use for greeting customers, starting a conversation, or providing information.
- A business can integrate its live chat with other channels like social media and email and offer support to customers on their preferred channel.
- Team collaboration features are available where conversations can be assigned to different departments or agents.
3. Drift
Drift is a conversational marketing tool with various features for providing online support and generating leads. The main focus of this tool is on conversational marketing where a business can engage with customers in real time and start personalized conversations.
Key Features
- Its chatbots are powered by AI and therefore can provide automated help and responses to customers.
- It can be integrated with other tools like Salesforce and HubSpot and such an integration allows easy streamlining of sales and marketing processes.
- The ABM features ( account-based marketing) can help in personalizing messaging and engaging more efficiently with key accounts.
- Drift provides comprehensive analytics that can prove very useful in tracking customer engagement metrics.
4. Zendesk Chat
Zendesk Chat is a cloud-based live chat solution that has powerful tools and features for delivering excellent customer support and building strong customer relationships. It’s a cloud-based chat solution that enables customer communication in real time.
Using this web chat app, a business can chat with customers over websites, mobile apps, and Facebook Messenger. Some other key features include multiple chat sessions, analytics, and skill-based routing.
The Zendesk Chat offers a proactive message feature that can be used to target online visitors and send automated chat invites. The invites can be sent based on the location, purchase history, or referral page of the customer.
Key Features
- A customizable chat widget can be added to the website or mobile app that can help customers easily initiate chats with support agents.
- A business can set up chatbots to manage routine inquiries and offer quick responses to common queries.
- Real-time chat monitoring is possible where agents can not only track the ongoing chats but can also quickly respond to inquiries and offer quick support.
- With the chat routing feature, incoming chats can be routed to the right team or agent in alignment with the nature of the customer query.
5. LiveChat
LiveChat is among the most popular multichannel customer support service tools. It enables support to multiple channels such as Whatsapp, Facebook, email, SMS, etc. More importantly, a business can integrate it with many tools and e-commerce platforms as well for boosting the value of customer engagement.
LiveChat is suitable for businesses that look to service a large number of customers and website visitors. Some of the key features of the tool include a ticketing system, chat routing, notifications, and team management tools. As a quality live chat solution, it gives the opportunity to add clickable buttons and quick replies in the chat windows.
Key Features
- Agents can feature and recommend products directly in the chat as there are product cards available.
- Cards and carousels can be added to the chat window.
- Extensive reporting is available that makes engagement better.
- It’s possible to customize the chat widget for the website by page and ensure each page reflects the true value.
- Agents can save answers to FAQs and then reuse them in future conversations.
6. LiveAgent
LiveAgent can be termed as a 360-degree web chat app with a wide range of features for engagement. While its live chat ensures hassle-free conversations, the presence of additional features such as a ticketing system, a knowledge base builder, and a built-in call center further enhances the value of engagement.
More importantly, LiveAgent’s self-service options ensure that your customers needn’t to reach out to an agent when they need answers to FAQs or when they want to check the status of the support ticket.
Key Features
- LiveAgent’s web chat app offers video chat and multi-language chat boxes.
- The software also offers customization options.
- Agents can set chat assignment rules to ensure the right agents answer customer questions.
- The proactive chat invitation features can help a lot when agents want to reach out to visitors on a specific page.
- This website chat app can integrate with various channels such as Slack, Twitter, Viber, and Facebook.
7. Tidio
Tidio is a popular live chat software that has some good features for customer service. Its focus is more on sales and conversion and it also combines chatbots with live chat. Businesses can use it to address all customer issues easily and efficiently as the software streamlines live chat, email, and messenger in a single platform.
Key Features
- It enables real-time communication via a customizable website chat widget.
- Fast responses can be delivered with the help of live typing previews and canned responses.
- Chatbot templates are available to offer answers to collect visitors’ email information and answer common queries.
8. Olark
Olark is a live chat software and customer management tool that is easy to set up and operate. It’s highly customizable and anyone can easily change the colors, position, and shape of the chat boxes. The software also allows adding welcome text and agent phone to humanize live chats.
Key Features
- Its automation features will help businesses automatically engage with people.
- It’s easy to create canned responses and route chats to different departments.
- Live reports and analytics on key metrics are available.
- Olark can get integrated with CRM software like HubSpot and Salesforce.
Drive Customer Engagement and Boost Support with REVE’s Website Chat App
A business needs to provide quick and timely responses to customers to drive engagement. It has to be available round the clock to take queries and guide customers through the problem.
To achieve better customer engagement, a business needs a range of quality tools that REVE Chat provides. Our AI-powered chatbots can help your business automate various tasks across the support.
The chatbots we provide can ensure not only automated responses but also quick responses, therefore driving the rate of engagement. In addition, we have video chat and co-browsing software for visual engagement.
Your business can also integrate the chatbot with the live chat software and start offering hybrid support to customers. With this kind of support, customers can get automated responses via chatbots and may also be diverted to human agents for handling complex queries.
Conclusion
A business needs the right technology and tools to engage customers better and enhance their experience with the brand. It’s also important to adopt a customer-centric approach and align all the processes in tune with what customers want and what to deliver. A website chat app can help businesses engage with customers in an improved manner and provide great experiences.
With REVE Chat, you can test top-class engagement and customer support tools for your business.
You can sign up and see how our tools can greatly contribute to your engagement efforts and deliver the kind of results you need.