Announcing the Top Rated Live Chat Software for 2019

Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Live Chat Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer.

Here are the winners:

LiveChat

LiveChat is a web-based customer service app and chat tool that integrates with a wide variety of third-party apps to provide a live conversation alternative to a phone call. LiveChat features automated greetings, canned responses, as well as a ticketing system and group management features on higher priced tiers. 

LiveChat is used primarily by service and sales agents across companies of all sizes and industries, and is priced on a per-agent basis. 

Users on TrustRadius praise its simplicity and reliability, making it quite useful for large centers that need an easy to use, straightforward live chat tool that requires very little training for successful agent onboarding.

“LiveChat is the most suitable Helpdesk solution for teams. Be it small startup teams, medium-sized organizations, and large organizations; the ability for LiveChat to scale is unbelievable. We have had situations where we moved from the regular tens of chats a day to hundreds of chats in a day, without having any problem. The customer support team at LiveChat have also been doing a fantastic work, which has only made it pleasant doing business with LiveChat.”

Florence Bawah | Customer Service Supervisor | Financial Services Company

Intercom

Intercom is a multi-channel customer messaging and engagement system used by sales and support agents for its live chat features, and by marketers for its in-app messaging and other features to drive engagement. The live chat feature is at the core of Intercom’s customer service and customer acquisition plans. 

Its plans and pricing are quite flexible, but relative to other live chat tools Intercom has relatively advanced features, such as its inbuilt customer data platform with customer profiling and personalized messaging for account-based marketing. 

Most Intercom users on TrustRadius users are employed in small business (61%). Relative to other chat tools, Intercom is used by a high percentage of marketers (25%), who enjoy its automated chatbot and in-app messaging features for starting conversations and driving engagement. 

“My organization used Intercom to gather customer data, to drive our marketing messaging. We have used it for months, and it has helped us really understand the types of information our eCommerce customers require before making a purchase. For example, we were able to understand that our customers were looking for quantity discounts, so we delivered that. Then we were able to test the messaging of these discounts for clarity and voila! satisfied, scalable customer validation!”

Verified User | Manager in Marketing | Consumer Electronics Company

Bold360

Bold360 is a live chat tool from LogMeIn that provides users with live chat, user self-service, file sharing, and other helpful customer service capabilities. On the higher-tiered “AI” plan, Bold360 can scale to become a multi-channel communication tool with a virtual agent, AI driven conversation engine. 

The majority of Bold360 users on TrustRadius (74%) are from enterprises. They value  Bold360’s ease of use, particularly when switching communication channels, reporting dashboards for tracking service agent performance, and overall efficiency when in providing responses to customer queries.

“We utilize Bold360 in our department for communicating specifically with prospective graduate students. It is intended to offer them the chance when browsing our website to have questions answered as they come across them, as opposed to picking up the phone and/or emailing and receiving a response within 24 hours or so… It really meets our needs to reach out to a broad audience that might not find the information they are seeking and/or don’t have the time to do an in-depth search. Bold360 allows them to quickly seek out and get a real-time response to meet their needs both quickly and effectively.”

–Erin Strom | Recruiter & Academic Advisor | Higher Education Company 

Congratulations to the winners of the Top Rated Live Chat Software Award!

What is Live Chat Software?

Live chat software allows salespeople or service agents, or in very small companies a site administrator, to talk to site visitors in real-time. The goal of live chat software is to help accelerate a transaction, increase conversions, offer marketing collateral, or provide service to an existing customer. 

Many live chat software tools include the ability to escalate a live chat interaction to a phone call with a live agent, if necessary. However, often the purpose of the chat tool is to resolve customer inquiries faster and more efficiently, thereby decreasing the total number of support phone calls needed.To that end, live chat software usually integrates with help desk software or contact center software, or scales to become help desk software on higher priced plans. 

Live chat software also typically integrates with marketing or customer experience (CX) tools enabling cross-channel (e.g. email, social media) interactions, and provide a direct means of channel switching to suit the particular conversation or customer. Chat conversations are archived for managerial audit or to ensure service issues are not dropped between service agents or chat sessions separated by stretches of time. Most live chat tools offer auto-logging of these sessions to the user’s CRM, and some degree of automation. 

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Live Chat Software list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap as of June 3rd, 2019. To qualify for the Live Chat Software Top Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.