LiveAgent vs. Groove by OptimizeCX

LiveAgent is great for companies that want to help customers with their issues. It is also great for getting sales for our company. During our chats, if a customer is interested, we like to ask for the sale. It is too easy for the customers to say no. So it is nice that with LiveAgent, they have an automatic process where the customer can enter their item and address information and it is easy for our agents to get the sale.

Incentivized

Groove is great for people who are wanting to provide accountability and organization for teams across your business. It is suited well for an organization that has many email requests coming in every day, because you can assign tickets to specific team members. It would not be suited for an organization that utilizes more phone support, than email support

• Having the ability to transfer tickets or chats has proven useful when we are working with a customer who has a specific type of inquiry - perhaps a sales question or an employment request. We’ve found it helpful to have the ability to transfer the chat to the online agent best equipped to answer the inquiry so we are able to serve our customers to the highest standard and with an immediate response.
• We find being able to add notes and labels to previous chats and tickets incredibly helpful in data collection and also in our ability to work as a dynamic team. By being able to sort our chats and tickets into an organized system that our company created, we can work cohesively to review old conversations for continuity, opportunities for growth, and with transparency between departments.

• Creates Tickets when someone emails in or you can create a ticket within the groove system.
• They have great reports on response times and the average amount of time it took for a ticket to close. You can even see individuals average response times as well as specific teams.
• We use their Knowledge Base which is a great tool for creating FAQ and sending people to that.

Incentivized

• LA doesn't provide you SMS integration.
• You cannot divert your phone call from your local carrier to LA agent directly. You need to get a third party number which is way much costly. Also, if you get a third party number to divert your calls from a local carrier to LA, then the callers have to wait more than the usual time in order to get them connected with the Customer Support Team.
• WhatsApp Integration also unavailable.

Incentivized

• Better Follow-up by customer success team
• More customization within their major features to fit both, large and small sales teams, alike
• Their site goes down fairly often

Incentivized

I am giving this rating as Live Agent is a very good software that is essential to any small or big business that provides customer support services. It gives you the possibility to manage any of your clients issues, answer questions and keep a good relationship with them by providing quick solutions.

The initial setup, onboarding and training is easy. The system provides 2 graphic version of interfaces in black or white default colors. I would appreciate, if there were more. Some of the setup forms are not correctly resized. Overall, I'm always able to find what I am looking for in LiveAgent.

It's well organized, but slow.

The one time that I contacted the customer support at LiveAgent, they were very quick to help me out and the customer support representative walked me through every thing that I needed to know to set up what I needed. Over all, the support staff at LiveAgent were perfect.

I'm giving them a 3 for the really great support they gave for general questions. They also have a good knowledge base. I'm giving them only a 3 though because of my last customer service when I need a billing resolution. I was very disappointed in how they handled that. I also find it very bad practice to send out ONE email notice that they were raising my rate three times as much at the end of the month. When I was with Desk.com, I had numerous emails over months letting me know their billing plans were changing. Even worse than refusing to refund me the difference was that they just stopped responding to me.

Implementation was quick and when not counting a bug on our website, it took a couple hours. It was mostly done on our end or with the assistance of LiveAgent's live chat support team. We recommend to check out LiveAgent's tutorial videos on their youtube channel or browsing their knowledge base - we've almost always found answers to our queries there.

Before making the decision, we evaluated many tools, but none of them met all of our needs or the costs we could bear for them, until we found LiveAgent. The implementation process was super simple and supported by the LiveAgent support team, who are excellent!

We also use Trello for project management. I have used both systems and we like Groove because it allows for our clients to contact us via email. They do not have to go to a ticket submission page, they can just email us directly and it will create a ticket. Groove also provides analytics on how long it takes to respond to tickets

• Less expensive than having multiple individual email accounts.
• LiveAgent has helped decrease our errors since it's more straightforward than sharing a traditional inbox with multiple team members.
• Sometimes the emails sent from LiveAgent end up in our customer's spam/junk folder because the auto-generated alpha-numeric ticket looks suspicious.

• We wasted a lot of time setting up the product before we discovered a lot of features listed on the website aren't ready for public use