Live Chat is an online customer service software with live support, help desk software, and web analytics capabilities.
It was first launched in 2002 and is currently developed and offered in a SaaS (software as a service) business model by Live Chat Software S.A.
Companies use Live Chat as a single point of contact to manage from one software all customer service and online sales activities that normally are provided using different channels (chat, email and social media) and multiple tools. Live Chat is used by over 27,000[4] paid customers from over 150 countries.
Live Chat is a proprietary software built with the use of multiple technologies, including JavaScript, Node.js, MySQL, Elastic Search, C++ and Erlang. The entire platform consists of two main elements:
Website chat widget – embedded on customer’s website and seen by the end users (website visitors) as a small chat box, traditionally displayed in the bottom right corner of the web browser. Chat widget is visible on desktop and mobile devices, either in the browser or as a part of mobile application.
Agent application – used by the company employees to respond to questions asked by the customers. Usually agents use the web-based application, which allows employees to log in and conduct a chat with website visitor using any browser. However, there are desktop applications available for Windows and Mac OS X and mobile apps for Android and iOS. BlackBerry and Windows Phone mobile apps used to exist in the past, but are no longer developed. Agent application is enhanced with user interface tools that make one-to-many communication quicker and more efficient. Examples of such tools include: canned responses, keyboard shortcuts, typing indicator with customer message sneak-peek, geolocation, tags system for categorization, etc.
There are two ways of having an online chat session between the agent and website visitor:
Passive communication, started when the website visitor clicks on the chat button or widget displayed on the page.
Active communication, initiated manually by the agent or automatically by the Live Chat system as soon as the visitor meets the predefined criteria (i.e. searched keyword, time on website, encountered error, etc.). Once the criteria is met, Live Chat displays a chat invitation with a customized message. During the chat session, agents close the sales, which results in increasing the overall conversion rate.
In areas unrelated directly to the product, Live Chat relies on 3rd party services. This includes Postmark for the delivery of transactional emails, Recurly for subscription billing, Pingdom for performance monitoring and uptime tracking and Up scope for instant screen sharing with customers.
