For those of you that use a live chat on your website, which one and why?
Hello! Our team is currently building an embeddable live chat product. We'd really love to learn more about what others are using and why!
Hello! Our team is currently building an embeddable live chat product. We'd really love to learn more about what others are using and why!
tawk.to, it's free.
Did you ever pay for it? Or do you just use the free tier?
I also used tawk.to for many years, just the free tier, didn't pay (it provides a lot of features for free).
For my last company (smpl.io, acquired 2020), we used Intercom. At the time, they had a generous discounted tier for early-stage startups, and their documentation was extremely developer-focused. It made the installation and configuration processes super simple to get up and running.
Perhaps most importantly, once we had Intercom added to the site, it was also tremendously easy to hand off to my non-technical cofounder to use for support, automated messaging, and a handful of other tasks. This meant he could get meaningful work done without one of the technical team needing to take time to intervene.
I'll add that we also added Intercom to our 404/error/unexpected-downtime pages, which was supremely helpful when we were doing maintenance, or if we experienced unexpected downtime
We definitely checked these guys out! They are one of the big ones in the space for sure. Thanks for sharing your use case! It always helps to understand how people are using products.
tawk.to is free. No limits on chats/agents. It's also a great choice if your product has users in different time zones than yours, and you'd like to have someone handling support for you for 24 hours a day. In a case like that, you'd just sign up for their agent on demand service which is just $1/hour.
Does that essentially mean $24/day? Also, did you ever try this? I'm curious what the service is like.
Yes, we used on our previous startup. The agent on demand service is especially useful for times that you'd normally have your live chat offline, e.g. at night or in foreign language territory. They handle the training of agents about your behalf at no extra cost to you.
I use Intercom. I've also tested other options (Talk.to, Crisp, Kayako...) -- Intercom is clearly the most feature-rich option.
Very cool site! Were there any particular features that pushed Intercom over the edge? Or was it just the quantity of good feature options?
Intercom - it provides a lot of features.
We used tawk.to initially, but it's just a chat while Intercom does much more.
I'm curious what some of the features were that made you switch over? It sounds like you were looking for something beyond live chat. If it was only live chat, would tawk.to have done the job? Or was it still missing things that Intercom had or was better at?
Talking just about live chat, Intercom allowed us to work as a team. We can assign tasks, create groups, add notes, etc.
Intercom can email customers if they leave the website.
It actually streamlines the communication. Whether it is a live chat, email, or social network, it ends up in Intercom in the very same way allowing us to cooperate on it.
We can see the history of each of the customers, we can access Stripe data for them. We can add our own arbitrary data and use them to control automated behavior.
We have implemented secure logging, so we can be actually sure that the user is logged and authorized.
We can have workflows and answer common questions without the interaction with a human operator.
We can have automated messages based on user interactions with our service. E.g., we can have a specific message for users that are new on the given paid plan.
We can use Intercom to promote new features, send requests for demos, etc.
Not even mentioning that there are other features such as product tours, banners, etc.
tawk.to its free , and there is no agent limit . We did buy a few addons and its pretty cheap .
If you don't mind sharing, what was your use case?
It was a live chat for our website, where users can get answers to basic queries. As the usage was very low ( few times per month ) , A third party agent was bought in who charged per chats .
We also tried the tawk.to premium agents , initially they were good , but then all over the place so moved to a lower cost alternative of having it per chat.
Very interesting! Thanks for the insight :) appreciate you sharing!
Started using https://landbot.io/ -- seems to be doing what we need, 100 chats per month are on a free plan -- will pay if exceed: we are slow. However, stumble on a problem with integration with Angular: appears and functions well in the beginning, but then does not appear on focus. Working with their support.
Functionalities we need:
From the technical aspects of functionality we need
If you have a free beta, would be happy to try and provide feedback.
Wow this is great feedback! We definitely don't have all of that functionality yet. But part of what we want to do in beta is to release our product for free and then have our users help us figure out what features are important. It means a longer time until we make money, but we aren't in a rush. We just want to make a great product.
I will definitely hit you up once we are ready!! Thanks :)
We use Help Scout on Payzip as it allows us to combine our help docs, live chat, and website messaging (when we're not online to help) all in one package. It's also separate to our SaaS (but embedded) so that non-technical people can manage the information and conversations.
We've also integrated it so that clicking the Help Scout "Beacon" (chat) shows you relevant help articles to the section of the system you're currently in. e.g. If you're in the Invoices section, clicking Beacon shows you help articles about creating and sending invoices.
This is really cool! Combining help docs with live chat makes sense. Giving the user contextual help articles based on where they are on the site is brilliant!
Thanks for sharing!
Using Drift to get more conversions, happy to provide you feedback on yours
I appreciate that!! We are doing a soft launch soon and I will definitely hit you up :)
I switched from live chat to using a simple contact form, I personally find live chat bubbles too intrusive and also whenever a website has a live chat bubble almost never I can use to reach an actual human (either no one is online or it just leads to a chatbot).