A solid choice for your next Live Chat & Chatbot solution

We created our account with LiveChat/Chatbot/Text Inc. in October 2023. It’s been nine months since then, and I feel like I have a pretty good feel for the software. On the positive side. LiveChat offered a ton of great features, which gave them the edge over other companies in the same arena that we were considering. As a standalone Live Chat offering, they have the core fundamentals done right. They constantly put out add-ons that continue to increase the value of the software and are a pretty good value for what’s being offered. AI is starting to be implemented wherever possible, and that comes in handy with some of their offerings. Where LiveChat comes in at the top of their game is their own Customer Support. You won’t get access to a dedicated account manager unless you’re on an Enterprise Tier plan, but, they have their own Chatbot and Live Chat products to assist customers or visitors 24/7. Not only are there people there willing to help 24/7, but they are people who actually know what they’re talking about and are in a position to help you. Gone are the days of talking with a low level gatekeeper who knows next to nothing about the software, followed up by the inevitable “I’ll have someone reach out to you”. When you chat with LiveChat, their Chatbot has been extensively trained on everything they could have possibly thrown at it. But, in the remote chance you can’t get an answer from the bot, their support reps are so incredibly helpful and friendly who make it so much easier to solve whatever issue you’re facing. In fact, everyone I have interacted with during the past 9 months have been such a joy to communicate with. It’s a pleasure to interact with their employees because I believe they truly love what they’re doing, and it shows.

On the not-so-positive side. There are some features that the software lacks that I would LOVE to see built into the platform ASAP. Canned messages can’t be searched for while in a chat. You get a list of your selected group at the top of a list of canned messages for every single client you have active. We have 200+ active sites, so it can be a little hectic finding the right message while keeping down average response time. There’s no way to know what the message says unless you memorize the title of every message and what it says. The actual “title” of the message is actually just keywords that are separated by a space, so if you want “FAQ One Bedroom Pricing” as your title, you have to enter “FAQ-One-Bedroom-Pricing” or else you will have a message with 4 completely separate titles that you will never find again. FAQ as title 1. One as title 2. Bedroom as title 3. And Pricing as title 4. When you’re in a chat and you need to find info fast, seeing a message titled FAQ is not helpful. There needs to be a way to have AI search through the messages of just the one individual group you are chatting for, look through a list of keywords, and then suggest the highest % matches based on what your visitor is saying. I’ve had that functionality with other platforms for over 5 years now, and it feels like a pretty big miss for this platform.
There is a Marketplace for apps you can add-on to your subscription that are made by LiveChat themselves along with other 3rd party companies who see the gaps in the product and move to fill them. While I do like this feature, there are some things that feel like they should automatically included with the highest tier subscription available, but aren’t. I’m paying a pretty big sum each month, but find out that some of the things they list on their “Features” page are actually features that you can pay extra for and aren’t really included with the price they’re giving you. Multi-language support? Yep, we have that and say it’s included, but there’s an additional charge per agent to have it active. A few of the add-ons have felt a little nickel-and-dime, which didn’t sit quite right, but, they are a company who is out to make money, and the last thing I’ll do is fault them for it, but I wish it was a little clearer up front.
LiveChat is capable of supporting multiple groups, and it does an OK job. When we first started out, we chose our plan because we were told we could have an unlimited number of clients with the business tier subscription. Fast forward to us setting up client #201 and we were told that there is a limit to the number of Routing Rules that can be created. So while technically we can set up as many client’s as we’d like, we were only able to route 200 of them. But if you upgrade to the Enterprise Tier, that number goes up to 500. LiveChat definitely feels like it was primarily built as a product to support 1 business or company, and most everything relating to having more than 1 company was simply an afterthought. They are slowly addressing things, but I don’t know how well they are able to keep up with the errors that users continue to experience. As they grow and change, it introduces more issues, and those issues are getting longer and longer to fix while they are hard at work on features that they think users want. They could absolutely use some additional resources in scaling their development work to handle their growth. As of today, I typically have 4-7 open cases with their support team on bugs I report. Everything from agents having issues logging in, their desktop platform not allowing the space bar to be used in some places, KPI reports showing 0 when there should be data available, etc. However, I do applaud their efforts for getting to these issues as they can. I know not every issue can be solved in a matter of minutes and with limited resources, there’s only so much you can do, but the team keeps trucking along and buttoning up whatever pops open from the most recent update or patch.

Overall: I would absolutely recommend LiveChat or Chatbot for anyone looking for a service provider. While they’re a smaller outfit than some of the other bigger brand names you hear of all the time, that’s actually a great thing because it means they can actually spend time on you and your use cases. The people at LiveChat are the reason I consider the company to be one of the best I’ve ever worked with. For a company based out of Poland, there really hasn’t been a language barrier and while non-support employees aren’t typically available during U.S. hours they get back to you as soon as they can which is just fine by me. The product is good, and the company is great. Give it a little more time for them to implement some of the bigger projects and AI ideas they are working on, and it will bring both the company and the product to phenomenal status.