Adept Communications

Adept – Innovative Software

Chat Apps Consultancy

Many websites have already integrated a chat app to communicate with their customers.  A chat app provides many benefits to both the website owner as well as the customer.  It enables websites to provide customer support at low cost without the costs of a call centre.  Most customers prefer to engage with a company through chat rather than a voicecall.  The perception of a voicecall is that it is not possible to get through, and a rapid response is not given.  In contrast, customers expect to receive a reply within a few seconds on a chat app.

Adept has made comparisons of most of the larger chat application providers, and has done integration work with many of these providers.  Adept provides advice to clients to help choose the best chat app provider.  After the selection is made, Adept provides software development and integration of the chat app onto the client website.  Adept also helps clients to switch to a new chat app provider.  Integration of a chat app onto a website can take from a few days for a small website to several weeks for a large website with a large numbers of customer connections.  There are many Chat App providers, here’s a short comparison of the most well known:

Zendesk (Zendesk.com) is one of the best known providers, and integrates chat into their platform.  While it is expensive compared to smaller providers, Zendesk has an advantage of integrating chat into their support platform.  This enables customers to ask a question on a chat app and then move to email, and this will be tracked within Zendesk. Smaller chat app providers do not provide a unified platform.

Livechat (Livechat.com) is another well known provider, it has similar features to Zendesk, at a lower cost.  Pricing for Livechat is $50/month for each agent.  Most chat providers base their pricing on the number of agents, however this does not suit many websites, since they often have a number of agents who work part time.  If a website has 20 part-time agents, then the annual cost of providing chat is $12,000 as well as the cost of paying the agents.

Olark (www.olark.com) has been in operation for many years, and their pricing is $29/month per agent.  They also offer a chatbot that can automate some of the conversation, such as the start when gathering details about the customer.

Purechat (www.purechat.com) offers a price of $39/month and then a price per agent of  $13/month.  This suits organisations who have a number of part time agents, for a website with 20 part-time agents, the annual costs are 39*12 + 20*13*12= $3588.  This represents a large saving compared to Livechat.

Live Agent (liveagent.com) is priced at $39/month per agent, but has a free tier with restricted features.  Many website owners start out with chat apps and try out LiveAgent to understand how customers use chat apps.

Intercom (intercom.com) are well known, and their platform has been in use for many years.  They have a wide range of product features, with pricing starting at $79/month per agent.  

Chaport (chaport.com) has similar features to the other chat platforms, and also offers a free tier, it has some limitations, but it is useful for a website to try out operating a chat window on their website.

Drift (drift.com) includes a chatbot to help automate responses to customers, there are many other features to help startup companies engage with prospects, and convert them into warm leads.

Engagebay (engagebay.com) is a lesser known chat platform, and offers a free tier.  They also offer a feature called Site messaging – which provides helpful messages to customers as they move around on the website.

Smartsupp (smartsupp.com) is a company based in Czech, and highlight that they are in Europe.   They offer a chatbot, this is available even on the free tier.

Freshchat (www.freshworks.com/live-chat-software) This is part of Freshworks who provide customer support software.  They provide a chatbot for $15/agent/month.  

Trengo (trengo.com) is a Dutch software provider, they offer live chat and a chatbot. Their pricing is similar to others €15/agent/month.