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Top 8 Live Chat Solutions for Your Animation Website

ben marvazi 2020

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In this day and age, live chats are a must for websites both for small and big businesses. Live chat capabilities turn your website into a powerful channel to attract leads, convert customers, evaluate performance, and enhance your business’ reputation.

So what makes live chat so necessary? A live chat feature is a cost and time-effective tool to keep track of your communication with customers. You can have many conversations with different customers all over the world in real-time while solving their problems.

According to AccuWebhosting, 79% of customers won’t leave a negative review if they get live chat support. In comparison, 63% of customers are more likely to stay loyal to a company if they offer live support. This makes live chat a simple and easy way to directly influence your customer satisfaction and end up with lifelong customers!

There are two kinds of live chat software providers—the stand-alone solutions and those that are all-in-one. Stand-alone live chat software allows you to live chat with your customers. This improves engagement and conversion among potential customers.

The downsides to this are that they’re not very personalized and have no knowledge base, and will not allow you to answer customer emails. It means that you must respond in a timeline manner or result in your customer leaving your website.

On the other hand, the all-in-one live chat software providers have a knowledge base, ticketing, social media integration features, and more. You won’t have to use any other app integrations in the future because your live chat will have omnichannel support.

In this blog post, we break down the top eight live chat software choices for your animation website.

1) HelpCrunch

HelpCrunch website

HelpCrunch is an all-in-one live chat platform with useful email automation, ticketing, and knowledge base tools. It allows you to store all conversations with your animation customers in one dashboard, capture more leads, and eventually convert them into your loyal customers.

You can customize your chat widget’s colors, sizes, wallpapers, and even add CSS. You can use HelpCrunch to send manual or automated messages, pre-chat and offline forms, or share files. One downside to using this platform is that it has limited third-party integrations and has no chatbot.

2) LiveChat

LiveChat website

LiveChat is a stand-alone live chat solution first launched in 2002. It is used in 150 countries by more than 30,000 businesses, including heavy-hitters such as McDonald’s, Adobe, and PayPal.

This program has fantastic features such as saved responses, auto messages, chat surveys, automatic sales tracking, user profiles, and the ability to send product cards in chat messages. You can also do basic customization on your widget along with animation and other eye-catchers. 

You won’t regret using this live chat software because of its excellent customer satisfaction and response time, plus 170+ integrations to apps such as DropBox, MailChimp, etc. One downside to using this software is that it’s only a basic live chat, which means it doesn’t have a knowledge base.

3) Intercom

Intercom Website

Intercom is known to be an all-in-one conversational relationship platform. More than 30,000 companies worldwide, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Udemy, use it. 

It organizes its chat features into three categories: acquisition, engagement, and customer support. According to Neil Patel, it allows you to build customer relationships through its knowledge base, chatbots, and real-time reports about leads, deals, and pipeline information.

Intercom moves your customers down the sales funnel quickly through its real-time tools and insights. With Intercom, you can manage customer interactions across many channels from one dashboard.

Its features, such as targeted messages, real-time chat, product tours, and email campaigns, will eventually boost more conversions. You can also take advantage of its integration capabilities with Salesforce and Marketo. You should keep in mind, though, that this program is a bit expensive and has a complicated pricing model.

4) Zendesk

Zendesk Website

Zendesk is a live chat software used by more than 200,000 businesses worldwide, such as Shopify, Slack, Venmo, Uber, and more. It started as a ticketing system in 2007 and later on purchased a third-party solution called Zopim software.

It may have a simple user interface, but it is a great software that helps you reach out to customers with proactive engagement, reports on customer satisfaction, agency performance, and site analytics. Some of its features are chat support, email support, social support, chat forms, and a knowledge base in 40 languages.

One of the great features of Zendesk is that it provides a real-time list of visitors. You will be able to see all your website visitors and the browser and operating system they’re using. A con to using it is that it has an outdated user interface and chat widget design as well as limited customization options. 

5) Olark

Olark Website

Olark is a stand-alone live chat software with an informative dashboard. It offers a wide range of features such as real-time chat, automated messages, canned responses, chat forms, reporting, management tools, and chat reports on customer satisfaction and busiest hours updates.

You can also edit settings for your chatbox size, chape, location, colors, text, and much more. Olark has a built-in customer relationship management tool that will allow you to search and organize your notes and transcripts. You can easily get qualitative data about your customers to improve your customer service and marketing strategy.

Just like Zendesk, Olark shows you a real-time list of visitors browsing your website. It also has a chat widget with limited customization, but you can add additional images in your chatbox to attract attention.

Users can also integrate Olark with SalesForce, HubSpot, MailChimp, WordPress, and Google Analytics. Some downsides of using this program are its limited widget customization, basic live chat features, and a lack of manual chat messages.

6) HubSpot

HubSpot website

According to HelpCrunch, if you're searching for a live chat software that will help you manage your conversations with your customers, HubSpot is a great choice. HubSpot’s live chat integrates with a chatbot that will help you find leads, book meetings, answer your customer’s questions, send personalized and automated messages, and more. 

What’s great about its CRM is that it automatically stores all of your conversations in a universal inbox. It also has a chat widget that you can customize and use to make targeted messages for different audiences whenever they visit your website. One major con of HubSpot is that you aren’t allowed to unbrand in the free plan.

7) PureChat

PureChat website

PureChat is an easy and standard live chat software for websites. What makes PureChat different from other live chat tools is that its full-service has excellent features. You can do unlimited live chat at no cost.

It is a live chat software designed to help organizations connect with their website visitors during the most critical times. With over 14,000 users in more than 150,000 countries, PureChat provides live chat features to make customers happy. It also offers standard features and chats widget customization.

It’s good to use if you want to give customer support in real-time but not spend a lot of money. You can use it to have unlimited chats, view detailed reports, visitor tracking, and visitor information and location.  You can also customize it to suit your needs, such as integrating with over 1,000 apps such as Slack, MailChimp, HubSpot, and more.

Some downsides to using PureChat are its very basic design, a lack of integration with other programs, and the fact that you aren’t allowed to remove Pure Chat’s branding from your widget. Some reviews stated that there have been glitches in PureChat’s system. Others had log-in problems and weren’t able to load attachments such as photos, documents, and screenshots in the chat.

8) Chatra.io

Chatra.io

Chatra.io is a live chat tool that enables you to communicate with your customers via the website and even over Facebook or email. Over 40,000 businesses trust Chatra.io with their sites, including online stores such as Muse, Nudie Jeans Co, Tinybeans, IGMS, and more. 

This program allows you to monitor who views your website in real-time, answer questions, clarify concerns, cross-sell, and upsell. According to WordStream, cross-selling is offering customers products and services that complement or supplement the previous purchases. Meanwhile, upselling happens when you add more value to a customer by encouraging them to purchase more services or products.

It also provides a chat history, Google Analytics, mobile apps, offline messaging, and a multilingual chat widget. What’s amazing about Chatra.io is that you can view live typing insights. You can see what customers type before hitting send so that you can send an answer in no time.

It has a chatbot that you can use to collect website visitors’ contact information and offer quick options for frequently asked questions. Your visitors will automatically get answers to their questions without any extra effort from you.

In Closing

Which live chat software do you think is best for your animation website? That all depends on the unique needs of your business. From widget optimization to file attachments to knowledge bases to app integrations, the live chat features you prioritize can make or break your site. 

The answer is up to you. It depends on the features you need and the budget you have for your animation website. If you’re not satisfied with this list of live chat software, there are many more great options to consider outside this list that might meet your needs.

If you want to learn more about the business of animation, make sure you sign up for our free masterclass and download our free marketing handbook.

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