It’s 2021 and the classic contact page isn’t enough anymore. Since people want fast contact with a business, filling out a contact form and waiting for a reply will not cut it. Depending on your type of business, adding a phone number and an email address might just do the trick, but sometimes clients still want more. This is where direct chat apps come in: they provide a quick connection to the sales or social media team, in order to increase customer retention and satisfaction.
BuiltWith, a business intelligence tool providing usage analytics, has an updated list of the live chat usage over the entire internet on their website:
But choosing such an app may prove difficult, especially since there are so many in the market.
Below is my curated list of the best website chat apps out there split in two categories. Depending on your business size, your products or services and who should be in charge of answering questions from the public, we have: social media centered (like the whatsapp web app) and sales centered chat apps (like Hubspot).
Sales centered chat apps
If you have a bigger business, with a CRM already in place and / or a dedicated sales team, then you should opt for an integrated chat directed towards sales. Most of them are premium services, with a yearly or monthly subscription, but they are either already part of the CRM your company uses or can link to it fast and securely.
Here are my top favorites:
- Tawk.to (quick to implement + free)
- Tidio (has a free option with up to 3 chat operators)
- Hubspot (has a series of free tools, but it’s best used when at its full capacity)
Social media centered chat apps
On the other hand, if you have a smaller business or you are an entrepreneur, you have a small number of products or services and the social media person can manage answering the public questions, you should go with a social media chat. They have the great advantage of not asking the user for any more information about himself, because they will directly connect him via that specific social network. It also gives you the advantage of getting more information from your interaction. Here are the ones I would suggest:
- Facebook web chat
- Whatsapp web chat
- Instagram direct
Do you know of any other chat apps that could help a website?
Photo by Dimitri Karastelev.
