Every post you read about website chat apps is going to hail them as the height of customer service tools. They’re great for conversion, for reaching customers, for building relationships.

But you, real, actual person: Tell me how many times you’ve had a chat that was helpful.

And then tell me how many times chats were irritating. How many chats were pop ups you weren’t asking for? How many chats were obviously bots—and not great ones either?

And then chat boxes just stay there. You’re trying to navigate an online store or read through product features, and this huge chat box is just chilling on the screen like an annoying little sibling.

So yes, I’ll say it, not because I’m a rebel but because I only speak the truth: Online chat apps are annoying. At least, they are most of the time.

Let me be clear: They suck so much, so often, that there are free browser extensions and how-to’s on how to make them go away.

That’s not to say they’re the downfall of a website, or that you should hire a team of phone operators to answer calls. They’re useful for managing questions and figuring out what steps a customer needs to take to solve their problem. Chat apps can also give users information they need (that maybe they didn’t know they needed).

You just have to find the best web chat apps to make chat less annoying for users.

A Rundown of Chat Apps: What are they and why bother with them?

If you’ve ever been on the internet, ever (which, you’re here, so) you’ve run into chat apps. They’re usually on the bottom right side of your screen, and they’re usually shaped like talk bubbles. Sometimes they’re square talk bubbles. So modern.

You either click on them and start a chat. Or they may spring out of nowhere. Usually there’s some sort of greeting to convey friendliness and seem helpful. Sometimes chats have direct questions or statements prepared for you.

What you, the user, see on the screen is a chat widget. Plugins are tools that you install to enhance your site, and they manifest in widgets. In this case, a chat bubble. Plugins give you the ability to speak with your customer live, and some of them have bots answer your questions.

Related: Plugins and widgets foreign terms for you? Let me learn you a thing or two.

Why does anyone bother installing chat apps?

If you run Slack, or AT&T, or Amazon, you probably have a dedicated customer service team.

If you do run these companies, leave my site. You already know about chats. And you already know about success, so enjoy that, I guess. 

Everyone else, especially people who own small businesses like ecommerce stores, does not have the manpower to answer customer questions and resolve issues 24/7, or even within standard 9-5 business hours. We’re busy people.

We also don’t have the money to outsource customer service, either.

But, our customers have questions, and problems, and their problems are our problems, always. In the age of immediacy, no one likes to wait for help.

This is where chat apps come in. They’re a low cost way of collecting, answering and redirecting customer questions and complaints.  

Characteristics of quality chat apps:

The success of a literal in-person chat depends on the interaction between two people. Were questions answered fully and promptly? Were both parties listened to? Did they both walk away feeling better than when they stopped to talk?

Chats with your site visitors are exactly the same. They’re not just numbers or consumer behavior statistics (although analytics software often paints them like that). There are actual people behind the screen, and the best chat apps will take into account what makes a conversation helpful. They’ll help to make a conversation good in general.

Specifically, good chats are:

• Responded to in under 5 minutes.
• Relevant to the inquiry and the page your potential lead is on.
• Specific enough to thoroughly answer a user’s question or complaint.
• Capable of understanding when a question or problem is beyond the means of the person or bot interacting with a user.
• Capable of redirecting a customer to the best resources for helping them, whether it’s a phone number, FAQ site or relevant link.
• Tailored to the user based on their information, if possible. They take into account the language spoken by a user, their information if they are a member of your site, etc.
• Ended at the right time, not too abruptly and not dragging on.
• Not intrusive to the user experience. Chat boxes should not be huge, or unable to be dismissed. That is so irritating as a user, and I’m not alone on this.
• On-brand, both in look and tone. If you’re going for laid back and chill, don’t write out the most boring, cookie cutter messages on earth. It’s weird.
• Able to be continued even if a user switches between devices.

But most importantly, chats should sound somewhat human. Vague, useless, “bot-y” messages just scream: “I haven’t invested in improving the customer experience.”

Live Chat vs Chatbots: The Ultimate Customer Interaction Method Smackdown

Live chat is when an actual person is chatting with you. It’s pretty obvious that they’re a person powered by breakfast and not software powered by AI technology.

They each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Live chatting means people, and people means payment. Weekly payment, salary, all the works. At the same time, you’re paying for what is very likely superior customer interactions. You’re paying for the ability to sense a user’s emotions and respond to them. It’s also easier to interact with people than bots when it comes to understanding and passing off complex customer problems to someone who can help.

Chatbots, on the other hand, are a one-time investment—well, monthly or yearly investment. They’re easy to install and will just about always be there in terms of being able to take questions. (People get sick. For the most part, robots don’t. Although I feel like I run diagnostics on way more machines than people.)

You can program them to take messages 24/7, take tickets, and handle easier problems. Have them pop up as soon as a user lands on a page, or only when a user clicks on the button.  They’re standardized in a way that people can’t be, which is the best and worst thing about them.

Proactive vs Reactive Chat

You know when you go to a store, or library, or any establishment, and sometimes, right as you get in the door someone’s there to say: “Welcome to (establishment) can I help you with something?”

That’s proactive chat. Those little pop ups as soon as you land on a page? Proactive pop ups.

And you know when you linger around an item for awhile, and then maybe someone comes over to see if you need any help?

That’s reactive chat. Those pop ups that show up when you’ve been chilling on a page for awhile? Reactive pop ups.

And then, there are the times when you go to a place, you know people are there to help if you need it, and you can go find them.

The online equivalent to this is having that chat icon letting people know that you’re there. You’re just a-waiting. 

Each kind of chat has problems and benefits.

The lady waiting when you walk in a store (online or in person) can be abrasive, but maybe considerate sometimes. People who go after you when you’re browsing can feel like they’re lingering hawks headed straight for your wallet, but maybe they’re just trying to help. Sometimes, you need help but you don’t know exactly what you need help with. So what the hell do you type into the chat box?

The best chat apps will attempt (and maybe succeed?) in balancing all the benefits and drawbacks, resulting in the least annoying, most helpful user experience.

10 Best Chat Apps to Make Chatting Suck Less for Your Users

• Tidio: Start reaching your customers using these low cost, flexible options
• Chatra: For a single pringle enterprise to be able to talk to their customers
• Sendinblue: Meet every need for you and your customers (and more)
• JivoChat: All the necessary chat features you and your customers need
• Acquire: Help your customers in every way, through calling, chatting and screensharing
• Crisp.chat: For individuals and early stage startups to build relationships
• Hybrid.chat: For chatbots that aren’t hateful, and are industry relevant
• Intercom: For bringing the humanity back into the equation (which is not cheap)
• Velaro: Learn literally everything about your customers
• Supportbench: Just because your company is large doesn’t mean you can let customers (and support staff) fall through the cracks

Tidio: Make good with your customers and your wallet.

There are a lot of ways to get free chat apps. Most of them include selling your soul—well, your business’s soul, because you have to carry around their branding and pay to remove it. 

Tidio, on the other hand, offer 4 regular plans and customizable professional plans. With no branding whatsoever.

The free plan allows up to 3 chat operators (the people who chat with your customers) to send up to 500 emails a month and have an unlimited number of chats. Chatbots are included and can reach 100 unique visitors a month, meaning that a chat can have an unlimited number of messages between itself and another person, but only with 100 different people a month. You can make several chatbots, though, using their chatbot templates.

Will it suck if you run out of email/bot capabilities halfway through the month? For sure. If that happens, tack on the chatbot and/or communicator plan to expand your capabilities. You always have the capabilities of the free plan. And then you can add on chatbots, more live chat capabilities (like live visitor lists, which is not creepy at all), and email marketing. You can have all of these at the same time.

Pricing is as follows:

• Free: Free
• Chatbots: $18/month
• Communicator: $18/month
• Email Marketing: $10/month 

Professional plans are custom priced, but you’re probably on a budget if you’ve heard the siren song that is cheap. So, for those with little to no cash flow, who don’t want to be branded by their chat app service, Tidio is for you.

Chatra: For all you single pringle business owners out there to connect with your customers.

A lot of these plans I’m looking at are better for larger enterprises or smaller, but more dedicated, teams.

But what about the 1-2 person businesses that are out there? All the single pringles or tiny teams who just want someone to talk to at night—and during business hours?

Chatra is the one for you. 

This is not to say that Chatra is weak in the chat app world. It’s a robust app. You can add chat widgets to multiple sites, and they’re all device responsive. Chats can be in several languages (but they won’t be translated in the chat, so make sure to set to languages you actually know). You can integrate your chats to Facebook, email, Slack, etc. 

The reason this app is for smaller ventures is because you can manage your time well, and, of course, pricing.

Answer questions while offline, set offline hours, and take tickets. If you’re a one man show, you’ll really appreciate being able to manage customer contacts easily. Create and deploy any number of simple chat and form bots.

You’ll be able to take a breath, if you will.

Pricing:

• Free: Free
• Pro: $15/month/agent

If there are only 1-2 people working on a business, project, etc., Chatra has more than enough capabilities to make reaching your customer. Questions and problems are easier to manage and solve. And it’s super cost effective. The free plan alone lets you chat using a customized widget on several sites. And this is without any branding or messaging limits.

It’s hard to be alone. Feel a little less alone with the best chat app for individuals and small teams. Even larger teams on a budget can use their team chat. But if you have the money for it, you may want to invest in advanced, scalable chat apps.

Sendinblue: A chat app to meet your customers on all fronts.

Sendinblue is a feature rich, high action software that aims to meet your customer base at every point in their journey. And just about everything your customer sees can be customized by you.

The company started out as a marketing agency who saw no cost-effective email marketing solutions. So they started there, and then grew to one of the most competitively priced communication marketing tools I’ve ever seen.

Their 100% free plan has the Sendinblue logo on it. But the trade off is surprisingly decent. In addition to chat features, you have access to unique email designs and email marketing capabilities. Customize SMS for SMS marketing. You can have an unlimited number of contacts, and send them unique sign up forms and transactional emails.

Every plan has advanced segmentation features to send your customers the appropriate messages at the appropriate times.

You can only send up to 300 emails a day. But hard bounces (as in, users who leave your page so quickly they probably clicked it by accident) are automatically blacklisted, so you don’t have to waste emails on them.

Higher level plans allow for landing page building, Facebook ads, A/B testing to optimize every part of the customer journey. And send messages at the optimal time of the day according to customer data. 

Sendinblue does not appear to have chatbots, but they have canned messaging and automatic chat/email messages that you can schedule, or that are fired off when triggered. I don’t know how you feel about having chatbots. But if you want just straight bot and not much else, you’re not here for this.

The perceived downside (besides bots?) of Sendinblue is their email limitations. They seem to have strict monthly email limits (but not chat limits). But you can customize the number of emails you can send without having to automatically jump to a higher plan.

Plans are:

• Free: Free
• Lite: $25/month
• Premium: $65/month
• Enterprise: Ask.

I know we’re supposed to be talking chat here, but Sendinblue does it all. I’m not going to keep their greatness a secret. For those with lofty communication marketing goals, especially for email, Sendinblue is the best for you (I’m sorry for the rhyme, but it was right there.)

JivoChat: However your customers interact with you, you’ll be there. Jivochat goes with everything.

The sheer power of JivoChat lies in compatibility with everyone and everything. 

You can add JivoChat to your WordPress site, your Weebly site, your Squarespace, your Shopify, your Whatsapp for Business, Apple Business Chat—the software could probably integrate into your house and live there if you really wanted.

Add it to Facebook, integrate the app with your email and answer email support questions as quickly as you answer chat messages.

Users can reach you from any browser or mobile device. Set JivoChat to one of 20 languages based on their geolocation, which you can pull from their IP address. With the advanced plan, live chats can be translated in 90 languages. 

Of course, customize your chat widget to reflect your brans, including color, font, and on higher plans, tone of speech.

Higher plans allow you to create canned responses, transfer chats between agents, transfer files to customers, set business hours—the list just goes on. You can design proactive chat if you want, and collect info before on in chat. (A lot of people find that annoying though, so maybe skip it.)

A lot of JivoChat’s features are “simple,” in that you simply should just have them.

How much is a fully fleshed out chat service going to cost? Glad you asked:

• Free: Free.
• Professional: $13 per agent/month.

If you want a chat app that can be used pretty much anywhere, JivoChat is the best chat app for you. If there’s somewhere that JivoChat won’t integrate into, their Developer API will help you make it happen.

Acquire: To help your customers by any means necessary.

Using Acquire isn’t going to let you help your customer find a new kidney. Or would it? I don’t know.

It will do everything else, though, or at least when it comes to chatting, it will.

Acquire gives you several choices when it comes to responding to customer inquires and problems. Agents can chat with customers. You can create automated messaging for standard questions. Set up categories for users to get to their answers faster. Start with highly customizable chatbots, and make it very easy to connect with a person.

Making it easy to connect with a real person? That makes chats less annoying.

They also make it easy for you to answer questions on any and all platforms where leads comment or question, from. This includes Facebook, Twitter, to email, live website chat and reviews. You can make sure no question or comment is left unresponded to with Acquire’s Unified Agent View, which pours all of this into one platform.

You also don’t lose sight of customers as their previous interaction with your business are kept and analyzed to get to know your customers better. You can tailor make experiences for certain segments of customers, leaving out all the irrelevant shit for them.

Leaving out irrelevant material? That’s definitely helpful.

One of the best features of Acquire though, is cobrowsing.

When speaking with someone about a problem they’re having on your computer, it can be hard to get to the root of the problem. It’s hard to describe what you can’t see, and annoying when you feel like customer service agents should know all the facets of a website or software.

Cobrowsing lets customer service agents share your screen, which allows customers and agents to literally be on the same page. The problem can be fixed, right then and there, by an agent. And customers can see exactly what’s going on.

How much does it cost to be some of the most helpful customer service providers out there?

I don’t know. You have to request a quote. This usually means expensive. For a larger business, who gets a considerable number of questions and comments a day, this is a great chat app for you. 

Crisp.chat: For individuals and small businesses to build a relationship with their users.

Crisp.chat really hit their mark when it came to embodying their brand. This sleek, simple, cost effective app has built their own CRM software to really track a customer’s journey, and in doing this, build a relevant idea of who they are.

They have also taken chatbots to the next level. You don’t just “choose a template,” define, like 3 triggering rules and then send it into the world to piss off your customers. Crisp.chat’s visual chat bot builder lets you map out entire customer scenarios to take them on the right path and the right time. Make a custom chatbot, and then deploy it over the several channels you can use to chat with customers.

As soon as chatting becomes less of an inquiry and more of a problem, customers are sent directly to a real person, seamlessly. They’re routed to the right department, to the right people to fix their problem, by a smart chatbot.

Smart chatbot—didn’t think I was ever going to say that.

Design and deploy marketing campaigns, with a personal touch. Use Crisp.chat’s customer engagement data, or import your own, to segment and personalize campaigns. You can even personalize messages, and add in your branded material.

This all sounds great, so why is it for small businesses?

Answer: the pricing:

• Free plan: Free. Allows for 2 agents.
• Pro plan: $25/month/site. Allows for 4 agents.
• Unlimited: $95/month/site. Allows for unlimited agents.

Great customer service capabilities, great pricing—this is the chat app equivalent of someone you can take home to your mother.

Hybrid.chat: You asked for chatbots. They brought the chatbots. And other automation tools.

Hybrid.chat isn’t just for automated widgets, and pop ups, and chatbots…but the app mostly for automating things, yes.

Their products are separated by purpose and industry. Things Hybrid.chat bots are used for:

• Lead generation
• Customer support
• Customer engagement
• Appointment booking
• Feedback and surveys

There are industry specific chatbots for law firms, hotels, yoga studios, too many to list. If you hate them all, build your own. Try them out quickly, gather feedback, tweak, and do it all over again. That’s the nature of getting things just right.

Hybrid.chat has other things, too. Automated messaging, autocomplete for forms, welcome messages (again, could be creepy depending on the wording and pop up method), and geolocation tracking. Add buttons, and build bots into landing or Facebook pages.

Hybrid.chat has the good sense not to make their chatbots do too much. Their chatbots are for the kind of tasks that are literally so easy anyone could do them. They’re pop up bots to fill in appointment bookings or answer pricing questions. They are made to have simple conversations, and send anything more than that to an actual person.

This is when bots can be used for good. Just for making simple things, like filling in a form, even simpler.

Although, again, some of these bots are proactive bots. Time them right, only on certain pages, and you should cause minimal disturbance to your users.

You get all the automated features, but only one actual chatbot. The chatbot can be platforms on several platforms at once. You can use it on your website and on Messenger. Or add it to your ecommerce site. But, one chatbot, for one simple thing. And the rest are just greetings, customer messages, gathering customer data, etc.

Plans:

• Free: Free. Hybrid.chat branding is present. And you only get 100 conversations a month. This includes agent and bot interactions.
• Basic: $29/month for an unlimited number of agents. 1,000 conversations.
• Pro: $79/month for an unlimited number of agents. 10,000 conversations. 

If you want a straightforward chatbot that does exactly what it’s advertised to, and some other automation stuff, then go to Hybrid.chat. It’s the best low cost, simple to use chat app for using bots.

Intercom: The app that’s elevated chatting to conversation. Humanity is expensive, but worth it.

Chatting, by nature, feels a little insignificant, lackluster. Conversation, on the other hand, feels meaningful.

Customers want to feel meaningful.

Intercom is there to help you help them feel meaningful, using conversational marketing and support.  

Chatting becomes a conversation—even when there are several people talking at once via chat, email and social media—by layering human, self service and proactive support. They have truly balanced human and AI powered support.

Bots can be programmed for use at any stage of your site visitor’s journey. Collect user rich data to customize exactly what a bot will say at any given point. Create very specific routing paths to meet your customer’s needs. Keep your messaging bots on-brand by programming exactly what they’ll say.

Proactive bots are only used on the kinds of leads you want, and the kinds of leads who have engaged with your bots before. If a user doesn’t get what they want from a bot, they won’t have to see it again. (Read: not annoying.)

Custom bots can also direct users to the right resources at any given time (but only for the most basic topics. Anything else is pushed to a person.) They can also prioritize concerns to make sure the most important ones are answered the fastest. Really, the angriest customer should probably be attended to first.

Use conversational marketing by casually bringing up sales, discounts or events to the right audience. And give interactive product tours to show and solve customer pain points (this is an add on feature. A good one.)

Related: Want to make push notification marketing work for you? Let’s get to work here.

Intercom makes interacting with people, within or outside a company, easy. Comfortable, even. Customer questions can be answered on whatever platform they were asked on. Facebook messages are answered on Facebook. Google reviews are responded to there.

But agents are sending everything out from one platform. They can also transfer chats, and communicate from within Intercom. Intercom also integrates with services like Slack.

Seems like a wonderful product. Is it going to cost an arm and a leg? You tell me.

• Start: $39/month. 1 agent max.
• Grow: $99/month. 5 agent max.
• Accelerate: $499/month. 10 agent max.
• Scale: $999/month. 10 agent max.

Intercom is the best chat app for companies who want to talk more, and chat less. It’s for those who have the kind of money to invest in starting conversations with their customers. It’s a way to build relationships on a large scale.

Velaro: The best chat app to stalk customers. No, actually just to gather their opinions and behaviors.

If you don’t know someone, you don’t really talk to them, right?

So why would someone online want to talk to you, or your chatbot? It’s kind of weird to talk to someone who has no sense of who you are.

Valero aims to mitigate the shot in the dark that consumers can be. Valero sets up chats as on opportunity to reduce cart abandonment. Every chat, to Valero, is an opportunity to test out a chat format. The end of every chat is an opportunity to ask for feedback, about agents or the experience in general.

Track visitors in real time. Get an entire history of every time a user has interacted with your site, from page views, to clicks, even what their eyes spent the most time looking at. Use geolocation tracking, view chat histories, and entire saved transcripts. Use this, and a shit ton of other data, to build entire customer personas. Build custom chats, marketing campaigns, and user experiences, very specific people. Segment people with this very in-depth level of consumer data and then talk to them.

You now know them. Very well.

Other fun surveillance things: agent surveys, management chat reviews, shadow chatting (where someone else silently watches your conversation from the metaphorical corner and then rates the agent afterwards. Not creepy. I love it.) But how else are your conversations going to improve?

Valero knows: To effectively talk to someone, you have to know them. 

And talking, turns into leads, turns into conversion. That’s the grand master plan, right?

Pricing:

• Small business: $64.95/user. Unlimited numbers of messages, conversation, etc.
• Professional: $179.95/user.
• Enterprise: Ask.

This service seems more geared to midsize to large businesses. But you also have the ability to build bots, and prioritize messages, so maybe a smaller team could use this app?

Valero is the absolute best chat app for learning literally everything about your customers, customer service force, and maybe yourself. who’s to tell? (Valero is.)

Supportbench: No one gets sidelined in a big company. Not customers, or support staff.

I can think of very little instances in customer service that are worse than calling a big company about a problem. You have to go through the phone options, wait on the line, and once someone picks up, they tell you you’re in the wrong department.

Or, they don’t have the ability to help you. So they make you wait while they find someone else. Or they fumble altogether trying to help you when they just can’t. It’s okay that they can’t, but I wish I had been directed to someone who could in the first place.

This is what Supportbench is working to mitigate in large companies. Customers are tracked, prioritized, and sent to the level of professional that is qualified to help them solve their problem. They can monitor the progress of their case being managed, and be notified when it is finished and/or the problem is resolved.

And at the end of the entire case management process, send out a branded, segmented customer survey. Use this to learn more about your customers, and to know that you care what they think.

Calendar and case management tools are in place to keep your company’s team on schedule and increase communication between team members. Agents write copious notes for every case, so no information is lost. No follow-up or ticket is left unnoticed. No one is left behind.

It’s easy to manage your team on Supportbench, too. Agents expectations can be set and monitored. Scheduling tools are available to ensure that you have coverage during your defined operating hours. 

Supportbench is one of the best chat apps to support you while you’re supporting others. Midsize to large businesses, bring your chat needs to Supportbench. They’ll take care of you.

Lots of marketers says chat apps are great. They’re usually not. But they can be.

Chatting is a way of communicating with people. Think of talking online in the same way as you would with an actual person.

The best chat apps think of chatting like this.  Chat widgets shouldn’t be invasive, nor should they be completely nonexistent. Chatbots should be there to bear some of the load, but nothing more than a bunch of light needs—featherweight light ones.

The lesson here: Try to be less annoying. Try to be more helpful. Use one of these apps to help you with that.