Live chat and the help desk have co-existed for well over a decade now, but organizations are only just starting to realize the potential of integrating the two properly.

What exactly is live chat help desk software?

Most of us are familiar with at least some type of live chat help desk software. Essentially, it's a messaging application that allows customers (or potential customers) to contact your company.

This is usually done through a widget on your company website, by which customers and support staff can engage in a 'realtime' text-based chat conversation.

To many businesses, live chat is now considered as important a channel as phone or email is to overall support.

Live chat help desk interactions have a some significant positives. Customers love the speed and accessibility, whilst agents appreciate the parity with consumer messaging services they're already used to using. Live chat is also way more scalable; allowing agents to juggle multiple chats at the same time without negating the customer experience.

What should I look for in live chat for my help desk?

Live chat help desk solutions come in all shapes and sizes these days, so here's a list of six essential features to ensure chat support really works for your organization:

Contextual Routing
When customers visit your site or portal looking for support, you can make it super-easy to find the best agent for the job with custom chat fields. Custom chat fields licit and record information from customers who want to initiate a chat.

For example, you can use custom fields to determine the nature of their support request before they're connected to an agent.

Coupled with business rules and intelligent workflows, you can ensure that customers are routed to the best agent or department to solve their particular issue.

User Journey Insights
Sometimes, when customers reach out to chat with your organization, it helps to equip agents with information regarding where customers have been on your site before engaging with you.

For instance, a customer could be spending a lot of time on your product pricing web page, letting the agent know that they might have a related request.

User journey insights allow your agents to understand and preempt queries effectively - promoting efficiency and a frictionless customer experience.

CRM Integration
Agents do a better job when they're equipped with all the facts about the customers they're supporting. This is exactly why CRM chat integration is so powerful.

From within chats, agents can view entire customer profiles, and truly understand their ongoing relationship with your brand.

Access to full message history and other pertinent customer information means agents can deliver highly-personalized support interactions with ease.

Time-Saving Tools
Once customers and agents are engaged in a live chat, time-to-resolution is key. Agents can be involved in hundreds of chats each day, so using time-saving tools really makes life easier for everyone involved.

Let's take a look Deskpro's Snippets tool as an example. Snippets allows agents to create, use and manage pre-defined support responses in chats and tickets.

The right tools for the job like Snippets means you can boost productivity, eliminate errors and delight customers - all in record time.

Multi-Agent Chat
Sometimes an agent isn't able to quickly resolve a customer issue during a live chat - but their colleague might be able to. This is where multi-agent chat comes in.

With Deskpro, agents are able to simply add colleagues to live chats. This means that if the initial agent is struggling to find a solution during a chat, they can easily team up with available colleagues to deliver the best support possible.

Chat-to-ticket
No matter how effective your agents may be, not all chats are solvable in the first instance. In some cases, issues that customers raise during chats need to be escalated or explored further before resolution.

With a single click, agents can capture all the information from a chat interaction and turn it into a simple ticket within the help desk - ready to be solved like any other.

Finding a live chat help desk that works for you

A full-featured live chat help desk enables you to create meaningful human connections with your customers. For just $30 per agent per month, you can get full access to all Deskpro features and channels. Check out the powerful live chat features we offer as standard.