Provide Support Live Chat Review (2023): The Complete Guide

Today’s Provide Support live chat review takes a behind-the-scenes look at a convenient solution for customer support in the digital world.

We’re living in a world where customers are searching for quick and convenient guidance from the companies they interact with, often using methods beyond the traditional phone call.

Live chat has become more than just a convenient option for business leaders. It’s essentially a must-have. Around 79% of companies say adding live chat functions to their site has increased sales, revenue, and customer loyalty. What’s more, around 42% of customers say they prefer real-time online chat as their number one tool for communication.

Provide Support is just one of a huge selection of tools catering to this live chat phenomenon. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the features, pricing, and everything else you can expect from this high-quality support software.

What is Provide Support?

While some companies still see live chat as a relatively new addition to the service space, it has actually been around for much longer than most realize. Provide Support, for instance, has been offering live chat and real-time monitoring features since 2003. Today, the company has over 10,000 customers worldwide, and an excellent reputation.

Part of what makes Provide Support unique is the company’s unique selection of available features. Rather than focusing exclusively on live chat, the organization decided to combine a convenient way of communicating with customers, with an easy-to-use monitoring system.

With Provide Support, you get a “live chat” tool you can add directly to your existing website, complete with meaningful insights into customer conversations, transcription, and a state-of-the-art integrations system. There’s also a dedicated “self-hosted” corporate chat available.

Provide Support also commits to offering phenomenal service to their own clients, through rapid real-time support delivered via the Provide Support website. As an added bonus, all of Provide Support’s tools are cross-platform ready. You can access the live chat tools across desktop, mobile, and even on a browser, so any agent can stay up-to-date with customer conversations.

Provide Support Live Chat Features

The heart of Provide Support’s product portfolio is its dedicated live chat functionality. The embeddable, and highly customizable live-chat window comes with a range of added extras, liker a native spell checker, chat statistics, and excellent security.

The “chat” technology is constantly updated to suit the latest trends in the customer service market, and Provide Support spends a lot of time evaluating feedback from customers to make the service more appealing. This ensures every interaction is as effective as possible.

Some of the features of the “chat” application include:

• Embedded chat: You can either choice to embed the chat window onto pages of your website, or create a pop-up, depending on the experience you want to provide. Everything works seamlessly with your existing website, so there’s minimal coding required.
• Security: Every live chat session is conducted through an encrypted channel. This helps to ensure businesses can keep conversations and sensitive information as safe as possible, particularly in an age where customers are becoming more concerned about their data.
• Live chat history: Not only can you keep a close watch on your chat sessions over time, but you can also receive chat transcripts via email, and allow visitors to send themselves their own chat conversations via email.
• File transfer: You can transfer files of up to 100MB directly through the live chat window. The “preview” function means it’s easy to see audio, images, video files, and other content presented within the chat window.
• Canned messages: Enhance and augment your customer support team with pre-defined responses to your customers’ most frequently asked questions. You can also use your analytics to track which canned messages work best.
• Proactive chat: Using the live website monitoring functionality included with Provide Support, you can invite your website visitors into chat by proactively sending them invitations. This can help with boosting engagement and conversions.
• Pre chat survey: The pre-chat survey function allows companies to ask visitors for extra information about their experience before stating a live chat session. This makes support more efficient and convenient for everyone involved.
• Post chat survey: The post-chat survey means you can collect insights into how customers felt about the overall chat experience. This can be useful for adding more context and human insight into your analytics.
• Customer details: If your website has already collected information about your chat contacts, you can pass contextual information to agents. This reduces the need to ask repetitive questions about what customers were doing, or looking at.
• Chat access restrictions: You’ll be able to block access to your chat tools from specific Ips, subnets, countries, or URLs. This gives you more control over the kind of messages you receive, and can improve security.
• Data protection: Provide Support allows companies to remove visitor IP, host names, and other information from real-time monitoring systems and add mandatory data processing consent checkboxes to chats too.

Customization

One of the biggest selling points of the live chat functionality offered by Provide Support, is how customizable the experience is. The technology allows business leaders to make significant changes to the operator console, adding company logos and greeting messages.

You can add images for team members, so your customers can get an idea of who they’re going to be talking to and enjoy a more “human” experience. There are also “localization” features, to help ensure the right messages reach the correct people. Though Provide Support can’t translate your chat into every language, there are dozens of options to choose from to help you provide a more global service.

Other ways to customize your live chat experience include:

• Changing the size and position of the chat window within your website pages
• Adding your own logo, colors, and other branding elements to the widget
• Switching between embedded and pop-up chat window modes
• Themes to alter the overall appearance of your chat with a couple of clicks
• Custom title and logo for your chat windows
• Live chat buttons with a range of colors. You can also use a text link as a live chat button
• Chat button status options, to show when your agents are available and online
• Pre-chat and online forms you can customize to suit your brand messaging
• Custom post-chat surveys with a range of gallery options and rating methods to choose from
• Offline chat mode for prompting visitors to leave messages when advisors aren’t available
• Custom system messages to immediately respond to your audience when they send a message
• Default visitor name settings so you can immediately see who you’re talking to
• Chat features toolbars for your teams, so they can see how to send files and audio quickly

You can also hide the “Powered by” message at the bottom right of the app if you have a paid account with Provide Support. This makes it easier to ensure your branding is the main focus of the experience for your audience.

Website Monitoring

As mentioned above, Provide Support goes a little further than your standard live chat application with its range of services and solutions. Alongside your chat widget, you’ll also have access to convenient real-time monitoring functionality.

The real-time visitor monitoring tools means agents in your team can do a lot more than simply keep an eye on ongoing chats from a shared inbox. You can also see which team members are already dealing with certain chats, and where the customers in those conversations are located in the world. There’s a clear insight into the visitor activity of your users when they land on your website too.

The live monitoring system gives you an overview of every page your customers have visited, as well as how long they might have spent on certain pages. Plus, you can check visitor browser and operating system details, to provide them with instructions more relevant to their situation.

The live monitoring functionality comes with referrer information tracking, to see where your customers have come from, such as Google or Facebook. Plus, the location and local time features ensure you can send more relevant messages based on where your customers are.

Alongside the convenient website monitoring functionality, users also get access to analytics for:

• Monitoring: You can check the performance of the whole company and individual operators or departments within your chat team. Metrics measured include the number of conducted chats by any individual, the acceptance rate of your agents, and average chat acceptance delay. There are also other metrics available at a company level for each department.
• Timeline detailing: You can view generalized and specific data for selected periods as a table, expanding everything to view timeline charts representing the hours, days, and weeks of your schedule. Depending on the reporting period, you can also zoom into different parts of the timeline to learn more about periods of peak demand.
• Reporting: Provide Support allows businesses to convert information from their chat system into custom reports for any period. This ensures you can share useful insights about your chat strategy with other business leaders and stakeholders.
• Comparisons: If you want to track the difference between your team’s performance in two specific time periods, you can compare specific metrics on one timeline and find various dependencies.

Provide Support Agent Apps

Notably, the functionality offered by Provide Support isn’t just focused on your customers, it takes the needs of your agents into account too. There are various workflow customization options. For instance, you can intelligently distribute calls and conversations to members of your team based on specific requirements and business operations. There’s also a simple environment where team members can handle several live chat sessions concurrently.

Team members can transfer live chat conversations with all included context to co-workers. Plus, there’s the ability to set up chat routing to different departments, depending on the questions asked. Native mobile and browser-based apps ensure team members can stay productive anywhere.

The apps come with handy add-on features too, like hot-key combinations to speed up responses, an included spell-checker, and customs system notifications. You can also add your live chat buttons to social media, and access a range of integrations for additional context.

Provide Support’s integrations cover everything from CMS technology, to shopping cart software integrations and email newsletter links. Provide Support even works with well-known services like WordPress, Wix, Microsoft Outlook, BigCommerce, GetResponse, Shopify, and many others.

Provide Support Pricing

There’s more to choosing the right live chat solution for your business than budget. However, you’re going to want to ensure the technology you choose is affordable for your team. Like many SaaS companies today, Provide Support does offer discounts to companies willing to sign up for an annual plan, rather than paying on a month-to-month basis.

There’s also a free trial for this tool, which supports unlimited agents, and all of the features you need for up to 10 days. After that, your paid options include:

• Small Business: $15 per month for one agent, with all of the features mentioned above, and the ability to remove the Provide Support branding.
• Corporate: $30 per month for 3 agents, with all the features and no branding from Provide Support.
• Enterprise: $60 per month for 10 agents, with the option to add extra agents according to your needs. This also includes all of the live chat and monitoring features.

Provide Support Live Chat Review: Verdict

Provide Support live chat is a fast and powerful solution for companies in search of a convenient way to track customer interactions, and connect with their audience. Everything is extremely secure, and you can add your chat functionality to as many domains as you want, with easy integration to all of your favorite tools. There’s even a 30-day money back guarantee if you’re not happy.

While the interface is a little dated in place, the experience is extremely straightforward, and Provide Support offers fantastic customer service to guide you every step of the way. The constantly updated series of tools and features also means you can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to offering state-of-the-art customer support.