How to Quickly Add Real-Time Chat Functionality to Your Software Product

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Regardless of your field — whether it’s transportation, healthcare, education, or sales — you might need to implement live chat functionality in your web or mobile software. Live chat functionality will help your company ensure smooth and cost-effective online real-time communication between employees, partners, and customers by providing two main benefits:

Improved service and problem resolution. Real-time web chat helps your staff multitask, communicate with several users at once, and delegate tasks to colleagues. This enables organizations to decrease personnel costs compared to phone-based support.

Easy oversight of communication. The availability of chats allows administrators and supervisors to easily access chat histories and find bits of conversation by sorting and filtering. Administrators and supervisors can also benefit from reports that provide metrics on the team’s performance and customer satisfaction.

What hosted and self-hosted services we use to integrate live chat into apps

• LiveChat. The first solution we use is LiveChat, a popular customer service platform that according to Wikipedia is used by 27,000 customers from more than 150 countries. Large brands such as PayPal, IKEA, and Adobe use the service’s live chat software. LiveChat can be embedded in web, desktop, and mobile apps. It’s appreciated by users for its ease of use, for its rich feature set that includes a helpdesk tool and a chatbot that can communicate with several users simultaneously, and for ensuring great security (all conversations are protected via 256-bit SSL encryption).
• Pusher. Pusher is a hosted service that provides real-time communication and collaboration APIs (supported by easy-to-integrate SDKs for web, mobile, and back end) and cloud infrastructure that lets developers power their apps with real-time functionality such as instant messaging and push notifications. Pusher serves as a real-time layer between an app’s server and its clients. This layer enables stable connections to clients over WebSockets, which we’ll get back to a bit later. If your servers have new data they need to push to clients, they can do it in no time using Pusher.

Read our full guide to learn the difference between Live Chat and Pusher and get the furthrer instructions.