MyLiveChat Review

Detailed Reviews

Adding Live chat software to your website is one of the best ways to directly interact with your customers. CuteSoft Components Inc. based in Ontario, Canada is the company who has developed MyLiveChat. The primary goal of the company is to save time and effort required to handle the customers.

Pros

• The application collects huge information about the visitors which can be used for analytics.
• The chats and connections are kept secure with the use of 128-bit encryption and SSL certificate.
• Provides pre-written codes for different chat buttons, chat widgets, and chat boxes.
• Owns a template library having twenty different messenger templates which you can further edit.
• Idle Agent Policy to take actions against inactive agents.
• Option to hide the chat for visitors from a particular country or who speak a particular language.
• Charts and Reports section provides everything required to learn about agent-visitor interactions.
• The web account has an inbuilt text translator having prewritten messages for 40+ languages.

Cons

• Requires more account types with different access levels.
• You can add unlimited agents, but there is a restriction on the number of online agents.
• The web console is somewhat slow as for few instances it took more than a minute for getting started.

The dashboard and site monitoring

The first webpage that appears after you open the client contains the code you need to embed to your website for adding the live chat to it. This option can be found inside the Account Console which is present at the top menu option in the left panel.

Below that, we have the dashboard option from where we get the complete summary of our activities. You can discover the details about total chat, total messages, online visitors, and offline messages related to agent.

As an admin, you also get the power to access all the chat transcripts through the dashboard. For that, you need to add the agent name, and details such as chat session start and end dates, name of the customer, and email address. The feature seems to be very helpful when a user requires finding a particular chat session.

Other highlights of the dashboard are a graphical representation of chat sessions, subscription information, and option to manage agent accounts and department.

In the same account console window, you will find an option of site monitoring which provides you with the data about the online agents, total ongoing chat sessions, and the users who are engaging with the live chat.

The details such as the location of the user, the browser and operating system used by him, the page he visited, the screen size, and referral, can be obtained with ease. Adding a feature like this gives effortless access to the company to conduct analytics for learning about their website visitors.

MyLiveChat may have attributed to decrease your burden, but still, it may not be possible for you to handle all the chats alone. That’s why it is also important to provide agent and department management options.

Agents and departments

In the Manage Agents window, there is an option to add a new agent. It is good to know that MyLiveChat doesn’t put a restriction on a number of agents you can add. However, for free users, the provision is of having only one online agent at one time.

Clicking on the New Agent button, you need to enter details about the person such as email, login ID, password, etc. Other than these basic details, you can even set an account type: normal or administrator, set a maximum number of chats, and a greeting message.

This looks like an application that lets a user make adjustments even on a very minute level. However, it would be better if the application offers a greater number of account types. MyLiveChat can set these account types on the basis of access level.

In case, as an administrator, you need assistance in monitoring the agents and visitors, then you have to add another user as administrator as there is no access level other than agent and administrator. When you add a person as an agent, he will not be able to access the web UI, and thus, won’t be able to assist you.

After adding the agents, the next step is to distribute them under various departments. Creating a department would not even take a minute. You just need to add the department name, description, and assign agents.

There are multiple settings which makes it simpler for us to manage the visitors and chats. You can route a visitor to the same agent to whom he had chatted previously. It makes it easier for the visitor to explain the issue. That delivers a positive impression of the support team in the visitor’s mind.

You also get advanced settings related to departments such as department routing, pre-chat survey, and smart invitation.

If you believe in providing more flexibility to a user for conversing, then you can add an agent selector also. The user will know about the languages that the agents speak which will make him more comfortable in giving details of the issue.

The application also records the activities of your agents. You can track their total online time, and it also includes a daily time sheet showing start and end times of all the agents.

Adding a chat box to your website and deployment

As we mentioned in starting, it is straightforward to add the chat box to your website. All you need to do is to copy the HTML code and paste it in your website editor. You can check how the chat box will appear through the test page.

After adding the chat box, there are several other attributes which you would like to embed on various webpages.

MyLiveChat’s web account contains prewritten codes for these attributes. All the codes of various elements are segmented under different sections. You just need to copy the code on the clipboard and paste it in your website’s HTML code.

This will make it easier for a user to make the webpages engaging. In the deployment section, there is a chat Image Button option. When you go through it, you will find three different tabs under which different choices are present related to adding a chat button.

The leftmost tab contains the code which you directly need to paste in your HTML code wherever you want the chat button to appear.

In case you want to choose how the button appears, you have custom UI options. From this tab, you can select an image for your chat button. Depending upon agents’ statuses: online and offline, you can select different images for both the situations. Or else, why don’t you try uploading your own image by browsing it through the local device?

You can even alter the text written over the image in both the cases (online and offline). It is also possible to create dynamic chat image buttons. However, they have a different code which can be found here as well.

Such options are available for other tools too. You can decide the position of chat widget, set offset from all the sides, and select chat window type.

It allows you to include the links which will direct the users to the chat. It would be a good idea to add them on call-to-actions.

When it comes to messenger’s customization, you can select the one amongst the various templates. It is also possible to set an image along with the template.

Such flexibility renders credibility, and the possibility to edit every element as per our requirement and let us use the messenger as a branding tool.

While reviewing the other live chat services, we have found the services which allow us to add most of the elements which you are adding here. However, the ability to edit them was restricted which is not the case with MyLiveChat.

Customization features

As you move down, you will see options related to the embedded chat, i.e., it provides customization of messenger added.

They have a not-so-huge messenger template library which contains nearly twenty templates. In our opinion, these many options should be sufficient as a template only provides the base, and further editing is still possible.

The chat bubble which appears when we send or receive a message comes in six different layouts. You can even choose to make the window draggable and add social integrations to it.

An offset option similar to the one which was available for chat widget is present for messenger too.

Not only this but even the small elements such as chat button, etc. are treated with high importance. Allowing a user to change the chat button’s size, color, position, and text, shows their seriousness of delivering a unique chat box to the subscribers.

Next comes the visibility options which provides the choice of showing or not showing some of the elements to the website visitors. You can checkmark the elements which you wish users to view such as agent panel, agent photo, brand photo, etc. The similar options are present for various buttons also.

You can include or exclude the save transcript button by which the user can send a complete chat to himself. This can also be done for various other attributes such as notification, good or bad rating, adding timestamps, etc.

There are style options present for each element which you are customizing. In a message window, the chat bubble is the primary element which you can edit. Thus, the color, size, and font, for your name, your message, visitor’s name, etc., can be defined by us.

We contacted Provide Support as well to know about the range of their editing features. They provide an ample number of options out of which some are exclusive to the application. Still, MyLiveChat stand’s above it when the overall scope of editing is considered.

It is obvious that they provide a high level of editing in the pre-chat form and post-chat surveys also. You can edit the content and choose the field which you want to remain visible. However, you will not find any style options for them. Thus, here you will be dependent on the selected theme for the appearance of the chat box.

Charts and reports

After adding the chat box, customizing it according to your brand, and having a chat with customers, the next step is to conduct analytics through the data generated using chats. It is not possible to manually manage all the chats, and information related to the website visitors.

For such uses, it is essential that the application generates charts and reports by rearranging all the data. It would also be preferred to use the software which stores the data in such a way that it becomes easily accessible.

There must be multiple customers for whom chat transcripts would have been generated. These transcripts are stored on MyLiveChat’s servers. There can be cases when you need to dig out a particular transcript.

At that time, even if the transcripts are available, it won’t be possible to find the one out of all. Filter options can be the one way to shortlist the transcripts.

MyLiveChat has adopted the filter choices but in a different manner. You can add whatever information you have about the transcript such as agent name, start and end dates, department, etc., and it will show all the chats which satisfy the information added.

The application has included a graph to let the admin know about the number of sessions every day. This graph can be used to find out the weekdays when the engagement is the most and place more number of agents for those days.

There is another graph similar to the previous one. But in this case, it shows the number of chat sessions conducted by each agent. This helps to find out which of the agents are the most active ones amongst all, and which ones like snoring.

As we have mentioned in the previous section, there is an option to add a post-chat survey. If these surveys include rating an agent, and a user takes it benefits, the combined rating all the users will appear in the Visitors Satisfaction window present in the charts and reports section.

In the table, information about a customer, his IP, the rating, and comment (if mentioned any) will be visible. Above the table, there is a graph describing how various users are rating the chat. Such charts provide us with the idea where the room for improvement lies.

You can also check the chats per hour, and the messages obtained while the chat was offline. The missed chats can be provided for the criteria you select. Those chats can be exported as CSV file as well.

One more important feature which we found missing in many live chat services (although it is obvious to add it) is agent activity tracker.

The application creates daily time sheets by checking an operator’s online status every five minutes and categorize them in four ways: Online, Away, Busy, and Appears Offline. Selecting the busy and total online time, it is possible to find out the total connect time.

The whole charts and reports sections can be used to manage the working of the agents. The rating, comments, the number of engagements, all these factors significantly affect the online presence of a company. Hence, MyLiveChat should be appreciated for providing a way to conduct analytics through this data.

General settings

There are three predefined fields added in the pre-chat form which are name, email, and message. What if you wish to ask the user for their number or gender or any other detail? In such cases, MyLiveChat allows you to include custom fields.

These fields can not only be included on the pre-chat forms but in post-chat surveys as well. As we have already seen the use of post-chat surveys in the charts and report section, we can say that you would be already knowing how important it is to generate an efficient survey.

Using the fields such as Yes or no, Multiple Options, etc., can help to create a quality survey. All the field types are added-below. You can check and find if they have not added any field which you require. In our opinion, they have covered all the possible types.

In the settings options, you get the various email templates which were predesigned by the application itself. You can’t edit these templates by selecting the color, font, and appearance-related options. Instead of that, it is required to edit them by making changes in the code.

In general settings, every single feature holds a different tab. This provides us with ease to find an option.

Although having a 24/7 live chat is cool, but in case you wish to remain available for specific days for a specific period, then you can edit the operating hours. However, we are not sure what will happen if a chat is going on and the operating hours end.

It can’t be considered appropriate if the chat ends without the consent of the visitor. MyLiveChat must include a feature by which the admin gets the right whether he wants to end an ongoing chat when the operating hour ends. Although it appears less significant, it would be a valuable inclusion.

One of our favorite features is the Idle Agent Policy which is one of the best ways to keep the agents working. It allows the application to take various actions against the agent when they are inactive. In case, there are no visitors, the agent has no option but to remain inactive. In those cases also, if these actions are taken place against the agent, then it won’t be justified.

There are many more features that you can discover under settings. You can create canned responses, you can restrict the access depending upon the country and language, auto detection of visitors’ language and much more. You can have a look at the settings menu present in the added screenshot to get a better idea about its features.

MyLiveChat desktop console

It is not possible to chat with the consumers using the web-based application. An exclusive application which serves the purpose of making the conversation easy and efficient is required.

As you can check in the image, MyLiveChat’s Desktop Console is segmented in four sections. The Departments section shows the details about the agents who are online. Under this, there is a request queue showing the number of users waiting to talk with the agents.

You can notice an Auto Accept button in the queue section. It allows the application to start the chat with a visitor automatically. There are customization options included to define the console’s working. There are three different tabs which house general, auto accepts, and auto invite features.

On the right side, you can see the conversation window containing the features above the box where the agent needs to type the message. Gladly, they have included an immense number of formatting options. For adding canned responses, you will not need to go to another window or section as it is included amongst these options.

It is also possible to learn about the current visitors and get information such as online status, IP, total visit time, platform, browser, and obviously the details which he willingly provided through the pre-chat form. You can also choose to view the user on the map, and if necessary, you can also ban him by adding the IP address.

Moving to the menu options, an agent can define his online status by selecting one amongst the list of all the provided statuses. He can choose to select online, busy, away, and appears offline. However, when the trigger is enabled, it will automatically detect the status.

Some tools are also added in the menu bar. Using those tools, the admin can go through the chat records. This is similar to the chat record filtering feature which we discussed under the charts and reports section.

Security

Security could be a major factor on which your decision relies. As the account will surely contain information about the chats your agents had with the customers, it could be harmful if it gets breached.

Therefore, it is always suggested to rely on the live chat programs which offer a suitable level of security.  MyLiveChat offers SSL communication which means exchange of data remains protected while you communicate with your visitors.

When the chats are stored in their servers, it is protected with 128-bit key encryption. However, we are not sure about the efficiency of the encryption as they have not mentioned the name, but only the key length.

From integration settings, you can set an encryption mode by yourself for providing a layer of encryption during communication. For setting an encryption mode, you also need to add an encryption key. This provides an adequate level of safety while transferring files.

From privacy policy we found even though the security is high, a few employees, agents, and contractors can access the data. The permit could be because of several reasons. However, the company seems trustworthy if we consider their attempts to safeguard the data.

Conclusion

MyLiveChat is available for most of the platforms. For altering the account settings and customization, one needs to depend upon the web account. Visitors and conversations can be handled using online or downloaded consoles (not the web account). However, there is no downloadable application present for Windows and Blackberry Phones.

Talking about the features, there are endless ways how you can design your chat box. Using several combinations of different elements, it is possible to deliver uniqueness to your messenger. For this reason, it can act as a branding tool as well.

One thing on which application focuses a lot is the agent management techniques. There are several attributes such as idle agent policy, statistics for an agent’s rating, online status, etc. which helps to get the appropriate level of work from the operators.

There are a few minor improvements which MyLiveChat needs to do in the current features. Also, adding a calling feature would be expected which is present in JivoChat.

Overall, in case you need to manage a huge number of agents and believe in creating a unique interface where the agents and visitors can interact, MyLiveChat can be considered as a good option. As the free trial costs nothing and it remains free forever with most of the features available, you should at least try it once.