Smooch

Smooch gives your team a way to chat with customers - while your team chat using Slack, your customers can chat through your website, app, or other services.

Here's how it works: you install the live chat widget inside your web application, and you connect Smooch to Slack. When a customer attempts to chat with you on the website, Smooch will automatically create a new customer avatar, name and channel for that conversation. You'll get a notification that the chat has started, and you'll be automatically invited to the channel. Normal chat inside that channel is between your team members, and you can chat to the customer using the /sk slash command.

On the plus side, we think it's great to have a way to integrate your internal conversations with your customer conversations in the same tool. We also found it easy to set up Smooch, and the tool works as advertised. As a bit of a bonus, you can also configure automated messaging - so an automated message is sent to a website/app visitor when they trigger a particular event. Smooch will also automatically archive channels that haven't had a chat in the last 6 hours. We also really liked the fact that you can integrate Stripe payments directly into Smooch chat.

We found that the Smooch interface was a little harder to learn, compared to their competitors with dedicated (outside-of-Slack) chat clients. Some of the things we'd come to expect in other tools, like integrated analytics or emoji support, aren't included in Smooch yet

We are really impressed that Smooch provides a generous 10,000 monthy active users limit on their free play. Businesses with higher customer volumes will need to move to the paid service.