Live chat
Talking to visitors while they are still on the page.
What breaks first
Chat is easy to install and hard to staff. The tools separate on what happens when nobody is free.
Look at routing rules, queue behaviour, out-of-hours capture, and whether an unanswered chat becomes an email thread or vanishes. That single path decides how many conversations you lose.
Bots and handover
Almost every product now ships some automation. What matters is the handover: does the bot pass context to the human, and can the visitor escape it in one step?
A bot that traps people costs more goodwill than it saves in tickets.
How you get charged
Per agent is common, but watch for a second meter: conversations per month, contacts stored, or resolutions by the bot. Two products at the same seat price can differ by a factor of three once volume is counted.
The visitor side
Load weight matters on a marketing site, and so does the mobile widget. Test on a phone with a poor connection, and check what happens to the chat when the visitor navigates to another page.