Live Chat
Was ist Live Chat?
Dieser Eintrag liegt derzeit nur auf Englisch vor.
Live chat is a real-time, text-based conversation channel embedded in a website or app, where a visitor exchanges messages with a business — typically a human agent, sometimes an AI assistant first — without picking up the phone or waiting on an email reply. Messages arrive instantly in a shared inbox, where an agent handles several chats at once or an AI answers routine questions and hands off to a human with the full history.
More detail
Live chat is synchronous but low-pressure: both sides are usually present, yet a message can wait a few seconds without the awkward silence of a phone call. That asynchrony is what lets one agent carry three to five conversations at once against the one-call-at-a-time limit of voice.
The strong deployment pairs automation with escalation: a chatbot or AI agent answers the routine questions instantly — order status, opening hours, password resets — and routes the exceptions, the complaints, and the high-value conversations to a human, passing the transcript so the customer never repeats themselves.
Live chat travels on persistent connections — a WebSocket or a long-polling fallback — rather than SMS or a phone line, so it costs no carrier fees and carries rich content: links, product cards, forms, and co-browsing sessions where the agent sees the customer's page.
The operational metrics mirror a phone queue: first-response time replaces speed to answer, concurrent-chat capacity replaces agent seats, and missed-chat rate replaces abandonment — the same contact-center discipline, applied to a text channel.
Häufige Fragen
- What is the difference between live chat and a chatbot?
- Live chat is the channel — the real-time conversation window on a website or app. A chatbot is a software program that may answer that window instead of a human. Most deployments run both: the chatbot takes the first turn and a human agent picks up the conversation when the bot's confidence is low or the customer asks for a person.
- Is live chat the same as messaging?
- Not quite. Live chat is session-based: the conversation lives in the page or app it started on and usually closes when the visitor leaves. Messaging channels like WhatsApp, SMS, and RCS are asynchronous and persistent — the customer answers hours later from their own messaging app, and the thread never expires. Modern platforms unify both into one inbox.
- How many chats can one agent handle at once?
- Typically three to five concurrent conversations, depending on complexity — the headline advantage over voice, where one agent can take exactly one call. Agent-assist tools and AI-drafted replies push the ceiling higher, but past a handful of simultaneous chats response quality drops measurably.
- What happens to a live chat when the visitor goes offline?
- A well-built live-chat system converts the session into a persistent message thread and, if the visitor left an email or phone number, continues the conversation on that channel instead of losing it — the transcript and agent assignment carry over either way.
See also
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