Why did we choose Crisp?

In this article I'll cover our experience with Crisp, why we switched, and how you can make the right decision for your business and startup as well. You will know how to compare live chats and which metrics could be important for you too.

What did we use before?

We've used multiple other live chat before, which somehow shifted their focus from a live chat to an "all in one business suite". Their live chat still works, but metrics which are important for us were removed. We've used those metrics for our monthly reports, and customer overviews, growth rates and more. After we were in for four months those metrics disappeared and were replaced by other metrics. We've got a leaderboard for our team members, which we did not use because we're looking for quality support and not quantity and the pricing seems to outperform the benefit. So our decision was clear at that moment: we had to move on.

How was that decision made?

Looking at the market leaders with live chat feature out there, we also found Crisp via Producthunt – thanks to rrhoover for pushing Producthunt content right into my Twitter feed. After we've made a Spreadsheet with multiple live chat vendors, we defined the core feature and metrics we were look for:

1. Amount of contacts
2. Chat history
3. Amount of agents
4. Trigger events/messages
5. Control the client via JavaScript
6. Integrations
7. Possibility to send campaign emails
8. Pricing

How many contacts do we need?

First, we tried to answer that question with another question "how many customers will chat with us?" - and that was wrong - we made that mistake already once. We can't limit on the contacts we make because we actually want to make contact with all of them. Unlimited contacts was what we were looking for (at a reasonable price tag). What we found were chats with 100 active contacts for €0/month which was quite nice, we scaled that up a bit to 1,000 active contacts and the price tag switched from €0/m to ~€125/m or even more (~€500/m). We've had that experience of price scaling for most of the solutions. As we did the same contact metric test for Crisp we saw something different:

So at Crisp, you do not scale by usage - which is huge! They think the same way we do at Storyblok, we don't want to limit the user to the usage of the system (eg. content entries or contacts), we want to scale as their team scales. So at Crisp you choose a plan and you can scale the numbers from 10 to 10.000 contacts (or more) with the same price tag.

Chat history

We found 14 days history, 30 days history and unlimited history (for higher plans this is common), also here the price scaling was interesting. All live chats we tried had that feature, some at higher price tags, others combined with a poorly implemented search feature, therefore the history wasn't accessible. With Crisp, the unlimited history is already available with their first paid plan, and it not only ships with a reasonable price tag, also their search works astoundingly well.

Amount of agents

The agent seats is kinda interesting, it's something you can control. You could choose one account for the whole team (which is cheap with most solutions), or you could go for one seat for each team member. Since we like to have that personal approach to our customers the idea of using one account for the whole team was dropped immediately. We've started to compare the first paid plan against most of the high tier plans to see how the price scales again. The highest prices we found were about ~€155/m per seat where the range was somewhere from €15/m to that. We had a look at Crisp again and saw that their highest package has unlimited agents seats included. Also, their free plan allowed 2 agents, which was great for testing.

Trigger events / messages

Automated triggers are used to send a specific message on predefined events, eg. "a visitor is on the same website for more than 30 seconds". Those triggers are a good way to help your audience with questions they may have. We use it on our pricing page since from time to time there are open questions about our pricing, maybe something isn't covered in the FAQ section. This part is available in all solutions we tested and mainly available in the first paid plan.

Control the client via JavaScript

We're using the live chat not only on the website but also in our application itself. Users may want to report an issue or simply have a quick question about something, therefore the direct integration, and a possibility to initialize and hide/show the client with JavaScript was a must-have. It was possible with most live chats we've tried, the documentation of Crisp about their JavaScript SDK is clear and well documented so we got that running in less than 30 minutes.

Integrations

Everybody loves integrations. Integrations to Slack, Telegram, Zendesk, Bitbucket, or Jira - you name it. Most live chats offer integrations to the main channels. We don't really use integrations that much, but the one we use the most is with Slack. Slack is the main communication tool in our company, we use it on a daily basis and added most of our tools already - so we focused on how they work and perform together with Slack. We tested some of them and most are actually working quite well. We found one that has huge delays when messaging from and to Slack which was a no-go for us. We reported that issue to them, but we don't know if they changed it since we left six months ago. With Crisp the integration worked instantly, notifications arrived immediately and the whole set-up was done in a few minutes.

Possibility to send campaign emails

From time to time we send emails using our live chat. We think it's a good way to retarget our audience because we should be able to send relevant content according to some metrics those live chats offer. To be honest, we're not sending many emails, because we also hate spam on our side. Therefore we like to send specific emails to specific target groups and again: we really like the implementation in the Crisp client. It's straightforward and satisfied our needs at a reasonable price tag.

Pricing

This one is tricky. If you read the last few points you saw that we compared the lower tier plans and feature with the highest tier plans, some are cheap at the beginning and become expensive as you use them. After using Crisp for six months now, and switched from a competitor because of that expensive "ending" and those feature we didn't need but would have to pay for. We are glad to say that we think we got the best fit for us, maybe it will fit as well for you. We saw that the list of 8 aspects above is all you need to find your own best fit.

What is Crisp?

"Crisp is the simplest way to communicate with your customers. From sales to customer support, Crisp is made to keep your workflow simple. From live chat to email, Crisp offers a single channel to reply to your users using a simple team inbox where you can manage all your user queries."

From our experience, Crisp really ships with the focus on that chat experience for your customers. Which is exactly what we were looking for as we evaluated other solutions.

Conclusion

We made contact with unbelievable great people (thank you!) and companies all around the world. We could have had the same experience with other live chats as well, but the price tag combined with the feature set Crisp does offer, we would and already do recommend it to all customers who are looking for a live chat themselves. We've upgraded to the Crisp unlimited plan a while ago, and are glad that we made that decision. If you have a question or want to tell us about your experience with Crisp and other live chats, feel free to drop us a comment below or send us a tweet or chat with us using Crisp!