What is live chat?
Live chat is a channel where a website visitor exchanges messages with a human agent in real time.
Live chat has been the default answer to 'we should talk to visitors' for two decades, and its weakness has always been the same: it is only live while somebody is staffing it. Outside those hours the widget either disappears or quietly becomes a contact form, which is the moment most visitors give up.
Why it matters
The two are not competing options, and treating them as one produces bad versions of both. The division that works is by question type rather than by hour: automation takes the questions whose answers are already published — delivery, returns, pricing, hours, compatibility — because those are repetitive, identical for every customer, and available around the clock. People take everything about a specific account, order or complaint, because those need access and judgement no published page contains. The reverse arrangement, where AI handles the difficult cases and people repeat the shipping policy forty times a day, is how support teams burn out while customers get worse answers.
Examples
- A visitor at 2am gets the return window answered immediately rather than waiting nine hours.
- A visitor asking where their parcel is reaches a person who can look it up.
- An agent picking up a conversation with the transcript already attached.
Not the same as
Chatbot
Live chat is a person. A chatbot is software. The window they appear in is often the same, which is why the distinction gets lost.
Related
term
What is a handoff in customer support?
Every automated support system needs a way out, and the quality of that exit matters as much as the answers. A good handoff carries the transcript, so the customer is not asked to repeat what they already typed — which is the single most common complaint about support automation, and one that is entirely avoidable.
term
What is a website chatbot?
The term covers two very different things. Older chatbots follow scripts and break the moment a visitor phrases something unexpectedly. Modern ones retrieve from a business's own content and generate an answer, which handles arbitrary phrasing.
term
What is containment rate?
Containment measures where a conversation ended up, not how it went. A conversation is contained if it never reached an agent — including one where the customer gave up. This makes it easy to report and easy to game: removing the handoff button raises containment immediately.
use case
After-hours support that doesn't lose the lead
The gap between a question and an answer is where interest dies. Answering after-hours questions immediately — and routing the ones you can't answer to a form or booking link — keeps enquiries warm until someone is back at a desk.
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