Review

BoldChat

Bravestorm makers of BoldChat call their software a leading solution for live chat with a goal to offer the industry’s most sophisticated live chat offering. Our review of the BoldChat software gives you an in-depth analysis of its features leaving you to make up your mind on its true greatness.

Chat (one on one, one on many)

BoldChat provides multiple chat support with limitless chats and automatic chat distribution and queuing. Operators in specific departments can accept as many chat invitations at any single time. The number of requests coming to an agent would depend on the number of agents marked available and intending chat traffic.

Website Monitoring

BoldChat offers real-time website monitoring features allowing users observe site visitors with flora of non-personal information like the visitor’s country, keywords/search engine used, current page viewing, amount of time spent on the site, IP address, State/Province, and Entry URL – all displayed on the user interface. Website monitoring is largely available on all versions of BoldChat.

Proactive Chat

Proactive chat is a feature that live chat agents invite visitors to a website to individual chat sessions. Several industry analysis pose this as a growing means to convert traffic to sales with hightened chances of making a sale once personal attention can be given to a visitor. BoldChat’s proactive chat offering permits live chat agents invite visitors either manually or through a pre-defined set of rules fixed by the software administrator. Chat invitations are known to increase sales conversion rates with invitees been 6 times more likely to convert compared to a normal site visitor. This feature is not available in the Basic version of BoldChat.

SuperVising

The BoldChat Dashboard provides supervisors with a top-down view of the entire website communication operation. Service Level Analysis and Agent Productivity and ACD Reports are additional features for enhanced productivity monitoring exclusively available to the premier version.

Spelling

BoldChat presents support for spell checking across all versions of the software.

Supported platforms

BoldChat is Windows XP/Vista/7 compatible. The chat windows also work fine in Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Opera web browsers.

Canned Responses

For canned responses, the good thing here is that BoldChat offers searchable canned responses but on a sad note the interface does not readily lay out this feature so creating, editing and using canned responses may be a little difficult without some prior training or atleast a look at the user guide.

Pricing

BoldChat offers 3 versions of its software. Each version comes at a different price with of course more features being available upwards from the Basic, to Pro and Premier versions. Only the Pro and Premier versions of the software have support for multiple chat agents with discounts being given for a higher number of chat agents. An easy to use online calculator helps derive the final price of the software after entering the number of licenses required – live chat agents with simultaneous access to the software.

- BoldChat Basic costs $29 monthly for the first two licenses and would cost $314 plus a 10% discount for the annual payment plan.

- BoldChat Pro costs $49 monthly with the annual payment option costing $530 excluding the 10% discount on annual payments.

- BoldChat Premier costs $99 monthly with $1,070 for the annual payment with a 10% discount if you go with the latter payment option.

Additional features

• Automatic Chat Distribution and Queuing- BoldChat boasts an automatic chat distribution and queuing system across available live chat agents.
• Skill and department-based chat routing – Customers are routed to specific departments best suited to handle their queries. i.e. problems with overcharging gets handled by someone in the finance department, and so on.
• Post Chat Satisfaction Survey and transcript email – We especially liked the ‘print’ and ‘email’ icons allowing customers convert turn a conversation into a transcript to be printed out or sent to an email address. BoldChat also supports the inclusion of a post chat satisfaction survey to ascertain the level of confidence customers have in your live chat service.
• Salesforce Integration: BoldCCM includes a Salesforce module that allow the creation of cases, leads, and contacts from chat interactions.

Reports

BoldChat offers several types of automated reports including the chat summary report, Run chat reports, Salesforce summary, visit reports, conversion summary, operator reports (including operator productivity and activity) and several other types of automatically generated reports. One thing we liked about BoldChats implementation of this feature is that you can schedule reports so you get, for example, a chat summary every Monday or on whatever day of the week you wish.

Customizations

Whoever designed the User Interface for the BoldChat Software did a really good job of creating a software with a home screen that presents just about everything you need to start using the software like a pro. The mid-section holds quite a bit of a welcome text and instructions to help get you started with using the software and getting around the second part of adding some Basic HTML code in order to activate your live support service – integrating the software with your website. The Video Tutorial lasts for about 1.40 mins and that’s probably all you need to get a good grasp of what the software really does, supposing you didn’t already know before downloading. You can also chat with a staff for further assistance.

The Home Screen is customizable allowing you add panels like the ‘Navigation Pane’ for easy access.

Multiple Site support

The code generated by BoldChat may be used for several websites. The software may also be downloaded and installed on as many computers. Each code is HTML based allowing complete customization on the page it resides.

Security (Encryption)

BoldChat features 128-bit SSL encryption which is the industry standard right now. So you should have no fears over someone eaves on your conversions with customers.

Downloading and Installation

The Bold Software is about 7MB which should download in no time depending on your connection speed. Once downloaded clicking its icon will bring up the usual Windows InstallShield Wizard that we have grown accustomed with over the years. And by the way, Bold Chat offers no support for Mac or Linux users as of yet so that’s a bit of flaw in itself.

Installing the Bold Software shouldn’t pose any problems. It installs in about 2 – 3 minutes tops but don’t get all worked up if it takes longer on yours.

Once you are through with the installation, you do not have to restart your PC, just run the software and this screen comes up. Unfortunately, you don’t have the option to choose an SSL encrypted connection from the very beginning – but we found a small trick for that.

Putting in the wrong “User Name” or “Password” brings up almost the same login screen with an options button to toggle internet connection settings and guess what? You can also check the secure connection button and there you go.

Customer Support Representative Performance

Finally, you would expect BoldChat themselves to use some form of their own software so expect that when installed, your website would have a ‘Live Chat’ service with a similar interface to the pictures displayed above, and yes that includes the lovely print and message buttons that would email or print out an automatically generated transcript at the end of the conversion with a live agent. As site administrator, you may choose to include a post-chat survey to determine the quality of service provided by your chat agents.

---