What is Live Chat Support?
Last Updated September 28, 2026
Live chat support is a digital customer-service channel that connects customers with agents in a real-time text conversation. It is commonly embedded in websites, mobile apps or customer portals and can be managed through the same contact center platform that handles voice and other digital interactions.
Live chat vs. messaging
Common live chat use cases
- Product and purchase questions.
- Order or account support.
- Technical troubleshooting.
- Billing questions.
- Lead qualification.
- Digital journey assistance.
- Escalation from self-service.
Route chat by intent and skills
Chat conversations should be routed based on customer intent, language, priority and agent skills rather than simply entering one general queue. Customer context from the website or app can also improve routing.
When chat is connected to CRM and journey data, the agent can understand what the customer was doing before asking for help.
Use AI to improve chat support
AI can answer routine questions through a virtual agent, summarize the customer's history, suggest knowledge and draft responses for live agents. When automation cannot resolve the request, the handoff should preserve the transcript and information already collected.
The customer should not have to repeat the conversation when moving from bot to agent.
Staffing for chat
Agents may handle more than one chat at a time, but concurrency should reflect conversation complexity. Excessive concurrency can increase response delays and reduce quality even if productivity appears higher.
Workforce forecasts should account for arrival patterns, session duration and concurrency assumptions.
Live chat metrics
- Initial response time.
- Average response time.
- Resolution rate.
- Transfer rate.
- Concurrency.
- Abandonment.
- Customer satisfaction.
- Repeat contact.
- Bot-to-agent escalation rate.
Also related
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