LiveChat Software (WSE: LVC) is a customer service software company and developer of LiveChat software as a service-based help desk software and online chat software for e-commerce sales, customer support, and lead generation.
The company has offices in Wrocław, Poland, and Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It serves more than 28,000 paid customers in over 150 countries, including Adobe, AirAsia, Best Buy, Better Business Bureau, ING, Huawei, Orange, and PayPal.
History
Founded in 2002 as LiveChat Sp. z o.o. (LLC) in Wrocław, Poland, since October 2007 it has run as a stock company.
In October 2006, 50% of the company stock was bought by Capital Partners S.A., an investment and consulting firm publicly listed at the Warsaw Stock Exchange. In February 2008 Capital Partners S.A. decided to follow its strategy of having fewer companies but larger individual transactions and sold its entire stake along with another 13% of company stock to another publicly listed company, Gadu-Gadu S.A. This way LiveChat Software became another Polish company in Naspers capital group, joining Gadu-Gadu and Allegro.pl.
In January 2011, the management team sought to get back a controlling equity stake in the company and started a management buyout. After Naspers agreed in June 2011 to sell its entire stake, the founders teamed up with private equity firm Tar Heel Capital to finalize the buyout of the 60% stake. After the transaction was completed in September 2011, the founders own 60% of the stake, while Tar Heel Capital owns 40% of the company.
LiveChat Software has been introduced to the Warsaw Stock Exchange in April 2014 with the symbol LVC.
Products
LiveChat
LiveChat is the main product sold by the company. It is a live support software and help desk software used by companies to provide real-time communication with customers using different communication channels: online chat on the website and inside mobile applications, email, and social media (such as Facebook Messenger and Twitter).
LiveChat Software owns the technology it uses in the product, however, in areas unrelated directly to chat, the company relies on 3rd party services. Technology partners include Elastic for search and analytics engine, Postmark for delivery of transactional emails, Recurly for subscription billing, and Pingdom for performance monitoring and uptime tracking.
In the software market, the company cooperates with such companies as Microsoft, MySQL AB, Intel, and Red Hat.
ChatBot
ChatBot is the second product sold by the company. It was initially launched and developed as BotEngine and was rebranded to ChatBot in November 2018. It is an artificial intelligence-based bot platform. It creates intelligent chatbots to communicate with customers in messaging apps, such as Messenger and Slack. AI-powered chatbots and automated systems are changing the game by enhancing productivity and personalizing customer experience. It integrates with LiveChat. Other features include rich messages, an intelligent matching system, an entity system (that allow to validate and save user input), and an open API.
HelpDesk
HelpDesk is the third product sold by the company. It is a system for tracking, prioritizing, and resolving customer support tickets. Customers can leave messages for companies by using dedicated email addresses. Team members can create tickets if customer queries came from other communication channels, such as LiveChat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or a phone call.
All inquiries are collected as tickets and assigned the appropriate statuses and categories within the application. The application stores customer profiles and the history of their previous messages.
Knowledge Base
Knowledge Base is a tool that builds a self-service help center. It can be used both as an internal database for agents and an external public help center for customers. The internal widget is equipped with AI support that suggests articles to answer customer queries.
OpenWidget
OpenWidget is a free website widget and plugin software. It was launched in November 2022. It allows to add functionality to an existing website using one of the pre-defined apps, such as contact and feedback forms, product reviews and recommendations, and frequently asked questions templates. Such widget integrates with ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and website builders, such as WordPress. The authors claim "using AI for ecommerce personalization" to be their mission.