The ultimate live chat features list (with examples)

Customer experience is evolving and customer loyalty increasingly relies on emotional connections with brands. To meet these expectations, live chat has become an essential tool for providing ongoing connections between customers and businesses. In this article, we explore 15 key features that make a competitive live chat experience, including low latency message delivery, automatic reconnection, channels and private messages, online status, typing indicators, read receipts, reactions, file and image sharing, targeted messages, push notifications, authentication, roles and permissions, message history and storage, message editing and deletion, and moderation. These features enhance the live chat experience for various use cases such as customer service, internal company communication, and two-way marketplaces. To implement these features, businesses can choose to build from scratch, use a Chat-as-a-Service provider, or build their own solution using a Platform-as-a-Service provider like Ably.