ClickDesk Review - The Swiss Army Knife Of Live Chat

If you're looking for a provider that provides both a decent live chat support tool and also help desk , phone support and social media integration, you should take a closer look at ClickDesk.

ClickDesk is an all-in-one solution based in the US and India. Pricing starts at $9.99 per month for their Lite package (that's the price per agent). It supports a maximum of 5 agents. If your support team is larger than that, you can choose the Pro plan for $14.99.

To try it out, you can start for free and get a maximum of 30 chats per month. For a full comparison of their three tiers, check this table. Here is a glimpse of what you can expect:


Chat Client	ClickDesk Customization	Automatic Triggers

Click the images to get a larger view

Our ClickDesk rating in detail

Criterion	Rating	Comments
Ease of use		For the most part it's easy. However, some settings are not intuitive right from the start. For example, proactive chats are switched on by default which can be irritating if you don't expect it.
Setup		Add a code snippet to your site and it's ready to go. The software supports GTalk and Skype.
Appearance customization		You can choose between different colors and themes. Also, you can decide whether you want a classic chat bar or a chat button.
Chat features
-Chat client (that customers use)		Offers a wide range of features: add the agent's image, receive phone calls through Skype or your landline, and integrate your social media profiles.
-Chat agent console / use of instant messengers (IM)		Only third-party instant messengers like GTalk, Skype and third party IMs such as Trillian and Pidgin. You can use it on smartphones as well. Use /help (or \help) to show commands for special actions. You can also find a list of commands here.
-Proactive chats and Triggers		Set up automatic triggers that pop up after a pre-defined timeframe. We found them quite effective as you can specify different messages for different parts of your site. The only issue is that you can only deactivate the trigger by deleting it - a major inconvenience.
-Offline mode		You can customize two fields in the offline form to ask for details like a phone number.
-Shortcuts / canned messages		ClickDesk lets you specify pre-defined messages that you trigger with a command of your choice.
-Create chat protocols	Yes	Your visitors will receive a transcript automatically if they enter their email address in the chat client.
Tracking & live analytics	No	No live analytics available. You'll receive the visitor's basic information (country, browser) once the chat has been initiated.
Internationalization		Backend supports multiple languages. On our multilingual site it also worked well. Texts on the chat client can be customized and the automatic triggers can be specified via the URL. This way it's easy to trigger automatic messages in the right languages.
Integrations	Yes	Integrates with SugarCRM, Zendesk, Zoho, Highrise and others. Find an overview here.
More features
-Working in a team	Yes	Set up departments. Each department has its own website code: you can automatically send visitors of your website to sales, and users logged into the backend to tech support. Chats can also be transferred.
-Mobile support	Yes	Supports mobile instant messaging clients as well (e.g. GTalk, Skype or IMO.im).
-SSL encryption	Yes	All plans, even the free one.
-Ban users	Yes	Use the command /block to disable visitors from chatting with you.
-Log creation	Yes	Creates transcripts for each conversation and stores them in the backend.
Support	Live chat and email	Excellent live support, no help section unfortunately.
Overall rating		ClickDesk is a tool visitors really enjoy using. It offers a lot of smart features. From a technical standpoint we think certain areas could be improved.

Conclusion:

All in all, we like ClickDesk a lot. It’s certainly not perfect at the moment, but there are signs that the tools will improve in the future. We’ve experienced a couple of minor issues that, when taken into account all together, dampen the fun a little bit.

ClickDesk recently changed the way they handle the idle modes of GTalk. If you switch to "Busy" or "Invisible" your website visitors will still see you as "online," which we found rather confusing. You have to sign out completely from GTalk to be shown as "offline." If you are like we are, you will not always remember to sign out from your instant messenger every time you leave the desk to grab a coffee. That's why you can tell your instant messenger to switch to "Invisible" after 3 minutes for example. Unfortunately ClickDesk doesn't support the "Busy" or "Invisible" modes anymore, which leaves you at risk of unanswered chat requests.

On the bright side we got the feeling that our customers truly enjoyed using ClickDesk. Visitors are allowed to rate their chats, and the software probably contributed to the impressive number of five-star ratings our agents received.

For higher-rates alternatives to ClickDesk, please check out our comparison table.

Updates

14 Jun 2013 - Based on the high number of complaints we received recently, we decided to reduce the overall rating to 3 stars.
14 Dec 2012 - Changes to the way ClickDesk interprets the GTalks idle mode.
12-19 Nov 2012 - Initial tests

Last updated: 14 Jun 2013 | Robert Brandl

Found a mistake?

Did you find our review useful?

Your Opinion

We are very happy to receive questions and feedback from you in our comment section below! Please note: we will not allow any advertising or spam here.