Infographic: Live Chat and Chatbot Market 2019

Live chat technology trends in 2019

Conversational marketing for on-demand consumers

Live chat and chatbot technologies are no longer the clunky, intrusive widgets you got used to ignoring in 2005. Customer service professionals, sales team members, marketers and even consumers understand the value of that age-old thing we call conversations in 2019.

Here’s the thing. Live chat and chatbots? They’re just ways to enable conversations faster between a consumer and a company. It’s the wave of always-on conversational marketing, where text-based customer contact technologies are being used as more than just a tool for customers to ask for help with FAQs. Companies can have meaningful conversations with people right on their site with conversational marketing enabled by live chat and chatbots.

As conversational marketing matures as a revenue-generating channel and live chat for lead generation becomes more ubiquitous, the market share of the companies that provide web chat tech (the backbone software for human to human conversational marketing) are in tougher competition.

In our infographic, we compiled data around web chat vs chatbot Google interest over time, the top live chat technologies, the countries with the most live chat usage and how these live chat technologies are faring in the battle for market prevalence.

Web chat vs Chatbot

It’s no secret that the hot topic in 2019 is chatbots. On both sides of the pond though, Google Trends reveal that chatbot Google queries are garnering more interest over time than those for web chat.

For the United States, search interest in chatbots overtook web chat as far back as 2015. Americans haven’t looked back since; web chat queries are on the slide while chatbot queries increased 2015-2017 before plateauing in 2018.

Here in the United Kingdom, things are a little bit slower. Chatbot search queries haven’t yet overtaken web chat search queries, but since 2016 it’s been a tight race.

Top 10 countries by websites using live chat

Countries like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom shouldn’t be surprises on this list! These markets jumped on live chat technology early and have been the markets where innovation in live chat strategy, live chat training and live chat outsourcing have matured.

Australia and the Netherlands aren’t shock entries on the list either. Strong economic growth in the new millennium and an emphasis on services makes these markets a comfortable addition to the conversational marketing top 10.

What’s really compelling here is that for every established market in the top 10 list, there is an emerging market to match. Russia, Brazil, Ukraine, India and Vietnam are all on the leaderboard. Those names just happen to be some of the fastest growing economies in 2019 according The Economist.

Top live chat technologies

Long time market leaders like LivePerson, Zendesk and LiveChat sit comfortably at the top of these charts. But clipping at their heels in 2019 are industry disruptors like Drift and HubSpot (the world’s favourite free CRM unleashed service-focused web chat and chatbot capabilities in 2018).

Take a peak at who stole who’s customers in 2018 to jockey for an increase in live chat market share in 2019.

How we gathered the data

We looked at the tough competition between 88 live chat technologies using data available on Built With and Similar Tech. We broke down these technologies’ live chat market share by use on the top global websites and their live chat market share wins and losses in 2018 to analyse what companies are leading the pack in 2019.

Find out what conversational marketing can do for you. Read more about the buzz.

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