Tidio Chat – Is it Worth your Money? Honest & Unbiased Review

I was running my dropshipping store on Shopify and that’s when I used Tidio Chat (Check Website) for the first time. I was looking for any free live chat plugin for my e-commerce store. Unlike WordPress, We don’t find a lot of free plugins on Shopify. Even Tidio Chat was a freemium plugin with 7 days Trial and then limited features in the free plan. Later I used Tidio Chat for my WordPress website in one of the startups.

So basically, I have used Tidio Chat for a while. In this article, I’ve shared my honest and unbiased Tidio review of what I liked about this live chat plugin and what I didn’t.

What is Tidio Chat, anyway?

It is a live chat platform that allows you to interact with website visitors in real-time and resolve their queries or issues. It is designed for all the platforms but works really well with Shopify & WordPress. With it’s sleek and customizable design, you can match the widget with your website’s primary colors which gives a great look and feel to the visitors.

With Tidio’s Chatbot feature, you can automate the responses for the common queries that visitors ask you. Not only that, but it also helps you with lead generation and other cool things like offering a discount to visitors or giving order statuses. We will talk more about chatbots below.

(Related: What is a Chatbot? Why Your Website Must Have it in 2020)

Along with extremely excellent user experience, this live chat platform also offers you marketing automation and the ability to track visitor’s geo-location and what page they are browsing currently.

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Live Chat Features

Firstly, let’s understand what a live chat is. Apart from your email, contact form, and phone number for support, there’s one more thing people love – Live Chats. Not only it is super convenient for the visitors but it also saves their time rather than waiting for your email reply or a callback. Let’s look at some of the features offered by Tidio Chat:

1. Live Typing

Saving your time is crucial while giving chat support. Chatting could take a lot more time than a phone call. Here’s how it works. Vistors Sends a message – You Think – You Reply – Visitor Thinks – He replies. But what if you somehow already know that what visitor is about to send. That’s where Live Typing comes handy. You can see what the visitor is typing in real-time. This saves your time to think and you can reply even faster. But be assured because whatever you type, it won’t be shown to the visitor unless you press Enter.

2. Visitors List + Viewed Pages

How cool it would be if you can see what exactly your visitors are browsing. This allows chat operators to do proactive engagement. As per the data, users are more comfortable placing an order after having a chat conversation. So, if you see someone is at checkout page longer than usual, you can proactively ping them if they need help or offer a discount.

Moreover, if you know which page visitor is on currently, you can better understand their query.

3. Live Chat Mobile App

We can’t sit all the time in front of our screen. But what’s more important than sales? Though the mobile version doesn’t have all the features as the desktop, Tidio mobile app has all the core features available. So with the Tidio Chat Mobile app, you can actually serve the customers on the go. I have done the same a lot of times.

4. Email Notifications

You don’t want to miss any potential customers when you’re away. Tidio chat allows users to send you a message even if you are offline. However, the chatbot takes care of the conversation beautifully and you receive an email immediately. In case there’s an urgent query, you can always login and resolve the issue.

5. Live Chat Analytics

One of the key factors of running your business is to analyze everything around. You can use their backend portal to analyze when you have a heavy chat flow, how many chats operator has taken, and how much messages are sent. You can also see the reaction time that how quickly your operator responds.

6. Chat Transfer

Visitors often make this mistake of reaching out to the wrong department. In my startup, I had two separate teams – Pre-Sales and Post-Sales. There would have been 100s of instances where the visitor has reached the wrong team. Thankfully, my team used to transfer the chat to the right person without even letting the visitor know! (Nobody likes to be transferred).

The great benefit of using this feature is the new operator can read all the previous messages without asking the customer to repeat himself/herself. Which happens often in phone calls.

7. Visitor Ban

People may come to your site and troll you, abuse you, and waste your chat operator’s time. Time is money. So you can ban them and they won’t be able to use the live chat feature of your website.

8. Canned Responses (Quick Responses)

You can preset some of the responses like greeting or closing messages. Or the whole how it works. It would be really frustrating for me to send someone “Hey I’m Nikhil and I’ll be assisting you today. How may I help you”. Instead, I can set this as a quick message in Tidio Dashboard and just write “/greetings” and the message will be sent.

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Chatbot Features

Tidio Chat comes with a mixture of Chatbot and a Live chat. In my previous article about Chatbots, I’ve explained why chatbots are essential for an online business. Tidio has various pre-built chatbots made. All you have to do is copy the snippet on your website. Or use the WordPress plugin. Here, we will see some of the Pre-built Chatbots:

1. Lead Generation

Chatbots have proved to be the best lead machines over. People actually love giving their details to a chatbot rather than filling a boring webform. You can either offer a discount, or a free eBook and ask for their email address or phone number. Just like this:

2. Welcoming Visitors

Everyone get flattered when they are warmly welcomed. A welcome message shows visitors that you care for them and you are always available. Here’s how they look:

3. Returning Visitors

Returning visitors are extremely important. Trust me when I say a lot of websites don’t have returning visitors. If the visitor has returned, there are higher chances that he/she will place an order  You don’t want to miss that opportunity and if it falls into your budget, you may offer a little discount like this one:

4. Abandoned Cart Recovery

Abandoned Cart is one of the common issues every e-commerce industry faces. According to the report by SalesCycles, shopping cart abandonment is 75% worldwide. So you can imagine even if you save 20% of your cart abandonment. There’s a pre-built bot at Tidio Chat which could help you save a lot of carts.

5. Chat Operators are away

How about someone has your back when you’re away or busy attending other customers? Chatbots can handle that when you don’t reply for a long time. This feature keeps visitors engaged without losing trust.

Also, you can create your own chatbot with different rules and logic to interact with the customers.

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Tidio Chat Pricing/Cost

Free Plan

Tidio is too generous to offer a lifetime free product (No Credit Card Required) but obviously with limited features that work really well for a small team. Once you log in, you get 7 days of Premium trial where you can experience all the features. Here are the features available in Tidio’s Free Chat Version:

• Live chat
• Email Integration
• Messenger Integration
• Visitor Info
• Mobile + Desktop App
• Canned Responses (Quick Responses)
• Javascript API
• Visitor Notes
• 100 Chatbot Conversations per Month.
• Up to 3 users.

After 7 days, you can either choose to continue for a premium plan or continue using the free plan. They won’t even ask you for the Credit Card Details in case of the free plan.

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Paid Plan

I found this very confusing (I would also say smart) while deciding the right plan. Apparently, they have 2 Plans – Chatbot & Communicator and both of them cost $18/Month. You will have to decide whether you want to use the only chatbot feature on your website or a live typing with other features that require the human such as the Visitor List. If you want to use a fully functioning chat feature (both chatbot and live chat) on your website, you need to pay for both i.e. $36 a month.

Here are the detailed features for each:

Chatbot Plan

$18/Month

• All Free Plan Features
• Unlimited Active Chatbots (Quantity)
• 5,000 Chatbot Conversations (You can choose to upgrade if you have more visitors)
• Visual Chatbot Integration (Drag and Drop)
• Zapier Integration

Communicator Plan

$18/Month

• All Free Plan Features (3 Chat Operators)
• New + Incoming Visitor Notifications
• Live Typing
• Viewed Pages
• Live Visitor List
• Additional Operator at $10/Month

They also have a professional plan listed on their website which includes everything and the plan can be customized according to business needs.

If you are a startup, I would strongly recommend going with the combined plan of Chatbot & Communicator. It would cost $36 a month ($12 per chat operator) which I believe is worth it.

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Tidio Chat Alternatives

There are 100s but I would recommend personally recommend these if you didn’t like Tidio:

• Chatbot by Livechat
• Freshchat
• Collect Chat (Only Chatbot)

Frequently Asked Questions About Tidio Chat

1. Is the Free version really free?
   Yes, it is, you don’t even have to enter your credit card details unless you plan to upgrade.
2. Can I use the chat widget on more than one website?
   Yes, you can use it. But your customization will remain the same on all the websites.
3. Can I upgrade or downgrade the plan as per my need?
   Yes, you can add or remove the additional agent, you can change the entire plan from chatbot to communicator and vice-versa. You can also increase the bot conversation limited. The invoice will be generated on a pro-rata basis.
4. How can I Install Tidio chat to my website?
   It is really easy if you have a WordPress or a Shopify website, all you have to do is download their plugin, install it in your WordPress dashboard, and log in with Tidio. If you have a custom-coded website, you have to add their small snipped code before the closing of the <head> tag. Just like Google Analytics.

Things I didn’t like about Tidio Chat

• Customer Rating System: Once you have served the customer we generally send them the last message to give us feedback. Well, in Tidio chat, you can only do it with Like/Dislike. You cannot ask more questions.
• Confusing Price: It actually took me a while to understand their pricing structure. But once it was clear, I didn’t find any issues.
• Multi-website option: I really hope they come up with a multi-site option soon. I have 2 startups and I’m using it from the 2 separate accounts because the concepts for both are too different, they have different color schemes and obviously different teams.

Actually there’s nothing much to complain about apart from them not starting this earlier. I would have loved to use it all my startups.

Conclusion – Is Tidio Chat Worth the Money?

Of course, it is! Especially for startups. I’m using it for months on my other sites and have never faced any issue. Tidio is definitely one of it’s kind. Previously, we were using Tawk to but when we decided to move to Tidio, we didn’t look back. We as a team have actually become a lot faster.

It easily integrates with our CRM Tool. If you’re stuck somewhere, their support team is always available. It is just the right tool to provide an awesome support service to your customers. I hope this Tidio Review helped you in some way.

What do you think? Are you going to try out Tidio? 

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