Crisp Review, Pricing & Features
What is Crisp?
Crisp is a live chat software that is used on over 200,000 websites worldwide. It offers core live chat and chatbot features, with some unique features not found in all competitors.
Table of Contents
- What is Crisp?
- Crisp Review Summary
- Crisp Pricing & Cost
- Crisp Features
- Crisp Customer Support
- Crisp vs. Competitors
- Is Crisp Right For You?
Crisp Review Summary
Crisp is a live chat software company that was founded in 2015 by Baptiste Jamin and Valerian Saliou. The company is headquartered in Nantes, France, and is currently utilized by over 200,000 brands. The company has 24/5 live chat customer service to ensure support availability for companies worldwide.
Crisp offers a variety of features including chatbots, email campaigns, and a reliable mobile application. The chatbot feature is one of the simplest to use on the market. Crisp is relatively affordable given that pricing plans are charged per website, meaning you can add as many agents to the Unlimited plan as you wish for the same monthly cost.
Overall, Crisp is powerful and well-designed. Given the capabilities offered at its relatively low price point, we found Crisp to be an ideal option for smaller businesses. If you want a free live chat solution, we recommend choosing tawk.to. If you are a larger company with a broader set of lead generation requirements and a larger budget, we recommend choosing Intercom, LiveChat, or Drift.
Crisp Pricing & Cost
Crisp pricing is either $25 or $95 per month per website. There is also a free option with very basic live chat features. Customers are able to sign up for a 14-day free trial to test their preferred plan before paying.
- Basic: $0 for two seats and basic live chat
- Pro: $25 per month for four seats and canned responses
- Unlimited: $95 per month for analytics and chatbots
Crisp Features
In this review, we’ll walk through the major features that Crisp offers. We’ll discuss how those features can support your company’s customer engagement requirements. To demonstrate the tool’s design and layout, we’ll include images of the software.
To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.
Live Chat
Live chat is a tool used by customer service representatives, often called chat agents, to enhance customer support capabilities. With this tool, agents have direct conversations with website visitors, answer questions, and provide support in real time.
Chat Inbox
The Crisp chat inbox is designed in an intuitive way. The inbox includes a list of all chats, shown in the left hand column, and visitor information, which will be shown on the right. Conversations that are open and unresolved are marked with a red bubble; resolved conversations have a green check mark. This makes it easy for agents to know which chats still require attention.
Chat Widget
Rather than seeing the company’s live chat interface, visitors will see a small bubble on your company’s website. When opened and engaged in a discussion, the widget looks like this:
Visitor Information
Gathering information about website visitors is essential for a company to engage visitors in an effective way. Crisp gathers a wide variety of information about visitors including device type, location, language, and more. The visitor information provided by Crisp is on par with that gathered by competitors, but Crisp has two features that are not found in every competitor: MagicMap and MagicBrowse, which offer an even richer overview of user behavior.
An interesting way that Crisp visualizes visitor information is through the MagicMap. MagicMap is a feature within the live chat interface that you can use to see an overview of visitors’ real-time locations.
If you hover over a visitor’s profile, you will be able to start a chat or utilize MagicBrowse.
MagicBrowse
The MagicBrowse feature allows you to see the visitor’s screen and mouse activity. Within the MagicBrowse tool, you can also start LiveAssist, where your mouse appears on the visitor’s screen to guide them through interactions. This tool allows you to assist customers who may have questions about your site or who have difficulty navigating the site. We found that this tool required a strong internet connection to function properly.
Additional Live Chat Features
With Crisp’s additional live chat features and capabilities, you can:
- Send links, files, videos, and images
- Send email transcripts to agents and visitors
- View what visitors are typing
- Edit the most recently sent message
- Write private notes to yourself and team members
- Mark conversations as resolved
- Block visitors
- Assign, reassign, and route agents to chats
- Segment and label conversations
- Remove Crisp branding
Chatbots
A chatbot is a software program that automatically carries out conversations with customers, often to respond to questions and provide support while customer service representatives are offline. When testing the Crisp chatbots, we found them advanced yet simple to configure. Compared with competitors’ bots, the Crisp chatbot is the most intuitive option.
Crisp chatbot features include customizable scenario graphs, where chatbots are designed, as well as sample bot scenarios.
Customizable Scenario Graphs
Customizable scenario graphs allow you to create chatbots without using code. Crisp chatbots can recognize and respond to words and phrases with a practice called “fuzzy matching”, which allows bots to recognize and respond to words and phrases. For example, a bot can be designed to recognize that a visitor has a question about their order, recommend an article from the Helpdesk, and refer visitors to the next available chat agent.
You’ll be able to test each chatbot you create by simulating a conversation with the bot. This makes it easy to test the bot’s efficiency before deploying it to your website.
Sample Bot Scenarios
Crisp comes with three pre-built bots: Weekend Responder, Ask User Details, and Department Bot. These bots are designed to capture user data and route conversations to the correct departments. With these choices, you can modify a pre-built bot to your preferences rather than having to build one from scratch.
Email Campaigns
Within Crisp, you can send automated or bulk email campaigns to your users and contacts. Overall, this tool is harder to use than comparable tools found with competitors, but it is no less powerful. For example, you can create an automated abandoned cart email to a segment of shoppers who add items to their carts but do not transact.
Emails will be formatted either using Markdown or HTML, the latter being more powerful yet more difficult to understand especially if you’re a novice programmer. Below is an image of how an email campaign will be crafted using Markdown:
Within the Analytics section, Crisp offers metrics about email campaigns like click rate, open rate, emails bounced, and emails delivered.
Helpdesk & Status Page
Helpdesks and status pages are resources that visitors can use to browse for information and check on a website’s status, respectively. Crisp hosts both a helpdesk and a status page for your site with the Unlimited plan. From the helpdesk, visitors will be able to chat with customer support and navigate directly to your site.
Analytics
Analytics are used to understand and improve aspects of customer service like response time and agent availability. Crisp offers a myriad of reports to help you understand your general performance. One drawback to Crisp’s analytics section is that there are not built-in agent-specific reports like those found in other tools. If you wish to have metrics that reflect each individual chat agent’s productivity, you will need to custom build that using their API.
Along with messaging analytics, Crisp also offers metrics on the following categories:
- Contacts
- Rating
- Campaigns
- Helpdesk
- Status
Integrations
Crisp has built integrations with software tools across five categories.
| Category | Integrations |
|---|---|
| Automation |
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| Marketing |
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| Messaging |
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| CMS |
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| CRM |
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Crisp Customer Support
Crisp’s customer support team is available round-the-clock five days per week. When chatting with Crisp customer support representatives, we found that they replied in under one minute and answered all questions.
| Customer Support Channels | Live chat, Email |
| Customer Support Availability | Live chat: 24/5; Email: 8 hour response delay |
| Other Support Resources | Help center, Live demos, Blog, How-to Videos, Social media |
| Application Status Page | Yes |
Crisp Alternatives & Competitors
The top Crisp competitors are listed below. Crisp is comparable to Tidio and Freshchat and also has similarities to tawk.to.
Is Crisp Right For You?
Crisp is a reliable live chat software that is ideal for startups and small businesses looking for live chat and chatbot features to support customer service aims. Regardless of the number of agents your company has, we recommend the Unlimited plan over the other options because it offers significantly more features that will benefit your customer support aims.
If you are a startup or small business, Crisp’s Unlimited plan will provide you with key customer engagement features and unlimited seats at a relatively low monthly cost. If you’re a medium or large business, however, we recommend that you opt for more all-encompassing tools like Intercom or Drift.
If you are interested in trying Crisp, sign up for a 14-day free trial.