The new Slack integration that's about to disrupt the Live Chat industry

The Verge recently published an interesting article about a new AI email-bot that will handle all of your appointment scheduling in which the author made the claim that:

“Consumers are experiencing app fatigue: the average person downloads zero apps per month, and spends 80 percent of their time in just three of the apps they do use.”

The author goes on to suggest that smart developers are shifting mindset away from “what market could use a new app” to “what existing app could we make better though bots and/or AI?”.

At first, the claim seemed questionable but then I realized that the premise had actually played out before my eyes just the day before when a new web-app called small.chat came through my Twitter feed. Small.chat is essentially a script that adds a live chat popup to your website but instead of having a backend you need to monitor (or an app you need to download) to receive/respond to people who initiate live-chat, it ties into your Slack account and creates a new thread in a Slack Channel that you create.

Anyone who uses Slack religiously will immediately recognize the genius of small.chat’s mission, which I would surmise to be: Why should you have to leave the chat app you use all day (Slack) and open another app to chat with someone on your website?

Our marketing agency, CustomerBloom, has been through quite a few live-chat apps over the years. We started with Zopim, moved to Olark, briefly tested Live Chat, then settled on Intercom. The fact that there are so many companies doing live-chat is kind of crazy, but it illustrates the fact none of them have quite “gotten it right” so far. To be fair, Intercom does way more than just live-chat, but we’d argue that’s part of their problem.

Intercom is pricey. We were paying about $80/month for stuff we didn’t need just to use their live-chat product, mostly because it looks better than the competitors but the main reason was that it has an iOS app we could use to respond to people without having to have an Intercom browser window open all day. This sounded great in theory but in reality, it’s easy to miss a notification and it gets annoying bouncing between phone and computer.

Then we discovered that Intercom integrates with Slack - incredible! So we set up a new #livechat channel in slack and set up the connection only to be incredibly disappointed to realize you get notifications in Slack when someone starts a live-chat and you can see what they type, but you can’t actually reply in Slack; you have to click a link that takes you out of Slack and into Intercom. It feels so intuitive to just reply right there in Slack - to the point where we would actually type a reply forgetting that it doesn't get pushed back through to Intercom.

Enter small.chat.

After a three-minute setup, anyone who starts a live-chat on our site triggers an update in our #website-slackchat channel containing a new thread where we can view and respond. Anyone with access to the channel can jump in start chatting. And the best part is it’s free.

Which brings us back to the premise. Small.chat got it right when they stopped thinking about how to build yet another live-chat app and started thinking how to improve the best live-chat app. It’s not a bot and it’s not AI, but what’s important is it’s not another app.

Convenience is the currency of tomorrow. Offer a service that saves someone time and they’ll gladly open their wallets. Small.chat is offering a serious chunk of your time back - and they’re about to cash in.