One of our clients requested a free live chat facility on the new website I'm building for them. I wasn't aware of any free ones at the time, and it seemed that the best option was for them to just use Skype outside of the website.

Not long after that conversation I heard about tawk.to in a podcast. It is a free live chat service which is full of features and really easy to set up.

I've added it to this page, so you can see what I'm talking about. Feel free to send me a message. If I am online and available, I will reply back on live chat.

There is no limit on the number of agents that can sign in to it. When someone starts a new chat it goes through to the next available agent. It rings like a phone call if you allow it in your browser or you have the app installed on your phone or table. It records the transcript of the conversation, gives you stats on the users that are on the site, what page they are on and if they are typing a message etc.

It is so good and so easy to set up. You just create an account at tawk.to, they give you a snippet of javascript to add to the page where you want the chat to appear and that is it.

It appears in the corner of your page and the user can interact with it to start a new conversation. If you're not online, you can have it set so they can send a message through it. You could have it set to not show at all if nobody is online. You can set opening hours too for the chat bar to appear.

There are lots of settings for you to customise, including changing the appearance of it in terms of css colours.