SMF·LIVECHAT
Can a prompt replace LiveChat?
Customer support — live chat for sales and support
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
LiveChat is not really a widget company, it is an agent-productivity company: message sneak-peek, canned responses on a slash command, and a concurrency limit that stops one person being handed twelve chats. Rebuilding that is a weekend and the result is genuinely usable. What stays behind is the mobile app, the marketplace, and the chatbot product sold separately — none of them a moat, all of them work you would then own.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a live chat system designed around one agent handling several conversations at once.
Stack: your choice with websockets, Postgres, Docker Compose, a domain with TLS.
Visitor widget: shadow DOM, small, reconnects after navigation, persists a visitor token in local storage, works without third-party cookies, keyboard accessible.
The agent console is the product. Build these four things properly:
1. **Concurrency cap.** Each agent sets a maximum number of active chats. Routing never exceeds it. When every agent is at capacity, new visitors get an explicit queue position and an estimated wait, not silence.
2. **Sneak peek.** Stream the visitor's in-progress typing to the agent before they hit send, throttled to roughly four updates a second. This is the single feature that changes how fast an agent can work, and it is a few lines over the same websocket.
3. **Canned replies on a slash command.** Typing `/` opens a filter-as-you-type list; selecting one inserts the text with placeholders already interpolated. Rank by the agent's own usage frequency, not alphabetically.
4. **A multi-conversation layout.** A sidebar of active chats each showing an unread badge and a time-since-last-agent-reply that turns red past a threshold, so the one you are neglecting is obvious.
Routing: round-robin among agents under their cap, with a manual transfer that carries the full history and adds a system line naming who transferred to whom.
After-hours: outside configured office hours the widget collects a message and an email address, and says so plainly.
One report: chats per agent per day, median first response, median chat duration, and maximum concurrent chats reached.
Write tests for the concurrency cap under simultaneous arrivals, for queue position updating as agents free up, and for transfer preserving history.
Do not build a chatbot, mobile apps, or an integration marketplace.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the desktop and mobile apps, and notifications when you are not on the tab
- B.2 the chatbot product, which LiveChat sells separately anyway
- B.3 the marketplace of prebuilt integrations and ticket handoffs
- B.4 hosted reliability during a traffic spike
- B.5 the reporting suite and agent-performance scoring
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: agent throughput tooling
Because chat is a staffing problem, and the tools that let one person hold six conversations without dropping any are what the seat price actually buys.
Questions
Is sneak peek not creepy?
It is the thing agents miss most when they move off LiveChat, and it is standard in the category — but it should be disclosed. Say it in the chat greeting or your privacy notice; a feature that surprises people when they learn about it is a feature you should be telling them about.
Why does the concurrency cap matter so much?
Because unbounded routing produces the worst possible outcome: every visitor gets a slow, distracted agent instead of some getting a fast one and the rest getting an honest queue position. The cap is what turns chat from chaotic into staffable.
What does queue position require?
Only that you count. The hard part is being honest when the estimate is bad — better to say "3 ahead of you" with no time estimate than to promise two minutes and take twelve.
Does LiveChat export my transcripts?
Yes, archives export as CSV or through the API, including tags and ratings. Attachments are URLs that stop working after the account closes, so pull them first.
Related tools
Receipt