When choosing a live chat solution for your business, it's always very subjective and depends on your objectives. But there are several features which are an absolute must. Check them out:

• Chat widget customization options for adjusting your live chat to your website design and overall branding.
• Canned responses for saving answers to all common questions and using them faster and more productively.
• Live visitor profiles for quickly accessing customer data like location, time zone, browser language, etc.
• Knowledge base integration. It's better to choose a multi-functional support tool like HelpCrunch right from the beginning, and a knowledge base tool is a must. It should also be well integrated with your chat so that you could quickly share help articles with customers.
• Auto messages for reaching out to your customers proactively and offering help based on their behavior — e.g. last visited page, time spent on page, exit intent time.
• Targeted messages (aka in-app messages) for sending one-time campaigns to customers via chat based on their personal data or your custom criteria — e.g. browser language, subscription type, account balance.
• Chat forms for collecting new visitors' email addresses and filtering out spammers — e.g. pre-chat or offline forms.
• Reports for tracking your live chat performance — e.g. first response time, average resolution time, customer satisfaction rate.
• Help desk features like statuses, tags, multi-channel support for managing customer requests faster and more effectively.

Even though the following features are not the ones you can't live without, they can be nice “bonuses”:

• Typing insight for tracking when customers are typing a message and letting your customers see when you do.
• Online status indication for seeing which customers are currently online and prioritizing your efforts.
• GDPR checkbox for including an acceptance checkbox to your pre-chat or offline forms and getting customers' consent to processing their data.
• File sharing for quickly sharing images, videos, PDF and jumpstarting the whole process.
• Chat transcripts for sending the whole transcripts to your customers so that they would have a detailed instructions in their inbox.