Tidio Live Chat & AI Chatbots

Storeowners beware!
I seriously don't know how Tidio have so many good reviews, our experience is that it worked poorly and customer care was non-existent until we really kicked up a fuss, only then did they react as they should have in the first instance.
Our issues with Tidio resolve around receiving the sound notifications when a customer has submitted a chat (or a new message) only about half the time which meant we missed a lot of chats. We reached out to Tidio several times for support, they were days, sometimes a week to respond and then we got a bland brush off that it must be a problem at our end with our equipment.
Now we all work from home with different internet, routers, equipment etc., totally independent of one another with no central server and the issue was universal with all of our operators, which kind of gives a bit of a clue? Anyway, we eventually decided that the issue seemed to be mainly occurring if the app wasn't actually open and showing on the screen, we would normally get the sound notification if we happened to have the Tidio screen up in front of us but as we only get a couple of chats a day this resulted in us issuing a third screen to all operators to enable the chat to be visible at all times. This process was worked out ourselves with no further input from Tidio as all they could advise was for us to clear the cache and reboot (which we did on a daily basis at one point to try and make it work properly).
All of the above was a 6 month process of trying to sort out what was happening without support.
What we found in the end was that not only do you need to have the app open on a screen but you also need to clear your cache and reboot every single day and even then it was hit and miss on whether we would get a noise notification.
We made the decision to leave Tidio and one more thing to watch out for, if you've paid for a years subscription and have uninstalled the app due to poor performance and service, you don't get a refund on the remaining 6 months subscription as they have a 'non-refund' policy and it's too small an amount to be worth all the time and effort suing them for.
A lot of these chat apps are similar in that they appear to have everything that you need and would be great if they worked 100% but they seem to be a bit hit and miss in operation.
Tidio is an expensive app for what it does, we decided in the end to employ a third party receptionist company (Pocket Receptionist in the UK), who charge 50% more than Tidio but this has freed us up and we don't have to worry about having to jump on the chat, it's not until we've done this that we realised what a distraction the chat is, even when it works OK. I would definitely recommend this cause of action to anyone as the customer has instant communication with your company (although they don't know it's a third party help), are reassured by professionals either with a simple script or the promise of a call back and you get emails pop through from the third party with all the details on, giving you time to respond when it suits you. It's very rare that the customer needs an instant response, but you get that choice on when to respond as soon as you get the email, so if you need to jump on it to secure an order you can, simple!
If you're going to use a chat service though, do yourself a favour and give Tidio a miss!

Update in response to Tidio's reply:
There was no misunderstanding on our part and we were not offline, as exhaustively explained to you at the time, so please don't try and gloss this over and make it look as if this is our fault as incompetent operators. We had previously used Tidio for a couple of years prior to signing up last year, so were fully aware of how to operate the app correctly. Also, as exhaustively explained before in both chat and emails, there was nothing wrong with the pop up notifications, a tiny red flag popped up when a customer was on the chat, this was often the only way we knew that they were, so for the second time in black and white here, we've had to tell you that it was the noise notification that the issue was with, it seems like you are still in complete denial about it despite the overwhelming evidence proving otherwise, which is a shame because if you didn't treat your customers with such contempt you would be able to build a really good app if you were prepared to learn from your mistakes.
Your chat agents were generally quite responsive, yes, support emails, forget it...a waste of time.

I wish i could give it a 5 star.. we have no ideal when customers are needing assistance.. they are leaving messages that are no where to be find on email or app. How do we interact with customers.. there must beca different version everyone is using. I linked messager to see their concern but nothing is coming through.

It’s absolutely terrible. When the app opens it tells you to login with no option to create an account. And once you are able to create an account by way of your web browser, then it does not do anything to help you set it up. I think this app is a scam.

一点都不好用

I had previously installed and used this app but removed it due to lack of time on my end to answer every customer that popped up. I attempted to reinstall the app a few days ago (since we've increased our customer service team) but the app wouldn't install on Shopify. The support person was NOT helpful at all. I finally gave in and paid a tech expect to re-install the app on our website. Then decided to go ahead and pay Tidio's subscription fee to get the extra operators and features. However, the app keeps freezing (doesn't alert our team when someone new is on the site, continually displays that someone is on the size when they are not, etc.) and I'm not going to pay for something that doesn't work. So I contacted Tidio support again (and got the same unhelpful guy from the first time) who told me the only way to downgrade my billing back to the free account would be to uninstall the app and then re-install it. Here is my negative review, as promised. You guys need help.

These guys are nuts - they changed their app Mid-December and eliminated offline messages via email when chat is offline... I missed 109 messages from customers during the holidays when we couldn't handle live chat. We never got any email messages. Who wants to email customers from a limited chat dashboard? Not me...

I used this App for about 3 months. I quit because I was being spammed chatted none stop with this app. I uninstalled and started using Shopify Inbox until I find another option. BUT they must write to your code because I have a bigger problem now. The chat calls ring in as from 'TIDO' and it won't let me answer them because the app isn't installed. SO I am missing customer chats and this is hurting my business. Tried to call support and their phone isn't working right now. Their uninstall should remove them completely! I need HELP to fix this

This is garbage. The UI is constantly changing and is becoming annoying to use. We are switching to something real like ZenDesk. Bye.

I will be the devils advocate here and do a real rating. I had problems with this application from the very beginning and its NOT smooth at all, and is very glitchy since the update as well.

Terrible customer service, very very glitchy on my desktop as well as my phone. Shows me notifications when I didn’t have any, was terrible with communicating with my mobile and desktop. I would get several notifications when I WAS the one who sent the messages. The update was horrible with geo location, no cart updates for customers and no cart information at all. The application is simply a glorified text message, nothing really that works great with Shopify. Just a terrible app.

On top of everything else, every time I went to customer service, they always had me do leg work, take a video, send screen shot, do this, do that, never looked into the situation at hand. Send you general links and information. Customer service is lazy, and simply never fixed any issues.

I will never be coming back to this chat application, was terrible from start to finish.

I was looking for a chat-bot solution that will help gain more email subscribers. I have a little small business store with 25K visitors per month. Tidio only served the first 1000 visitors, then the bot stopped working. Now they ask for $89/mo for 20K visitors per month. It's a pure robbery. I know you guys are smart and IT-geeks, and you're surrounded by billionaires and trillion dollar businesses - they are all around you. Then this makes you think that a small business with 25K visitors per month is a billionaire too... this is not true. 25K visitors per month can hardly generate $5K in gross sales. Minus 5% transaction commission, minus 45% operational costs (shopify, apps, google services). So you get roughly 30% of the gross revenues - and that's to put food on a table for a family. Now you want to take $89 from my pocket for just running a bot that asks for a customer's email address. For $89/mo I'll write my own bot with blackjack and hookers.
You guys forgot how hard to earn each dollar. How much daily hard work, sweat, pain and grinding is in each earned dollar.
Good luck!