Types of online chat

As it relates to UI agencies, online chat implementations fall into one of four categories, which I'm calling: Live, free-text, prompted, and support. Some states have multiple implementations on different parts of the site or at different times of day; others have multiple and let the customer choose which one suits their needs. For each type of chat, we will discuss its pros/cons as well as vendors seen to be offering that functionality to UI agencies as of December 14, 2020.

Links to how you can access each state's chat system, along with any notes like what vendor they used, can be found on the page where we're tracking solutions across many states:

pageTracking implemented solutions