Hipchat ain't bad; the place when I got to use it was a 3-week temporary gig for me (they needed additional programmer for emergency fixes). The places where I was actually employed all used Skype, and "bearable" is the best I can say about it.
I think the best solution would be a Hipchat/Slack-like IRC client.
They used Hipchat, and it was neat - my coworkers there greeted me with inline memes. Having to use a proprietary client sucked, though.