mcangeli
Loading ...Every once in a bluemoon I come across some web trinket that I think could help change the way people use websites. On one of my other sites, I have an IRC chatroom online with a javascript page setup so members can log in and chat directly from the site. There are a couple of solid members who are in the chat room most of the time in case anyone has any questions or needs any help with something. I’m rarely in the IRC chat room these days so I’m looking for other ways to help members on the site. Thats when I stumbled across the perfect live support solution.
A cool, hosted service for support chat from LiveHuman.com. A simple line of code added to my site and I’m off and running. When I’m in the room, the message on my site lets my members know I’m available for help, when I’m not, the online equivalent of a closed sign is up. Its pretty cool. The “face” time opportunities have been increased on my site and now my members feel that if they need anything all they have to do is ask where as before a request could sit for a week in the boards before I’d get to it. Its pretty good and like I said it was easy to implement as well.
The only down side to the service is that its not free. They have plans starting at $13 a month per operator on your site, but that allows for an unlimited number of member/user connections. Its a pretty cool service. Chats are logged and retained for two months and you can even edit the styling of the chat window to suit your site. You also get all kinds of useful information from the chat as well, user location, pages visited and more. In all its a pretty good way for a site or company looking to expand their support options in an inexpensive manner.
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October 22nd, 2007 at 5:25 pm
You know, those services are actually very handy for websites when you’re really trying to sell your business. That or you can offer live help for certain things. I think it is a really neat feature to have on a bigger website. Maybe not my blog but definitely something larger where people often have a lot of questions. $13 isn’t all that bad for something like that.
October 30th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
As sabriena said, such a service really is handy when you have a product or service that you really do want to sell. $13 in this case is just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the real and potential benefits you stand to gain from it.
My first host and my current host have a feature like this and I love them for it. I know I can get in touch with them any time and it’ll be handled ASAP rather than waiting two weeks and then being told “we are now looking into this and will get back to you”.