Adding live chat

[Firecom]

Hi

I have seena few threads on this site but none that quite answer what I want.

Anyone have any good recommendations for a live chat service to add to our site? relaible and cost effective.

Also there was mention of open source ones. Any advice there?

we host on a dedicated linux server if this is of any help.

Thanks.

[Chunkford]

Having live chat on a site can cause more problems than its worth, and rather than spend money on it, this would be a good place to start - Crafty syntax (open source). It gives you what you need:- multi user, auto invites, canned responses, real time visitor monitoring, custom skinning etc...
Recommend putting it on the checkout pages to begin with, and then start experimenting putting it on other pages.

[Darren B]

I am currently using a simple open source one on this site to see how it go's.

Im not sure what paul means by more problems? But the amount of people using it are a few a day and we have so far found it to be usefull.

The option we are trialing does not have any page tracking as we only want to test the water. If all proves success full then we would move to a better system but one we would host ourselves.

you can see it here http://www.casupply.co.uk/

and this is the one we are using http://openwebim.org/ simple and does the job

[Firecom]

hi Darren

That looks quite interesting. I think I might give that a go.

[george]

This recent thread might help.

[Firecom]

cheers, i'll check that out too.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

When I took a look recently www.onlinechatcenters.com had a decent looking free offering which offers auto invites, canned responses, real time visitor monitoring, etc.
I downloaded and tried around 7-8 different and this was my favorite.

One disadvantage is that it is not hosted on your own server, but certainly worth checking out if you are looking for a free service.

[chris ashdown]

When we tried it we found it to be very time consuming, where a phone call was answered in say 2-3 mins the live chat was considerably longer and quite often used for prity simple questions they could find the answer to on the page.

Following customers on the web was also usefull but hard to make any real sence of the information, and in my opinion you are better with simple information 1 months averages rather than following such narrow data, basically a bit of time management

[Chunkford]

Problems I mean are like what Chris says, time consuming, and having the resources.
There are so many different factors involved when considering live chat, and it all depends on what level you want to give, the volume of traffic you have, the people power to meet the demand, bandwidth etc etc....
If you have a relatively small site then its easy to manage, but if its a larger site then planning, like with everything, needs consideration.

Do like that web messenger, will defiantly look into that, cheers Darren

[rookers]

Hi - I very musch like the side-nav on this site. Is it an out of the box solution of one you've created? It is not one I have seen before.

[Darren B]

what site are you talking about

[rookers]

oh sorry it was: http://www.casupply.co.uk/

[TraceyHand]

ooooh Darren...he's eyeing up your fancypants new nav!!!!

[rookers]

Yes I am! It is the best I have seen. Looks superb.

[Darren B]

ooooh Darren...he's eyeing up your fancypants new nav!!!!

LMFAO - Fancypants

No this is not an actinic out of the box menu, and as much as i would like to take the credit for it, its not mine, the styling is but not the concept or code