live help, live chat, live suppot, etc

[tesla]

I'm going to add one of these live help or chat features to my site. Is there any shareware versions or versions that are a one time fee, rather than an ongoing monthly charge? I would prefer something that does not require my host provider to be involved.

Seems to me that your local PC can act as the live chat server and thus cut the middle man out. THis should make the thing faster as well.

[mivox]

Instanttalk is purchased and installed on your own web server. Nothing fancy about the interface, but it will forward messages to email if there are no "operators" logged in. The chat interface seems sluggish, but I'm not sure if that's the software, our location, or end user foul-ups (in some cases, the problem was definitely #3...), but it works fine for our low-volume site, and wasn't too expensive in my recollection.

I recall spending weeks searching for a program that met your description... I ended up having to do some Mac installation debugging on Instantalk, but the programmer gave me a free bit of customization in trade.

[papabaer]

Tesla, I think that is a great idea if you have the connection and the equipment to make it all happen.

Mivox already has one possibility for you. Let's see if there are other's as well!

What kind of setup are you going to be running this on? I'd love to see how this progresses for you.

Best of luck,
- papabaer

[chiyo]

we tried this with Livehelper when they were free. We actually sold a few contracts from this. Now i think Livehelper is monstrously expensive but there are some up and comers who are far more reasonable, plus a few raw perl scripts for less than 100 US and you have it forever. Usually it involves a small java applet. Im sorry cant find the actual URL's just now but do a search for Livehelper and related links, or customer service software, or live customer. something like that and you will find them. One kicking around is under a url like worldwidecreations.com or something like that.

[Staffa]

Hello everybody,

I have been reading this forum for quite a while now and found answers to some of my questions already posted by other users. So here's my little contribution.

On this subject of life help I just added remote hosted clickchatsold on my site, tested it and it works fine. From your pc screen you can monitor visitors to your site, pro-actively interact, chat with the visitor, push them to another page, show a graphic and add a button in emails.

I am not involved with this company but thought it could be an option to look at.

[txbakers]

Thanks for the ccs tip. I just downloaded and installed it and played with it. Pretty cool. And the price is right for now.

I like that you can customize the button too.

I wonder if they collect all the IP addresses going through their servers and do something nasty with them.

edit 12:23 cst:
Actually, after playing with for a while, there is a bad javascript error in their code, and it caused my IE 5.5 to crash.

And, certain outside users weren't being recognized.

Oh well.

[sun818]

You can use an Instant Messenger client like MSN, Yahoo, AOL, ICQ, etc. Customers appreciate the instant contact. Great ROI.