Customer Service Chat Needed

[zulufox]

I'm looking for a professional script that lets me:

1. Let visitors "stand in line" to chat with me, like a customer service chat thing.

2. Let me "close" the chat when I leave the office or go home

It cannot just be a chat room, but 1 on 1 chat, then when I have completed that chat I can move on to the next person waiting.

Any suggestions?

[robotsdobetter]

This should get you going at [hotscripts.com...]

[encyclo]

The best-known is probably Liveperson [liveperson.net] - it'll cost you $100 per month per seat, though. There are similar (and probably cheaper) services available from other providers, although I have no experience of them.

My hosting company provides a Liveperson chat which I can use for technical questions - I find it incredibly valuable from a customer-service viewpoint, and it is a strong incentive for me to stick with their company.

[Rossv1]

We demo'ed Liveperson and a few of the other hosted live chat solutions, but decided to go with [xigla.com ] which I found about in another thread here on WebmasterWorld. Very happy with the product, easy to install, and no monthly fees. It paid for itself in the first day with increased sales. Multiple operators, canned responses, the ability to push pages...it seems to have all the options. We've got it running on our site right now, PM me if you would like to see it in action...

[bcolflesh]

Nice free option:

Crafty Syntax Live Help
[cslh.com...]

[txbakers]

Hi zulu, I will second and third Xigla as mentioned above.

One of the best investments I've ever made in software. No monthly fees, installs on my own server and works flawlessly.

Customers love it.

[kodaks]

I would reccomend boldcenter for their overall ease of use. They also offer a free version.

[bcolflesh]

Question about the Xigla .NET one - what is the resource usage like with a couple people in chat?

[txbakers]

resources are minimal with the xigla product.

To turn on user tracking you'll need a real database, but you can run it successfully with Access if you don't want to track users.

[pmkpmk]

We use LivePerson (previously HumanClick) for many years now. We have the most basic option for $19/month, but since we are a long term customer we got a special deal with the number of seats. Usually the $19 option only has 1 seat.

Our results are VERY good - we get ONLY positive feedback about the service.

There are shome drawbacks, which mostly result from us using the cheap version. I did not had time to look into the freeware solution mentioned above (Crafty Syntax).

[pmkpmk]

Thsi xigla looks interesting. Very much like LivePerson, only that it runs completely inside a web-application (where Liveperson uses standalone clients [which I personally prefer]).

However it only supports Microsoft web servers and therefore is completely useless to me.

[Rossv1]

Question about the Xigla .NET one - what is the resource usage like with a couple people in chat?

We are hosted in a shared hosting enviornment (less than 50 sites of the server, though) and we've had 4 or 5 people chatting at the same time with no noticable resource drain. There is a .NET application that runs on our operators desktops which is the site monitor / chat agent, while the main chat server runs on our server.

[kodaks]

Karicart is also a pretty good live chat program, but they are slow answering their support emails and it is not as user friendly as liveperson.

[romsourcingcl]

The price for one chat session with a Romanian operator is about $1 and the monthly subscription is about $200 (300 chat sessions included). Maybe will help your online business and will cut your costs.

Regards,
Claudiu

[edited by: rogerd at 10:45 am (utc) on Aug. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs please... [/edit]

[pshea]

I installed a Tag-Board window on some key pages on my sites. I created a panel down the right side of the page to display the content of the 'live chat'. The conversations remain as part of the history of the page and I have found that visitors with questions seem more likely to "join in and ask a question" if they see the content of previous questions and answers.

Some might say a tag-board type of operation is low-tech and it is. But for the right type of site, it is low tech and high impact. My conversions off tag-conversations is quite high.