Forum Moderators: phranque
Thanks
I am thinking to launch a Live Support on my website. Does it make sense?
It all depends.
Remember, you would also need employee(s) to staff the support site, which also takes a lot of time and effort. You would probably lose quite a bit of money if you are a smaller site, with less income potential. There are many other possibilities for improved customer support, for a smaller site. These may include a FAQ guide or a website manual. These are often effective and cheap solutions for the common small website.
If by chance you own a large site, I say go for it! Based on my own personal experience, I feel more comfortable with stores/websites that offer live chat. It sort of gives out a signal saying that they care about customer support a lot more than just a contact form or an FAQ. Generally speaking, this may also help to improve your sales, and lower the chances of a potential customer "abandoning" the shopping cart in case they can't figure out how to use it.
I would prefer to buy and install rather than to use a service with monthly payments.
I agree with your choice, I would recommend you buy or download a script that has a one time fee or is free. Sure Liveperson or a comparable service is great, but it does cut away at your income, because of the price. Also you would have to worry about downtimes and server errors if you chose a remotely hosted solution.
What script can you recommend?
Personally, I would recommend Crafty Syntax Live Help Script (google it). This script uses PHP and MySQL, and is free (open source). It is hosted on your own server, and requires very little knowledge of coding, if any. It has a lot of the same features that you would get from a paid service, and they offer an excellent support forum to answer any of your questions or problems. New releases are sent a lot, so it is always improving. I suggest you look at this script before going anywhere else.
Also, you will also find many live chat scripts that you can read reviews on at Hotscripts:
Remotely Hosted Customer Support:
[hotscripts.com...]
CGI and Perl Customer Support:
[hotscripts.com...]
PHP Live Support:
[hotscripts.com...]
Here are some tips before deciding on what type of live support system you should use:
Cost- Ask yourself if the script you are looking into is really worth the amount of money they are requesting. Often you can find better or equivalent scripts for a smaller price, if you do some searching around the net.
Power- Does the script have enough power to handle all of the support chats you will be receiving? If you are expecting a lot of live chats at one, don't use a plan that only lets you have one operator logged on at a time.
Features- Be sure the script includes all or most of the features that you need to succesfully run a live chat support. But also be sure not to get a script that has way too many features, this may just confuse the user or the operators. Some of my personal must haves for live chat services are ability to send invitations, online/offline chat buttons, leave a message if not operator is around, multiple operators/chats at one time, and different skins for the interface.
Support for the Script- Be sure that the scripts website has sufficient user support for the script. I personally like it when they have a knowledgable forum or user manual. If they don't have sufficient support, I would not look into the script/service any farther.
I hope this helps, and best of luck finding the new live chat script :)!
I've been using this without incident for almost 4 years now and I adore it, my customers adore it, the feature set is great, and the price is very fair. Plus, you own it.
It also has user tracking, which I find very useful.
