Live chat on AC7, anyone?

[alkasber]

I see many AC7 sites with live chats, but AC7 hasn't live chat as an option. I want to integrate a live chat on Ablecommerce, can someone give me the directions where to start?

Thanks

[AbleMods]

There are essentially two ways to accomplish LiveChat.

You can host it yourself (what I do) or pay an outside service to host it for you. Typically, the outside services will have better features and reduce your bandwidth. However they will always have a monthly/annual cost associated with them.

Hosting it yourself requires more cash up front with software and installation, however it's yours to love, hold and grow as you need.

I had Xigla.com live chat hosted and running on my site in about 10 minutes. It doesn't work on product pages for some strange reason. Probably because I integrated it with AC7 instead of making it a separate IIS app. Or because it gets embedded in an AJAX update panel. Either way, No biggie I just keep it on the home page. Probably why it barely gets used

You can check it out on my site http://www.ablemods.com/Absolute-Live-S ... 32C14.aspx or get the full details from http://www.Xigla.com.

[Robbie@FireFold]

Joe says it best.

We use Xigla.com live chat. It has it's flaws here and there, but they all do.

We handle 50-75 live requests per day with very little hiccups.

[alkasber]

Joe,

Does it come with source code? (for translation purposes)

Thanks

[calvis]

As an early adopter of HumanClick (Remember those guys), which LivePerson bought and screwed up the licensing, I went with Xigla on their 4.x chat product. I used the Absolute Chat product for 3 years before we started having major database issues. My contact guy was Juan (who by the way is based in Columbia) who I begged and begged for help and all I got was deaf ears. Even offers of $$$ did not result in any help.

Xigla has some good quality products but they do not have any kind of community. I pleaded with Juan for years that they should have a forum where their users could hang out at and share info, but for one reason or another he did not want to mess with running forums. (Some companies view forums as a threat) Juan added a number of features that we requested on the 5.x product and overall we were very happy with it until the day it crashed and could not be revived. In an act of desperation (I swore at one time I would never do this) I started testing out hosted solutions. I went though many of them, right and left. I tested out a hosted version called BOLDCHAT and I have never looked back. Our Proactive Chats went through the roof. We average during the weekday 134 chats a day, and our sales conversions using proactive chats, pays the monthly cost in one day.

I just thought I would relay my experience with Xigla. It's the best product that I have seen if you want to run Chat on your own servers. And since Xigla is based in Columbia I am sure translating would be no problem. Support can be iffy at times, but for the most part it runs on autopilot.

[AbleMods]

I've had pretty similar experience with Juan and Xigla. Very short (and ineffective) support responses, so you're essentially on your own after purchase.

His products do work, altough I disagree with the branding of ".Net" on some of them. Writing the whole thing in ASP and adding in two user controls doesn't count as a ".Net Version" in my book. His News Manager is very well designed, but again 99% javascript/ASP.

If I used my live support more proactively, it would probably reveal more concerns. But for me and my simplistic needs, it was economical, somewhat painless to get running and does the job.

Juan must make a fortune off that software, it boggles me his support efforts are so weak. Word is eventually going to spread and sour his reputation.

[jmestep]

With Able 5, we used Whoson chat and it worked fine. We stopped using it because in the paintball industry there are a lot of kids who asked questions like What colors does it come in when they could have just looked on the product page. Those didn't normally turn into sales because they had to wait to beg Mom to use her charge card. Anyway, Whoson includes live website monitoring which I would have been lost without. Because we could see who was online and if there were any page errors, we were able to track down performance problems that had to do with when spiders were hitting the site.

[WylieE]

Xigla has some good quality products but they do not have any kind of community. I pleaded with Juan for years that they should have a forum where their users could hang out at and share info, but for one reason or another he did not want to mess with running forums. (Some companies view forums as a threat) Juan added a number of features that we requested on the 5.x product and overall we were very happy with it until the day it crashed and could not be revived. In an act of desperation (I swore at one time I would never do this) I started testing out hosted solutions. I went though many of them, right and left. I tested out a hosted version called BOLDCHAT and I have never looked back. Our Proactive Chats went through the roof. We average during the weekday 134 chats a day, and our sales conversions using proactive chats, pays the monthly cost in one day.

Hi Calvis,

Are you still using BoldChat? I just checked out their site and it looks good. We're investigating live chat options for our site. Knowing we get 7,000+ visitors a day, I've been concerned about the possible impact to our servers of people wanting live chat. A hosted solution could be a viable alternative.

[calvis]

WylieE,

Yes, we are still using Bold Chat with great success. We use the Pro Version. I think your site would do well with it because your products are so technical in nature. Setting up the cans takes some time. Implementing the conversion code is pretty straight forward. Their client is very slick and is constantly being improved upon. They have a free trial. If necessary they will extend the free trail if needed to allow you more time to evaluate. They have their own online support just in case you have questions.

We have been very happy with it.

[heinscott]

We use live person on ours... That also works very well, with all kinds of different programmable options for proative chats.

Scott

[WylieE]

Thanks Scott.

I've been looking at BoldChat and LiveHelper today. Both look impressive. LiveHelper looks like it allows the rep to synchronize pages with the customer and see the same things. That could be highly beneficial with our customers. LivePerson seems to offer some of the same things.

I'll be doing some testing with both and will report back my results. In the interim, who else is offering live chat?

[WylieE]

Here's a quick summary of our findings if anyone is interested in pursuing live chat.

We demo'ed:
http://www.boldchat.com
http://www.whoson.com
http://www.websitealive.com
http://www.livehelper.com

Pricing and features were fairly comparable across the board. We swapped out different solutions on our site for about two weeks. For us, the boldchat client was the most intuitive. I tried out technical support at all sites and bold chat was the most responsive and gave the most complete answers. Whoson has done the most follow-up with us, however.

What was surprising was the sheer lack of use from our site visitors. We average 200-ish visitors on the site at a time and I never had more than 9 support requests a day during business hours. The questions posted were *exceptionally* basic and required very little technical knowledge. I've been surveying some of our regular customers and they were more likely to just drop us an email than use the online chat.

If we do implement online chat, it will be in a more limited capacity (perhaps 2 staff) than we had thought would be necessary.

[jmestep]

We used Whoson, but turned off the chat fairly early. We just got a bunch of kids with questions like Does it come in blue? Answer, no we just showed it in blue because a birdie told us it was your favorite color and we knew you couldn't read. I found that whoson was invaluable for watching live traffic on the site. When Able 5 was having performance issue before they came out with the mods, we could always tell when there was a site problem right away-- visitors in the live traffic started showing up with red x right away. We could also watch what search engines were doing.

[AbleMods]

...no we just showed it in blue because a birdie told us it was your favorite color and we knew you couldn't read.

WOW!! Feel the love!!!!

[calvis]

We average 200-ish visitors on the site at a time and I never had more than 9 support requests a day during business hours. The questions posted were *exceptionally* basic and required very little technical knowledge.

Sounds like you did not use proactive chats aggressively enough. In bold chat you can install the conversion code so that you are able to see what sales were influence by chats. Some people think proactive chats are a turn off, but we have great success with them. If we did not utilize proactive chats the cost of the program would not be cost effective for us.

Proactive chats gives us an opportunity to create a defining relationship with the customer. They educate us on what products they would like to see and what our competitors are doing. Plus proactive chats give us a opportunity to differentiate ourselves with the competition. It is not uncommon for our operators to handle 200 to 300 chats a day with a relative small customer base. We train our operators to focus more on the sales part so a good training program is essential. I do all the training myself to insure that it done correctly. Also to utilized the proactive feature effectively you need to have some very artfully created cans. Effective cans are only created from the results of prior chats. All cans need to be positive towards the customers to give the customer a real and genuine experience.

Proactive chats and their impact on customers is a science within itself.


To Judy:

Here is my best chat story.

Last year a week before Christmas we starting getting a sudden rash of chatters and this went on continuously on for hours and hours. The regular operators were so overwhelmed that they asked for help. Everyone in the office was helping and it was very bizarre. I started to do some investigation and I noticed that many of users were coming for a forum website (can't recall the name right now). This site was very popular among teens, and it was Christmas break, and when I clicked on the referrer there was a post to effect: To get on our website and screw around with the operators. It was all fun and games to them. I registered and posted a message saying to lay off our operators and let them do their job.

I flagged their posts and within minutes all the people that were posting in a thread on how fun it was to screw with online operators were all banned in forums. Afterwards I am happy to say that the bogus chats stopped very quickly and everything when back to normal.

[jmestep]

Oops, my halo slipped.

[WylieE]

Sounds like you did not use proactive chats aggressively enough. In bold chat you can install the conversion code so that you are able to see what sales were influence by chats. Some people think proactive chats are a turn off, but we have great success with them. If we did not utilize proactive chats the cost of the program would not be cost effective for us.

Proactive chats and their impact on customers is a science within itself.

Points well taken. This is one of managements greatest concerns and a reason why I still have not been able to convince them to go after abandoned carts. (Another issue there.) That concern is one of 'big brother' watching our site visitors. Management is concerned that pursuing our visitors more actively (agressively, if you prefer) will be a turn off to those that wish browse privately.

I did initiate proactive chats and the vast majority were ignored. Would you mind sharing your criteria for establishing proactive chat? Are you doing it automatically after a certain timeframe and number of page visits? And what percentage of visitors accept the chat invite?

Thanks!

[calvis]

In the Setup area of Boldchat our auto-invite rules are as follows:

Stop auto-inviting a visitor after 2 invite declines

Stop auto-inviting a visitor after 3 invite ignores.


These were suggested by Dave at Boldchat for us.