Live Help

[Cornish Steve]

Ozzy,

In another message thread, you happened to mention Live Help. The other day, I was visiting a site when up popped a chat window. Is this what you mean by Live Help?

I've been thinking that this is a great way to communicate and to convince site visitors to buy. It would seem to be analogous to a salesperson offering help, for example, when a potential buyer enters a furniture store. It's not too intrusive because the visitor can choose not to accept help, but for others it may be just what's needed to convince them to buy.

What does it take to implement such a feature? Does it matter that Live Help is not always available? What are the costs involved? Can you recommend any products?

I'd appreciate any feedback.

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Steve,

I don't know the thread you're referring to but it sounds like a good definition of livehelp.

The screen popping up was probably a livehelp operator spotting you on the site and then initiating a chat request to see if you needed any help.

We use livehelp all the time, it's pretty good. I would say that we have found it more productive when it is user initiated rather than salesperson initiated.

Costs for the script we use are free to obtain, tweak and install, ongoing costs are higher bandwidth, processor load etc..

The benefits far outweight the costs for us and we invested in desktop applications (£15 per machine) that sit in our start trays and notify us if a chat request comes in. The alternative is to have an operators chat window open the whole time on your PC desktop which we found a little annoying (because we kept closing it down accidently)

Hope this helps a bit,

Rob

[MinuWeb]

We use a livesupport from Kayako (www.kayako.com) it is a paid software and works extremely well.

We never initiate a chat with someone on our site and always wait for them to initiate it, mailny because I don't want to invade someones "browsing privacy"

[Rob Holmes]

We never initiate a chat with someone on our site and always wait for them to initiate it, mailny because I don't want to invade someones "browsing privacy"

Yep - this is v important:)

We use: http://www.helpcenterlive.com/

I really rate Kayako as well

Rob

[Ozzy]

I use PHP LiveHelp and have pay the annual fee for the self hosted option with unlimited updates (which is needed).
http://www.phplivesupport.com/

Piece of cake to install and use too :)

[The_JinJ]

Help Centre Live here too - about to buy the desktop app :)

[fridayteam]

Is there one that is free and easy to set up?

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Roz, yes

http://www.helpcenterlive.com/

or

http://www.craftysyntax.com/

Rob