Live chat services & browser compatibility

By Paul Farnell
19 Jul 2005

Live chat services & browser compatibility

We’ve recently added a “live chat” button to the SiteVista site. There seem to be lots of these live chat services around now, so it was a case of weighing up the different features etc. in order to chose which one to go with. However, LivePerson (who seem to be the market leader) don’t support a range of browsers! Firefox is out (in fact, last time I tried, LivePerson’s chat window crashed Firefox), and so are Safari and pretty much anything else except IE. Not impressive at all.
We’ve gone with BoldChat Plus. They support a decent range of browsers and it’s not too expensive. The user interface is pretty dire, though.
Anyway, we’re going to keep this live chat feature on the site for a few weeks and see how many people use it. What do you think? Do you find these live chat services useful – do you ever use them?

http://www.ssi-developer.net/rant/ maca

I have never used them but I think they are a very good feature to have as they offer an immediate source of help for those who might need it.
I presume they are a resource (personnel) hog ..?
http://www.sitevista.com/blog Paul

Maca – yep, the .NET-based client software (PC only), takes up something like 40MB RAM whilst it’s running in the backgound!
http://www.davidsmalley.com/blog David

personnel consists of me and Paul, and he’s the only one answering the live support at the moment.
I personally think it was a good idea to include, there always comes a point that you just need to speak to someone who can help you immediately or you get angry. I remember when Dabs.com messed up an order of mine (posted the box with no MP3 player inside it) and I tried to get in touch with them, the only avenue was email, not even a phone number or fax number! I got very angry with dabs that day. If they had a live chat feature on their site I imagine my opinions of them would be very different now.
http://www.dabs.com Jonathan

Sorry this is a delayed response and that you had a problem with us in the first place. We have now added a live chat feature to our site and it would be interesting to get anybodies feeback on this. You can connect via the login screen pages.
http://www.sitevista.com David

Hey Jonathan,
Thanks for responding, nice to know that you are listening to people and I’ll certainly check out that feature in the future.
http://www.livechatdir.com Live Chat Directory

Congratulations on implementing a Live Chat solution.
We use Liveperson and it works well with Firefox. Though its more expensive, they have great support, feature set, and its cost effective because it integrates live chat, email, knowledgebase and live call in one.
Liveperson goes way ahead of most competitors for a lot of reasons, and its definitely worth a try.
Matt

Live Chat Directory is a marketing front for Liveperson. It’s a more in depth scam than when Sony was creating their own blogs to market the PSP. Take anything they say with a grain of salt. Or a complete fabrication created by Liveperson’s marketing department.

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