Zopim Chat

Zopim Chat (non affiliate link) is a live chat feature, much like Facebook chat, which allows users to quickly and easily connect with customer service, technical support or sales representatives directly from the website.

Apart from the obvious advantage of quick, instant service, the admin section of the chat provides all sorts of other useful information and features such as chat logging and live updates about which page a user is currently viewing – making technical support and sales enquiries very easy indeed as you know exactly what the customer is looking at.

Crucially live chat is a modern and informal communication method. It has none of the formality of a letter or phone call & therefore users feel instantly more relaxed & open.

Much like emails or phone calls, good solid metrics must be in place when using live chat facilities:

• How long should a customer be expected to wait?
• Is it acceptable to take a customers details and call them back, or is a live & instant response expected?
• How are more traditional metrics measured such as conversion rates?
• How do you deal with competitors / distributors looking for informaton that they may be restricted to (but can gain access by posing as a customer) ?

The answers to these questions may well vary between industries but in my opinion they are very similar to a phone call. If you don’t have enough information to hand, it’s very natural to ask for details and call them back.

Remember, this is about being open, informal & honest with visitors. Forging genuine relationships on their level and being as helpful as possible while still maintaining a business / sales related approach to the conversation (upselling should still always be encouraged).

A chat function can instantly catapult your site into the top percentile of memorable sites simply because it’s new, useful, incredibly easy to use and as yet hasn’t been widely adopted.

If you aren’t using a chat function, you certainly should be.

Oh & did we mention that installing zopim chat is as easy as embedding two lines of code on each page? No complex installs or server maintenance & great prices on upgraded accounts.

It also work on smartphones such as the iPhone & Blackberry via IM – stay in touch with your clients wherever you are!

The only issue we’ve found with Zopim is that it does seem to slow down IE6 significantly. In a perfect world no-one would still be using a browser that is almost a decade old, but we don’t live in a perfect world and there is still a small percentage of users on IE6.

Our recommendation? Check your stats before implementing this if you have a high proportion of IE6 users as you don’t want to ruin their experience because they’ll simply leave your site.

A fantastic piece of software, the free user account should be enough for many small businesses & the small upgrade fees for larger accounts more than justifies itself as a communication line to your customers.

Can be slow with IE6.

Overall – 4/5 Stars