What's hot around the world of Software Development and
information workflow
Integrating live chat into your website for *free*
How many visitors do you get to your website on a daily basis? More importantly
how many of those potential customers view the services that you offer and then
have a question but the only way to contact you is via an email form or phone
number.
Believe it or not, many potential customers do not feel comfortable phoning and
making an enquiry for fear of getting the hard sell over the phone so their only
option is to use an email form. The problem with email is that it does not offer
a instant response like a phone call does.
This is where a livechat component for your website enters the picture.
A livechat component allows you to provide a simple way to easily offer sales or
support chat via your website. A potential or existing customer simply clicks on
the "chat button" and you will receive a message informing you that someone is
ready to chat with you.
You can then answer any of their questions via an intuitive interface and once
the chat is finished you are able to save the chat transcript for future
reference.
What's great about this feature is that you can see if you are being asked the
same questions time and time again. If so, it may well be worth adding the
question and your response to your websites "Services" page or as part of a
"Frequently Asked Questions" section.
So, how much does this cost?
How about nothing, $0, free or whatever you want to
call it. We looked hard around the web as this was something that we wanted for
our own website. We needed something that was reliable and also provided a professional service.
There were many commercial options available costing in the vicinity of $60 -
$130 per month and then there were the folks from comm100.com.
We signed up for their service and integrated their chat component into our own
website and have not been happier. We have had numerous enquiries via the live
chat feature and have gained some new clients.
Adding the chat component to your website is as simple as signing up for the service, copying
and pasting some simple HTML into your website and then downloading and
installing the desktop chat client.
We do offer a one-off fee to do all of the above for your company for only $120
ex GST if you are not confident incorporating the chat client into your
companies website. For a single payment of $120 you will have the ability to
chat to your clients in real-time for the life of your website; we think that's
a bargain.
For more information about this service, please
contact us
Free piece of handy software
One of our clients recently needed a way to concatenate thousands of text files into one big text file.
This is very easy to do with a simple command prompt but unfortunately we could not ask our client to "drop to DOS" everytime they needed to concatenate a few files so to get around that problem we wrote a small app for them at no charge.
It's available for free from this download link.