These days a business can have a website that is rich in social features allowing comments and feedback and multiple ways for their customers to spread the word about their products and services. The real tech savvy companies can even chat online with its customers allowing for real-time support and communication.
Now, with help from companies like Zopim, chatting live online with customers is easy for anyone. I even gave this live chat software a test on my own blog and it was simple.
In this article I will share how you too can easily chat online with your website visitors using the Zopim live chat software.
Overall, getting started with Zopim is as easy as signing up, inserting code, and setting up. That’s about it.
Signing Up With Zopim
To sign up with Zopim, head on over to Zopim and click the orange “Sign Up Free” button. The only information they ask for here is your first and last name, display name, and your email address.
Once you fill in the fields you will be emailed a verification email. Simply note the password given in the email and click the link.
Inserting the code for Zopim
Once you sign in, you will be introduced to the set up process. The first thing you want to do is grab the widget code to insert into your site. Begin by clicking the “Embed widget on my site” button off to the left. You’ll then be given the code.
I use WordPress so the process of inserting it into my footer file was quite easy. It should really be easy for any site, as long as you can modify the HTML code and insert the code somewhere in it.
Once you insert the code and refresh the site, you should see the widget at the bottom right corner of your page.
Setting Up & Using Zopim
To tell the truth, at this point everything is set up far enough to use. You can go further through the buttons below the “Embed widget…” button and make some changes. For instance, I chose to quickly modify the greeting message by inserting my name where it says “Leave a question or comment and someone will try to…” (this is done under Customize widget –> Message settings).
Using the dashboard may be a bit overwhelming at first. It shows if you have any visitors and some analytics data.
If someone is trying to chat with you, you’ll get an auditory notification letting you know. When this happens, click on the visitor on the right.
You’ll notice when you hover over the visitor that you’ll see some information like where they are from, their OS and browser. When you click the visitor, you’ll be brought to the chat tab.
As far as simply chatting with your website visitors, the Zopim live chat software handles it well. There are more features to mess around with. Explore a bit and see what you can do.
Notice that there are packages that are not free. The reason I introduced Zopim is because even the free Lite package does what I needed: it gave me a simple chat widget. Similar services include: Olark and Plupper.
What do you use to interact with your visitors? Do you have a chat widget that you employ on your website or blog?
Tagged: chat • commenting • help • tech support • webmaster tools
