Good Morning Everyone,
We are looking to have a live chat on our site to help with customer service during lean staffing times. I've been asked to get this going, I think it is a grand idea and I was hoping to get a little direction from this community before looking for vendors, especially since I am not familiar with how they work. Hubspot has been mentioned as a vendor because it is free?
I'd appreciate any info before I talk to salespeople, especially if you are currently using Live Chat on your TNew site. We also have a marketing site - is chat installed on both? thanks in advance for your help.
Sheila
This has been on our radar as well -- there are an immense number of options out there at different price points; a key consideration for us is how user licenses are calculated, since our box office staffing setup tends (not during a pandemic) to involve a larger number of users working fewer hours each, as opposed to a smaller number of users working full-time hours. I also tend to search for options that integrate well with our existing tools; for example we use Front for customer email response management, and have evaluated their web chat solution which is built-in to their application. For the opposite reason, we would probably avoid something like Intercom since it comes with a huge set of additional features that we aren't interested in. We will almost certainly be moving forward with the web chat component of Twilio Flex, since I am currently implementing Flex as a robust contact center phone system solution for our remote box office. (I do plan to deploy this both to TNEW and to our marketing site.)
If your team uses Slack for internal comms, you might scan through some of the options in the Slack app directory, since there are a number of web chat widgets that integrate directly with Slack. "Slaask" has struck me as particularly interesting, since it appears to be "Slack-first", without an external interface.
Olark is one of the only options that immediately comes to mind as a pure-play web chat tool without an entire CRM underneath, but I'm sure there are others. Also worth mentioning is Facebook Messenger -- if you are already using Facebook Business tools for marketing, you could look at putting the Messenger Chat Plugin on your website.
Hi Sheila,
We use Purechat and have been happy with it. We do pay for it. It is on both our marketing and TNEW pages. You decide which pages to add it to. It’s been quite a while since we installed it and I don’t recall if they have a free version? Feel free to poke around on our site. Here are a few pages we have it on: https://www.seattleopera.org/on-stage/watching-on-your-tv/ (marketing site)
https://secure.seattleopera.org/streaming/giovanni (TNEW)
If you have any questions, let me know.
Thanks,
Michelle Carrasquillo
Michelle - thank you so much, I will certainly take a look and come back if I have questions.
Wow Nick, thank you for all of the leads and some really useful information. I have no exacts since it just came up as an idea and you gave me a few things to put on the list and I appreciate you helping me out as I get started. Good luck with you Flex implementation, it sounds like you're in the midst of some great solutions.
Hello again Michelle,
I chatted with someone on your site, it does look pretty cool. They mentioned that the constituent number came up on the inside chat if the customer has been there before – wow.
I am copying Matthew Cohen, our Digital Media Manager.
Thank you for the info – it’s new to us so we may indeed have more questions.