Zopim Live Chat Review

In the past I have rang the praises for Livechat on salespages. I really love i because it makes the user feel like they can get all the questions out of the way before buying. I can’t think of a single instance where I have bothered to email a seller about a product before buying. Usually when I am buying something online, it is a “want” not a “need”. And therefore if it doesn’t look right to me, or I don’t know whether it will work for me, I just give it a miss. Ontop of that, when I am in a buying mood, I am in that mindset in that moment only. I don’t want to buy in a week when the company finally responds to my email, I want to buy right now.

However there has been plenty of instances where if live chat is available. I will use it to ask a quick few questions and then onto my purchase. Once again, being in that buying mindset is what drives me here.

With that in mind, I have in in the used LiveZilla for my salespages before. LiveZilla is a pretty good product, and you can read about my uses of it in a previous post here. But LiveZilla always failed in some ways for me.

The biggest being that the actual admin interface, where I answer chats and talk to people, is run from a desktop application. Meaning that for me to be able to answer these chats, I had to have the software installed on my PC. Doesn’t sound that bad, especially because I find desktop applications far more responsive than their web counterparts. But the issues come when I am at work, or at the inlaws (Don’t ask), or maybe using my girlfriends laptop for some reason. Probably in those instances I shouldn’t be answering chat anyway . But I always want to be available to answer any questions. And I can’t have the Chatzilla software installed on every possible PC I am on.

So when it came to installing a livechat system on WachaHost. I certainly shopped around a bit. I really wanted either software that could plug directly into a MSN messenger account (Everyone has messenger nowadays). Or possibly had a web interface. Luckily I found Zopim.

Zopim is amazing. Let me just get that out of the way now. It has one of the best web interfaces out there, where I can chat with buyers anywhere in the world. Aswell as this, It can plug into MSN Messenger. Although I have never tried it in all honesty, so I don’t know how well it would work, But one can assume it works aswell as their web interface.

One of the most time saving features about Zopim is the fact it has canned responses already programmed in. So for example, let’s say I type in /hi into the chat window. It will automatically change that to “Hi, How can we help you today =)”. This particular phrase was pre-programmed in, but you can add as many as you want.

If you look closely, you will also see that there is a check-box for “History (beta)”. I haven’t got much use out of this feature yet, mostly because I haven’t had a bunch of chats for it to analyze. But basically what it does, is that if you write a phrase enough times, it saves it. And as you start typing, it will suggest things in that top box. Thus if you get the same questions over and over again, it will remember your replies and save them for you. It would be much the same as writing a shortcut, but this way it auto remembers.

I’m sure there will be some people out there that don’t wish for their chats to be saved. But I couldn’t care less in all honesty. I am not selling nuclear weapons to Iran so I have no fear over Zopim reading my chats. Plus you actually have access to the history anyway. Which is super handy when you need to prove a customer wrong, which we all hope we never have to do but will always come up.

There is also a bunch of other stats. Like analyzing how many visitors you get (Sort of like Google Analytics). You can also see each visitor live as they come onto your site, and it can tell you which page they are currently viewing, their referrer, if they have ever chatted with you before etc. If you have a particular visitor who you want to talk to, you can also initiate a chat with them so that it pops up on their screen. Very very cool.

I suggest if you want to read more about the features. Go check ‘em out at www.zopim.com. There is a free version which you can download and give it a test (And usually use for small businesses anyway). I am still on the free version since there will never be more than one agent in the chat at one time in any case. So unless you run a massive enterprise business, the free version should be enough for most.