As a support feature the president of our company wanted to offer a help desk via chat clients (AIM, Yahoo, MSN) and i wanted to see what you guys think. My first impression was that it was too unprofessional. However... It's growing on me.

What do you all think? :banana:

I think it depends on your niche and how many clients you have. If you have 50,000 clients it would be overwhelming and as far as I know you can only have 150 or 250 people on your MSN/AIM list. Gets to be tough. But I think some clients love it.

Moved to Running a Web Host.

LIke Greg mentioned it will depend on your customers and target audience. As an alternative to AIM/MSN you could look at one of the live hel/chat support options.

If the server goes down, you'll be bombarded by IMs.

You won't have accessable logs, should someone need to reference something.

You won't have time to compose thoughts.

There's less a chance of a helpdesk account being maliciously used by a family member, than an AIM account.

I just can't see the logic in it, against a LiveChat.

It works for me as I offer it for customers only; but for sales--- you run into too many kids IMing you to bother you.

I think it’s more professional to use a live help chat service like Livehelper or LivePerson. I have used these on several sites and found them very helpful. You could also use these services to do proactive sales on your site.

Originally posted by webdevtalk.com
I think it’s more professional to use a live help chat service like Livehelper or LivePerson. I have used these on several sites and found them very helpful. You could also use these services to do proactive sales on your site. Proactive sales are iffy. It may work, but for every client that has been gained, I've heard a dozen complain or reject it.. (Rackspace, for example.)

In terms of keeping track of your conversations, there are a few programs available on the market right now that will automatically save all of your instant messenger conversations for future reference.

Try http://download.com for some

Boris

Its good that you provide more support options. But when your company grows i.e clients it will be tough for you to manage the request. Even hard to track the issues. Keeping logs is good but how are you going to manage them ?

I offer it, but I think it's wise to make sure all conversations are logged. I have addons for various instant messanging systems that help me provide automatic logging features (and some systems, like MSN, already have logging built-in). I also agree with everyone said above: If you have alot of clients, it's going to be tough and probably not wise.

AIM,MSN, and YIM are great for customer support and you should use them.

AIM/MSN and other IMs are a good way of supporting especially if you sell to personal websites and photography websites. If you do provide that type of support make sure you log everything, like previously mentioned above, some people think that IMs are not logged and they go on saying stuff that they wouldnt email or say on a ticket.

go with a pro systsem that may have multi operators and priority system and a built in ticket.
so later you can add more people to handle the load and could have people wait in turn to chat with you.
any company that uses msn is not a pro and i would never buy any thing from them.
finda nice hosted chat/support systsem so if your server goes down your safe.
good luck

latest MSN support auto logging. AIM doesnt, not sure about Y!.

Trillian and gaim supports logging and multiple-accounts-on-multiple-protocols(AIM/MSN/Y!). Trillian Pro is worth the money with some extra plug-ins (esp POPCheck) and good GUI

Alrighty so here's my next question...
Is there any free top of the line chat system for php that you recommend? I want it to be free so that I dont feel locked in to that perticular system. Thank you.

Also i bought trillian pro. Im going to offer it for my members only. Thanks for all the ideas guys! :-D

the words "free" and "top of the line" don't go together, but there are quite a few that are free, and half-decent. Take a look at the "supported scripts" by Fantastico, there's at least 2 there (IIRC)

Originally posted by BizB
go with a pro systsem that may have multi operators and priority system and a built in ticket.
so later you can add more people to handle the load and could have people wait in turn to chat with you.
any company that uses msn is not a pro and i would never buy any thing from them.
finda nice hosted chat/support systsem so if your server goes down your safe.
good luck

I'd have to disagree with you, BizB. I've been with hostgator.com for a few months now. They offer im via msn, yahoo, icq and aim. I LOVE it. They are ALWAYS available. And it's easier to chat with them then to send an email. They DO offer live chat via their own setup, but so far, it's been less convenient for me than just im'ing them via yahoo since that's what i'm always chatting on anyway. They also have phone support, but it's still easier for me to just chat rather than call. I prefer it. It's instant and requires no effort on my part.

hostgator.com has been totally professional. So far, their server has NEVER gone down. The uptime is 99.7% consistently.

So, with that being said, I'll have to disagree with your statement.

Originally posted by VolkNet
Alrighty so here's my next question...
Is there any free top of the line chat system for php that you recommend? I want it to be free so that I dont feel locked in to that perticular system. Thank you.

I know it's not free, but PHP Live Helper from Turnkey Web Tools works extremely well for us. We tried a free version of some other system for a while, and it did not work well at all. It wouldn't report all visitors for us and was very buggy. If you're actually going to use the system, the $100 would be well worth it IMHO.

HelpCenterLive is great -- and free... but its not "great enough" for my uses.

For my customers with 56k AOL... AIM/MSN/ICQ/YIM is MUCH better, you don't have to always have the page refresh, which bugs them and me too.

Boldchat is great --- Doesn't do that massive refreshing thing... but the freeversion is too simple, and the paid version is outrageous.