Live Chat

Roger_Ramjet

Has anyone got any recommendations about the various 'Live Chat' products that are out there? Your personal experience with any of them would be greatly appreciated.

rebz01

i like the simple chac stuff so i use
pjirc & i made my IRC channel at quakenet

then all you need is a irc client like mirc or the firefox add on i forget what thats called

this way you dont actually need to be logged in on your site to chat

if this isnt what your lookin for jus check out sourceforge

Roger_Ramjet

No, IRC is not what I meant at all.

Yes, I can and have checked out SF: what I was asking was for peoples' experience with the various scripts that are on there like PHPOpenChat or PHP121. But Ta anyway.

rebz01

oh my bad lol

Servyces

I have some experience with Kayako's Live Chat which is part of the Kayako Support Suite. It does the job and seems to work fine for most of the customers.

bpat1434

I just got done implementing fail code for a client from LiveHelper. Stay away from them. Essentially the problem was the javascript they were using was extremely inefficient. Instead of keeping an object with a hash of customer id and whether the tech was online and polling every so often, each implementation on a page made the same requests multiple times. And you couldn't delay execution until after the DOM loaded because their javascript wrote code directly where the script was called, instead of maybe after a specific div, or replacing the contents of a specific div?

So our client has moved on to ProvideSupport and they seem better. I personally have no greater experience than that.

As for PHP based clients, not really sure if any are good. I'd rather put my weight upon a third-party that I can go to with complaints if/when something breaks than go "well, it's OSS so you get what you pay for" and have to waste my time fixing it.

laserlight

Do you have something like SparkWeb in mind? I have never tried it myself, but I did experiment with running their XMPP server in the past.

Roger_Ramjet

Ta everyone.

I should have been more explicit in my question, 🙁 my bad. We are after a one-to-one chat feature on the site so that visitors can talk directly to sales staff, not a chat room. So Bpat and Servyces answers are the sort I am looking for.

Bpat, looks good, ta.

Servyces, looks very good indeed as it covers many of the other things I am wanting to do on our company site. You say 'seems to work fine for most of the customers'. What problems have the other ones encountered, please?