Chat as important channel to support your customers

If you care about your customers and want to give them an opportunity to immediately contact your support team, then you can't work without online chat!

As you likely already know, UserEcho customer support solution also includes online chat. Recently we've paid considerable attention to this part of our product and would like to tell you more about it.

First of all we significantly updated design. In addition to more modern appearance we've made the interface a little more "alive" adding animation of elements like appearance and hiding of buttons and texts, the progress of downloading files, etc. Now the chat seems more modern, vibrant and holistic. Compare the old and new view.

In addition, we added an animation that the agent is already responding to the customer. We show animated three dots when support agent starts to reply. Now customers don't have the feeling that no one heard them and doesn't answer.

When a customer just opens the chat he/she sees all support agents who are online. This is clearly seen from the following comparison - the first chat screen.

If there are a lot of support agents and their photos do not fit in the header of the chat window then show kind a gray round to make it feels like there are more support agents available.

In addition if in your project settings you've selected to request data about user and the user is not authorized then earlier he/she immediately saw the form for entering personal information. We think that this behavior may push the client away from the start of the conversation. Therefore, now we show just a chat window at first. So the user starts a conversation and after the first call we request his data. With this behavior he/she is more likely to start the conversation and at the same time leave personal information.

If there are no agents online an offline request form is shown to the user. The form is more pleasant than before as well.

The chat code itself has been significantly optimized for faster performance and download. File size decreased by 96% from 230Kb to 9Kb!

We also added parameters for chat windows customization. At the moment, you should add parameters directly to the widget code on your site, but in the near future we plan to revise the embed code and all widget configuration will be done through the UserEcho administrative interface.

What can you customize in the chat window

• button color (btn_bg_color: '#0098FF')
• button text color (btn_fg_color: '#FFFFFF')
• header color (header_bg_color_start: '#0062a4', header_bg_color_end: '#24A7FE'). If you use two different colors, then the title becomes gradient. If colors are the same, then the hader has only one color.
• user message background color (user_msg_bg_color: '#0062a433')
• user message text color (user_msg_fg_color: '#222c27')
• agent message background color (agent_msg_bg_color: '#eae8e8')
• agent message text color (agent_msg_fg_color: '#222c27')

Customization parameters must be specified in the chat section. For example, to change the background color of buttons:

chat:{btn_bg_color:'#0098FF'}

What do we plan next:

• Configuring widget settings from the UserEcho administrative interface and saving parameters in the same interface. The insertion code will be reduced to the widget number (ID).
• Refactorig if the widget "tab".
• Binding an offline request form directly to you Helpdesk. So, you will be able to show customized forms in the chat window.
• Ability to search by you knowledge base articles directly from the chat widget.

The last items will be implemented by combining support widget and chat widget into one. Now they are represented by two tabs and essentially two different widgets.

As always, we are in touch! If you need help with integration feel free to contact us at our Support Forum or email us to support@userecho.com.