active website help

[thedark]

Hello, people!

Perhaps it's not the thread to discuss this.. it just seemed the most appropriate to me.

Anyway, i bet all of you know the subject - live help tools, ie software to establish a chat with a site visitor. So starting this thread i hope we collectively would decide on questions:
1. Are these tools good? I mean how do they influence the conversion? Perhaps effect is different for different products?
2. What goals can pursue by using such software and what package works best for all and each?

Big G let me come up with examples pretty easy:
http://www.liveperson.com/
http://www.phplivesupport.com/
http://www.livehelper.com/

They all seem pretty same. thoughts/comments?

Also i've come up with something.. rather unusual:
http://www.sales-n-stats.com/
The site says it can "text or voice chat". They're using VoIP i think. Does anyone has experience with VoIP? I think the customer needs a headset to use it. Also they claim to have online monitoring and statistics on this monitoring, something like webserver log analyzer. And it's done by the folks made http://www.x-cart.com/

Pretty interesting: to merge a chat and a webserver log analyzer :)

They don't offer a demo so i wonder if anyone has actual experience with that.

Yet this sales-n-stats thing is just my 2 cents into the discussion. Any first hand experience with live help?

[nottheusual1]

Works well for us on 6 commerce sites. We like it, and Eric seems to get it a bit better with each release. We've donated at every update to this point. Easy install/admin and you can have multiple operators, etc. Not missing much we've noticed at all.

http://www.craftysyntax.com

We balk at the pay services because we can't get a warm fuzzy about what happens to our info on their servers.

:not_the_usual1
[you decide]

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by nottheusual1

Works well for us on 6 commerce sites. We like it, and Eric seems to get it a bit better with each release. We've donated at every update to this point. Easy install/admin and you can have multiple operators, etc. Not missing much we've noticed at all.

http://www.craftysyntax.com

We balk at the pay services because we can't get a warm fuzzy about what happens to our info on their servers.

:not_the_usual1
[you decide]

How's it do for server load? We tried an open source PHP live chat a while back and the server load went through the roof (the author said it wasn't designed to handle our traffic on just a Dual Xeon web server - not sure what we'd need.)

Brian.

[nottheusual1]

We run it on PIII boxes without breaking a sweat - and it isn't tough to load test, and I can't imagine a dual-xenon horse like yours should have any problems. Well, unless you had a couple of thousand concurrent sessions, which you wouldn't really want to have occuring on your Web server, anyway.

Take a look around on the CSLH forums - I saw some load discussions there a few months ago, but can't remember ever having anyone say they had problems.

CSLH is also a PHP and MySQL-based product - BTW.

[jomariet]

From a vistor POV, make sure there is someone to staff it. Most of the sites I've been to that offers these never have anyone available. I know that in Alaska we're not in a mainstream time zone but still, I should be able to find someone sometime.

JM

[Granite]

Not long ago free version of Sales-n-Stats software was released. Istalled it at my site, seems like a viable solution.
Download link: http://www.sales-n-stats.com/free_edition.html