Add IM to website for online support chat

[quickcreative]

I want to add a chat now button that uses IM to permit visitors to talk to us if we are online. Has anybody done this?

Is it necessary to provide each service (msn, yahoo, aol) or is there any common standard.

Does it launch the client on the vistors desktop or is there a programmatic way to handle the actual "chat"?

[speed]

We setup a Jabber network as an addon to our web directory it uses a flash client to allow people to chat or they can download a client for their PC/Mac/Phone etc. However the way we have it configured it requires that people sign up for an account. You can see it at http://www.worldsiteindex.com/chat/

The Flash client is available at http://xiffian.sourceforge.net/ and any Jabber server should work. You can also use a HTML client such as http://jwchat.sourceforge.net/

The Flash client can be set to automatically log the user in and drop them into a conference room.

Alternatively there's http://www.kayako.com/ who do a ticketing and chat system and http://www.craftysyntax.com/ one of these might be the easiest option.