Another milestone has been achieved, its only the first month of the year and we are on a tear already. *Pats himself on the back*.
Ok with that shameless toot-of-my-own-horn out of the way, here are some details of what's been done and why this is good stuff, especially for customers on premium plans.
This may not come as a surprise:
When asked about their preferences for support channels, customers say that they prefer live chat over social media, email, and even phone support. Why? Live chat support is fast, efficient, and convenient - so says HelpScout.
There are a lot of great reasons why chat based help and support works and there are a million providers of live chat service, at various price points and with a great many bells and whistles.
Our many goals with this integration
Business goals
- Offer chat based support to OUR customers, to help them better and more effectively use our rather big lineup of tools (with more on the way)
- Use chat as a sales channel for customer acquisition and conversion
- Allow our customers the option of using the same tools for THEIR prospects or network members / customers
Technical goals
- Integrate the chat service into MainCross with reasonable effort and make it work for our specific requirements - eg having programmatic control to handle different use cases
- Access to a REST API for deeper integration into the Pro dashboard as we evolve this feature further
Pricing goals
- And we had to do this without breaking the bank for us or our customers.
Like I said, there's a million providers out there, and without exception most are too expensive for everyday use cases and small business requirements. Or they have a free tier which has many restrictions, or restrictions that kick in after a period of time (eg access only the last X months of messages etc).
So after evaluating many different providers, we narrowed down to tawk.to as the service of choice, and after a detailed evaluation with real use, settled on this service.
Tawk.to is genuinely free
Its rather amazing, and I don't know how they do it - but their service is free and its not hobbled in any way. I was initially skeptical about the quality of a fully free service - but Robert and his team seem to be doing a fine, fine job. Brilliant reading material here on "why-free".
How does it work?
This feature is currently in beta.
Support for you
Chat based support and ticketing is being offered to all our customers on premium plans, ie for heroes.
The chat widget shows up in different ways depending on whether its a small screen or large screen.
On a larger screen, the chat widget always shows at the middle of the screen, on the right side.
On a mobile screen, since real estate is limited, chat can be launched from the bottom navigation bar.
Support for your network
For all networks on premium plans - we have currently enabled chat support for your entire network. Ie MainCross will offer support not only to you but to your network members as well at no extra cost.
This is being done on an experimental basis while we learn directly from end users what issues, if any, they are facing.
Edit 14th April 2022: This is no longer being offered. Thanks to all who participated.
Back story, or the "why are we doing what we are doing"
I've spoken about this earlier here:
When I started evangelizing the MainCross system, one of the major goals was to create the most complete elegant system that just works and has solutions for solving many of the usual use-cases that everyone needs. Without breaking the bank.
So that's one strategic direction for our product journey.
