Does anyone have any positive experience with integrating homepage chatbots into Bubble.is? I’m considering one of those “How can we help you?” popups, typically lower right of the screen.
I’m using Freshchat. It’s got great features at free level and very easy to deploy. Customizing a bit (to do things like get the user’s actual ID when logged in) is fairly easy (this always requires a little JavaScript) as well.
There are many great chat tools like this. Each of them should be quite straightforward to set-up in Bubble. If you get stuck, just ask the forum and include screenshots. People are happy to help.
A few related thoughts / best practices:
- Decide on whether you’re using a chat tool for customer support or lead generation/nurturing. There are different feature sets to support both of these and in my experience any particular chat app is only optimizes for one of the two.
- These are great for getting feedback from users on what’s confusing them. So, I’d optimize not just for pushing your message out but also for getting useful feedback and information from other users.
- Lots of people talk about “chatbots” (i.e., automated chat support) but very few chatbots are any good. Chat apps can work well, but they need to be manned by a human. If you really need automation so that it’s more of a chatbot, then you’ll probably need $100k+ to build something that users won’t dislike. At least, that’s been my experience.
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Good advice as always, @sridharan.s!
In terms of other live chat solutions, a lot of Bubblers seem to like Drift.
Intercom is of course the classic and industry-leading solution.
There are a lot of these and producthunt.com will turn up a lot of different options. (Search “Intercom” and you’ll get a list of many different alternatives.)
I took the OP’s post to be more about a chat widget in general, and not really automated bot-like chat, but simple automated interactions are available in a lot of the chat solutions.
I use Freshchat and also have a big friendly “questions?” button in my header on most interior app pages (for Logged In users — it opens a popup that sends me an email) and I find that folks use both.
Anything that increases user engagement and feedback is great, and a lot of users are accustomed to using chat widgets to give feedback or ask questions, so I think these things (regardless of which specific one you use) are very helpful!
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@keith Just curious what do you use Freshchat for? For example customer support or lead generation/nurturing etc.
Hey @kumar: It’s literally just my “chat for any purpose” solution. Inside my app (like, on user admin type pages), I have a big “Questions?” button that pops up an interface to send me an email. (And that’s configured in such a way that I get notifications of new messages like that.)
And then there’s also the Freshchat widget lower right. (It’s present on pretty much every page whether one is logged in or not.) Some folks just prefer that type of interface and I’ve had suggestion reports, pre-sales type questions and support inquiries.)
In fact… while I was starting to write this a couple hours ago, I was immediately interrupted by a Freshchat question from a paying customer needing help with a configuration type issue. So, it really does work and is pretty helpful.
One thing I need to do is complete my integration (I keep not getting around to identifying known users… so when an actual user pings me, they have a silly name like “Flaming Carrot” and I’m like, “sorry, can you tell me your email… I really need to finish configuring this crazy thing.”)
Great. Thanks so much for sharing your experience. Good luck and success to you.
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