* for information on how to link zopim up with your favorite IM (Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM) networks, please read this earlier post.

To start off this post, Zopim doesn’t just allow you to reply to customers on your website via Instant Messaging (IM) clients, we also allow you to use commands and access information that will be important in helping you close a sale. Recently we’ve powered up our IM offering by rolling out some highly-requested features.

Chat Request Information

Those of you who frequently chat with visitors via IM clients may have noticed these new features being silently rolled out a few weeks ago. For starters, whenever chat requests are made on your webpage, you will see a lot more information about the visitor, including:

• IP Address
• Country, Region, City
• Current Page URL
• Email (if available)
• Notes (if available)

Page Surfing Information

Also, during a conversation, you will be notified as the visitor is moving from page to page. Now, you will know the context of a conversation and be able to customize your response based on the page your visitor is currently on.

Help Command

As with before, you can list the available commands using the command #help (screenshot above). The old commands include #shortcuts, which lists the shortcuts you’ve created on the dashboard and #end, which ends your current chat. The new commands we’ve added allows you to set the name, email and notes of the visitor you’re chatting with.

New Commands

The screenshot above shows #setname, #setemail and #setnotes in action. The next time this visitor returns to your site, you will be able to access the same information regardless of whether you’re on the dashboard or on your favorite IM client.

This short blog post concludes our new IM feature additions. Do write to us at feedback@zopim.com to let us know what you think!

Hilarious!

Here’s how to ensure an outsourcing FAIL, especially if you’re an outsourcing company:

• Outsourcing company emails company (cloner) that wants to clone Zopim
• Cloner asks for a quotation from Outsourcing company for cloning Zopim
• Outsourcing company responds AND COPIES Zopim in the email
• Zopim.. *Jawdrops at extent of FAIL*

Every now and then, we notice companies attempting to copy our web design. That’s a compliment to our web design, and we appreciate it since we ourselves copied nice web designs (very early on) when we were still developing a prototype of Zopim.

Cloning our service is new though, and it’s kinda hilarious when you think about how we found out about it.

Below’s the unedited email conversation thread between the out-sourcing company, cloner and us.
(screen capture of email)

We’ve blotted out the full names of the companies out of courtesy =)

/***************** Our Response *******************/

Royston Tay
RE: General Information
Royston Tay Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:58 AM
To: info@2e*****.com, team@zopim.com
Hi Jason,

Thanks for paying the ultimate compliment to Zopim by requesting for an outsourcing company to clone our services.

Let’s share our experience as a company that has done this from scratch (with a team of talented web developers, not out-sourced robots). It is dead-easy to create a clone of our solution that has 60% of our functionality and user experience. A couple of developers + a couple of months should get you somewhere, and you’ll be effectively competing with hundreds of clones in the market.

It’s the final 40% that’s going to take a while to perfect, and it’s what made the bulk of our customers choose us over the competition. This includes fine attention to details like making sure our inline chat window works across all browser (with nice touches like being draggable and skinnable), perfecting the messaging system to send messages without lag time (unlike many other solutions in the market), a smart-intuitive dashboard that minimizes work on the agent’s end, etc..

Fortunately, you really don’t have to do all that =) We have an affiliate program that will be launched this month, that will allow you to resell Zopim to your customers. Would you like us to keep you informed once it’s ready for launch?

Cheers,
Royston
Co-founder Zopim

/***************** Out-Sourcing Company COPIES ZOPIM in email *******************/

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 1:46 PM, John wrote:
Hello Jason

Hope you are doing great!!

Do you have any updates for me.

Thanks

-John

/******************************* Cloner’s Request *********************************/

From: info@2e*****.com [mailto:info@2e*****.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2010 12:45 PM
To: John
Subject: Re: General Information

Hi john

Can u quote to do a clone or making similar script like this site how much:

www.zopim.com

I need quote for:
Dashboard
Online widget
Open api system

Pls let me exact technologies driven this system.

Thks

Jason
Director, 2e*****.com

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on 3

/*********************** Out-Sourcing Company’s Cold Email *************************/

From: John

Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 12:18:49 +0530

To: info@2e*****.com

Subject: General Information

Dear Manager,

Hope you are doing great!!

I am John *****, the Business Development Manager with CAT ************ Ltd Offshore Technology Service Centre. I am here to focus on acquiring and understanding your business needs and nurturing you with the outstanding talent we have which will generate and sustain significant and beneficial growth to your organization maintaining the quality, here is a little more information on how it can be beneficial for you.

Our Centre is located in the best economical country:

Hyderabad, India : CMMI 3 Level Certified having a 6 day workweek with over 500 professionals

Our presence in the U.S., Europe & India makes us a viable partner for Large, Medium and Small scale companies looking to partner with an offshore services company.

For more information, please visit us at www.cat*******.com

We would love to supplement your team with our professionals, Our staff includes professionals in the following areas:

C/C++
.NET (C# and VB.net)
Delphi
Perl
JSP/ Java
PHP
Web Designers
SQL Server DBAs
Oracle DBAs
ASP

SEO Developers
Pocket PC
Visual Fox Pro
Access Developers
QA testers
SAP Consultants

Ruby and Rail Developer

Games Developer

Drupal Developers

WordPress Developers

Outsourcing IT projects to CAT ************ Ltd dramatically reduces development costs by 40 – 60%. Besides, the advantage of working on a full-time basis with people that are familiar with your methodology and Process, hiring dedicated professionals will bring down the costs of long-term project or a pool of projects dramatically in comparison to traditional ‘time and material’ or ‘fixed price’ models since we have special pricing for dedicated teams.

What’s more, Your company does not have to provide any benefits, e.g. health, dental and vision coverage, life and disability insurance, paid vacation, 401(k) etc cutting costs even more and saving Your HR Department a lot of time and paperwork.
Our staff welcome and look forward for inquiries & assistance regarding your requirements, so please don’t hesitate.

Your valuable comments will highly be appreciable. We will feel proud & pleased to serve you with our Services.

In anticipation of your reply!

Your’s Truly,

- John

John ***** [John]
Executive – Business Development |
CAT ************ Ltd.
E-Mail: john@cat************.com | 201-257-5081 x 167 |
Skype Id : s.cat************ | MSN Id : john@cat************.com |

Visit us at—
http://www.cat*******.com Software Development Services
http://www.cat***.com BPO & LPO Offerings
http://www.cat*******.com RPO Solutions.

Disclaimer: We respect your on-line privacy. This is not an unsolicited mail Under Bill S1618 ES Title III passed by the 105th US Congress this mail cannot be considered Spam as long as we include contact information and a method to be removed from our mailing list. If you are not interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with a “REMOVE” to Remove@cat************.com in the subject line. I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to you

Disclaimer: We respect your on-line privacy. This is not an unsolicited mail Under Bill S1618 ES Title III passed by the 105th US Congress this mail cannot be considered Spam as long as we include contact information and a method to be removed from our mailing list. If you are not interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with a “REMOVE” to Remove@cat************.com in the subject line. I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to you

Last week, Julian (VP Sales, Zopim) happily accepted a speaking assignment at RIAction.. on my behalf! And the event was in 5 days!

Time was running out.. The first topic that came to mind was to talk about our history with RIA frameworks, and how we’ve been making use of Flex 3 (more recently Flex 4).

Given the short amount of time available for my preparations, I clobbered together some information from around the internet relating to Flex, the optimization of Flex and also added some of our own thoughts. I also discussed about the considerations product managers should have in mind when deciding on an RIA framework.

Interesting note: This presentation was actually done at Microsoft’s office (in Singapore). I’ve gotta say that Microsoft and their Evangelist team are doing a great job of creating an open platform for RIA discussion, rather than trying to shove Silverlight down developers’ throats. Good stuff..

Well, without further ado, let me present my humble set of slides..

About RIAction (as described on their site)

RIAction (pronounced as ‘Reaction’), as a event with the focus on Rich Internet Application. Aim to promote RIA in the region, RIAction will provide a platform for web professionals to see how RIA can provide a rich user experiences to their applications. During RIAction, we will see major players in the RIA industry like Adobe, Google and Microsoft get together for a day of networking, technical discussions as well as future development roadmaps.

Okay, maybe the headline is a little exaggerated =) But our Intelligent Trigger System does allows you to automate Zopim in many ways. Because it’s designed to be flexible and powerful, there’s no limit to the number of ways you can use this feature. While we don’t want to limit your creativity, here’s a sampling of some of the things you can do with the system. We’ve even given them cheesy names that marketing gurus will be proud of.

Built-in with Zopim

Automated Proactive Chat

Boring name, but massively useful for site owners who want to automatically initiate chat with every visitor that lingers around the site for more than x seconds. You can also customize the greeting messages for new visitors / repeat visitors. Access this via Labs > Proactive Chat. If you have too many visitors on your site and only want to engage the high potential leads, this post should give you more ideas.

Automated Proactive Chat

Chat Rescuer

Sometimes, you could be just too busy handling customers, or taking a toilet break, or walking the dog, or in the middle of an online game. Whatever your excuse is, it’s not nice leaving your visitor waiting for your response. With Chat Rescuer enabled, if none of your agents respond to a visitor’s request within x seconds, Chat Rescuer would politely apologize to your visitor and request that he / she leave a message and email address. Access this via Labs > Advanced Triggers.

Chat Rescuer

Not included by Default (create yourself)

Smart Alec – the Bot with the Answers

Many of your visitors may ask similar questions over and over again. While it does mean you should reconsider the arrangement of your website content, Smart Alec can help you pre-answer certain questions. For example, if a visitor’s message contains “Pricing”, Smart Alec can help spew out the pricing of all your products. Smart Alec works really well with Percy the Manners Police..

Percy the Manners Police

While we generally believe The Customer is King, we also live in a civil society where manners matter. When a customer starts spewing vulgarities, it could sometimes be awkward for us to tell him / her off. This is when Percy the Manners Police will firmly step in and inform the customer that vulgarities will not be tolerated. Percy can also be programmed to warn the visitor that if he crosses the line again, he would have to be evicted (‘banned’) from using the live chat.

Sue the Sexy

Ok, this is totally frivolous, but do check out http://www.zopim.com/?sexychat (when we’re online) to have a short chat with Sue the Sexy. She’s not really bright, so don’t bother talking to her much. If you have the time, you can create a version of Sue that’s actually capable of smarter conversations.

Our Intelligent Trigger System can help you automate Zopim in countless ways. But first of all, let’s take 5 minutes to find out how to create triggers and how the system works. In this tutorial, we will run through how you can create a simple trigger that starts a chat with visitors that have landed on the ‘pricing’  page.

1. Log in to the dashboard and access “Labs” > “Advanced Triggers”. Click on “Create a new trigger” to begin.
   

   Advanced Triggers

2. Key in a name for this new trigger. There are two checkboxes just under the description field. You can enable / disable this trigger using the “Enabled” checkbox (on the left). To ensure that visitors will not be shown the same message repeatedly, let’s keep 2nd checkbox (on the right) ticked as well.
   

   Trigger Name and Checkboxes

3. Triggers rules are only checked when visitors are surfing, requesting to chat or sending messages. Under “Step 1″, use the drop-down to select the event when you want the trigger to be fired. In our example, we want to check the page url whenever a visitor loads a page on your site, therefore select the 2nd option.
   

   When to fire trigger

4. Select “Add Condition” to add your very first rule! Another window should appear to guide you towards creating the condition. Let’s assume that your pricing page’s title contains “Pricing”. Create a condition that looks like the screenshot below. Feel free to explore the various other conditions available.
   

   Condition Window

5. Once you’re done with the first condition. Let’s add two more conditions using the “Add Condition – And” link. You can experiment with adding “Or” rules as well. For this example, we want to start a conversation 2 minutes after a visitor has landed on our pricing page (so he has sufficient time to browse and understand the pricing packages).We also want to make sure that the visitor has not been served by another agent so far. It would be embarrassing to show him an automated message when he’s already been served.Try adding the other two conditions yourself. By the time you complete, you should see something similar to the screenshot below. Give yourself a pat on your back if you’ve managed to achieve it!
   

   Add more conditions!

6. Last but not least, once these conditions have been met, we want to initiate a conversation with a customized message that includes the visitor’s name. Click on “Add action” and select “Send a message to visitor“. Within the message, you can include useful variables such as visitor name, country name, etc.. by typing “@” in the text field. A drop down of available variables would appear (see screenshot below).
   

   Add Actions

7. Once you’re done with all the actions you want to perform, click on “Save“. That’s it, you’ve created your first trigger. Now go on and try experimenting with other triggers!

In this release, we’ve yet to include the ability for you to reshuffle the conditions / actions. But in the meantime, if you’re a developer or comfortable with working with JSON, you can create and edit the triggers quicker using the “Developer Mode” (screenshot below). The textarea within our dashboard isn’t the best place to edit JSON, we’d highly recommend writing your JSON in your favorite text editor before pasting it here. Do check out our documentation for developers as well.

Developer's View

Targeted Proactive Chat

Live chat increases sales conversion, therefore it is important to proactively start conversations with high potential leads. With Zopim’s Intelligent Trigger System, you can automate the process of identifying leads and initiating chats with them.

How are high potential leads identified? It really differs from site to site. For example on a product site like Zopim, someone on the pricing page is considered a high potential lead. By starting a conversation with them, we can offer more information about the features and clear up any doubts in their mind, thereby leading them smoothly towards the goal of a signup.

Here are several ways you can use our Intelligent Trigger System:

• Tag and initiate live chat with visitors entering your Website using specific keywords in specific search engines
• Proactively chat with high value leads entering your Website via PPC links
• Automatically offer assistance to visitors who have been lingering on your site for a while
• Automatically initiate chat with visitors located in certain geographic areas
• Better still, hide the widget from visitors located out of your interested areas
• Offer different customized messages to initiate chats with different categories of visitors
• Upsell / Cross-sell / Offer discount codes  to repeat visitors

With our real-time analytics, a wealth of information about your visitor is available at your fingertips. Our Intelligent Trigger System gives you access to:

1. Visitor’s Location
2. Previous Visit Information
3. Page Information
4. Time / Duration
5. OS / Browser
6. Chat Content

Once the visitors have been identified, you can automate Zopim to perform the following actions on them:

1. Initiate Chat
2. Add Note about visitor
3. Add Tag
4. Mark visitor as “triggered” (on dashboard)
5. Notify Agent (on dashboard)
6. Change name of Visitor
7. Ban Visitor
8. Disconnect Visitor

It’s really simple to set up this rule-based system. Here’s an screenshot of how it looks like.

Landing Page - Pricing

Basically, if a visitor fulfills all the following conditions

1. has not been served by our agents
2. has landed on our pricing page
3. stays on the site for a further 2 minutes

Zopim would perform the following actions automatically

1. send an automated message to the visitor
2. tag him / her with “Pricing”.

There are a million other ways to use our flexible trigger system. Take 5 minutes to learn how to create triggers. Be creative! And feel free to share your experiences with us =)

We’ve recently launched our Shopify Live Chat App. Now Shopify users can effortlessly add Zopim Live Chat to their online store.

For Shopify shop owners, Zopim Live Chat is a dead-easy live chat solution that allows you to track and chat with visitors on your website in real time. You would also get a beautiful chat widget on your website for your visitors to reach out to you when they need assistance. So why Zopim when there are many other solutions available?

• Zopim’s simple to deploy and use. It will take you less than 60 seconds to get started (including signup!)
• Zopim’s powerful (when you need it to be). Get access to customized greeting messages, widget designs, javascript API, powerful trigger system, etc..!
• Be available everywhere! You can access Zopim via our web application, Email, Instant Messaging client (MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, AIM) and via your mobile phone

Can’t wait to get started? Here are the simple steps required:

1. Go to our Shopify App page (here)
2. Click on ‘Install’. You would be led to the activation page (screenshot below). Sign up for a new account, or link up your existing Zopim account.
3. Final Stage! Insert our script into your Shopify web template. Only two simple steps (screenshot below)
4. That’s it! You’re done. You can now log in to the dashboard to chat with visitors!

Two weeks ago, we released our wordpress plugin without much fanfare so we’d have time to iron out potential kinks / bugs that early adopters could face. It turned out to be a non-concern, because after 2 weeks – 1200 downloads and a couple of positive reviews later – the feedback we got was our plugin was ready for show time! So here’s our official introduction of the Zopim Wordpress Live Chat Plugin:

Wordpress users now have an even more intuitive (if it was possible at all) way of deploying Zopim on their site. Simply download our wordpress plugin! Activating it is dead easy as well. You can either use your existing Zopim account or register for a Zopim account seamlessly without even leaving the wordpress backend.

Dead simple setup process

Once you’ve activated Zopim, our widget would auto-magically appear in your wordpress site. Of course at this point, the widget design would be the default one. The next step would be to style the widget and configure other settings to fit your needs specifically. You can do this effortlessly within the plugin by clicking on “Customize”.

Styling and Customization

Last but not least, remember to set Zopim up to work with your favorite IM network (Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM).

Set up Instant Messaging (IM)

If you need to make additional changes or get access to advanced features such as Shortcuts, Departments, Chat Transcripts, etc.. you can still log in to our web-based dashboard using the same credentials.

Enough of us talking about it. Why don’t you write in to let us know what you think about this plugin and what can be done to enhance it? You can reach us via Live Chat or support [at] zopim [dot] com!

It’s probably not new to everyone that Zopim works awesome with the 4 major Instant Messaging (IM) networks out there, namely Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo and AIM. However, the challenging part was getting your IM set up properly. The common complaints we got were

• Hey, your IM chat bots did not add us as buddies
• Your bots are appearing offline!

As you can imagine, the biggest challenge during the setup process was getting our chat bots to add you as a buddy and getting you to accept that invitation regardless of which IM network (Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM) you’re using and regardless of which IM Client (Pidgin, Meebo, Live Messenger, GTalk, etc..) you’re using.

We have since revamped the infrastructure to fix the above problems, and the new IM setup process is as follows. On the Dashboard, under “Settings” > “Instant Messaging (IM)”

1. Select your preferred IM network
2. A Zopim bot will be assigned to you. Add him (her?) as a friend.
3. Send him (her?) a message as indicated. (#setup <key>)
4. That’s it!

Add bot to your IM

Our servers would handle everything else. Other chatbots will request to your friends. Once you’ve accepted their invitations, they will start forwarding chat requests to you.

For our existing users, rest assured that this implementation won’t affect you guys. Chats will still be transferred to and from your Dashboard to IM, and you can still use commands and shortcuts like #help to make replying easier via IM. Check out this short video to understand how commands and shortcuts work: Reply via IM video

Earlier today, we tweeted that

Zopim is currently down due to an issue with vps.net ->http://status.vps.net/?p=61 – hopefully it is resolved soon.

Our service is now back up. We will be monitoring the situation and keeping in contact with our hosting provider to get more information regarding the outage.

We do apologize for the downtime that some of you experienced, sorry!