Over the past couple of days, we’ve tested and rolled out a useful new feature.
You might have seen some basic information about your customers when starting chats. For those of you who may have missed it, it looks something like this:
Rapleaf Integration
We have partnered with Rapleaf to provide basic information (Age, Gender, Location) about your customers for free. All that is required is your customer’s email address. For those of you who have enabled the Chat Request Form (Dashboard > Settings > Chat Request Form), this feature should work well since we would have your customers’ email addresses.
The business value of this feature is to give you real-time insights about your customers. This approach allows you to take a more tailored approach when serving customers, and ultimately provide them with a more personalized chat experience. In the long run, this will translate to higher sales conversion and happier customers.
Do note that some of the data provided by Rapleaf may not be 100% up-to-date. For instance your customer may have migrated and Rapleaf’s “Country” information might still be from old records. For this reason, we suggest practicing discretion in using the information provided.
We’d love hearing what you think about this new feature. Love it? Hate it? Questions regarding it? Drop us your ideas / suggestions at feedback [at] zopim [dot] com!
* For customers concerned about privacy, Rapleaf has a page dedicated to privacy concerns.
* Some of you questioned if the “System” message is visible to visitors. Rest assured that only your agents can see these system messages.
Is there a way to turn it off?
@david Perhaps you could give a little feedback on why you'd like it turned off? We'd really appreciate it, thanks!
Hi David, currently there's no way to turn it off.
Haven't seen any useful results from this – most customers enter just their forename name like Dave and of course no service can provide useful information about the particular Dave you're speaking to when there are thousands of them…
A much better solution would be to have Zopim tie in with an existing CRM more easily, so that customers enter something like their username (for example) and the CRM can spit out some relevant information. Obviously this particular example would apply to customers you already know something about of course…
Overall we want more and easier ways to integrate Zopim into our existing systems.
Hi Damien, we hear you! We have just integrated with Highrise (and a couple more CRM soon to come in the next few days), and you can read all about it on the 37signals blog: http://bit.ly/hFP3IT
Does this work for you? Which CRM are you currently using?
How about integrating with pipelinedeals.com and the others found here:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/sear…
And maybe with Google Apps
Hi Jason,
Great suggestions there! We will definitely check out the apps on Google Marketplace (though there's a couple there we have integrated with or will be integrating with soon).
Anyone in particular that you have in mind?
Cheers,
Qing
Bespoke. We need to be able to perform some integration ourselves which from what we've understood isn't facilitated in any suitably easy manner by Zopim yet.
I would like to turn it off as well. I feel like it is an invasion of privacy, and I would be uncomfortable with my clients finding out that I was provided with that information when they use the chat. The gender and age of my customers is irrelevant to my providing a quality service. Collecting that information could be perceived as discriminating, labeling, or pre-judging a client. In our case our clients are students and often funding for participation in our program is provided by the state. I am very concerned by having this feature on our chat screen.
Hi Genie, we understand your concerns totally, and rest assured we are working on a way to turn this off.
The ability to turn it off wasn't built in right from the get go because we wanted to add this awesome feature to all our users as soon as we can. When we first heard about Rapleaf, we knew we found what our users have been asking for all the time- the ability to understand the customer's profile prior to any chat engagement. So we wanted to deliver this first as a beta feature while we work on fine tuning the details, hope you understand.
We'll update again once the ability to turn this off is ready
Hi Zopim, i love this feature with rapleaf. Because in my country ussually we say hello to elder people with the information you provide with rapleaf.
Please do not turn it off this feature, we like it so much.
Thank you for your great innovation updated every months.
Hey Teddie, glad you like it! Kudos to the guys over at Rapleaf!
Perhaps you can tell us how you're using it, and we can do a case study on that
Cheers,
Qing
This seems a bit big brother-ish and unnecessary.
If our clients go with us, they'll provide us with the information we require. If not – they've got a right not to share it.
How does rapleaf get it's actual information? Is it linked to something like facebook?
These are scary days for those who want to respect their clients' privacy.
I would also appreciate knowing how to turn it off.
Hi Nadine,
We understand your concerns about privacy, and rest assured that we are working on a quick fix to turn off this feature. This does look a bit big brother-ish and we do not deny that some of the data collected are personably identifiable.
That said, these information that Rapleaf provides are already publicly available. If you search hard enough across multiple platforms, you can probably piece together the same (or even more) information on a given user. This is precisely how Rapleaf gets their information – by gathering information from the Internet that users have chosen to make public in the first place. What Rapleaf does, is to aggregate it into an easy to read report.
For example, if a Facebook user chooses to make his profile information public, that information could be picked up by Rapleaf, or anyone else for that matter. Whether Rapleaf gets their information from Facebook, is something that we are not aware of as they do not publish their sources of information.
Perhaps it's more reassuring to hear it from Rapleaf themselves: http://www.rapleaf.com/privacy
What do you think?
Cheers,
Qing
I have done my own integration with drupal accounts. When a user that is also logged into my website shows up, the user name, his actual email (stored with the drupal account he created) and few other pieces of information are provided with the user name. All right in zopim.
Cheers,
mark…
Oh really? Please share the goodies with us Mark! We will love to feature this on our blog!
Cheers,
Qing
Here is what what you do:
1) Have the php input format module installed. Allows you to include php code mixed in with normal content.
2) Create a new block under Administer->Site Building->blocks
3) Set the block title to so nothing appears and since the rest of the content is not visible, there is nothing that gets rendered in a browser.
4) I used a "Hidden Chat Block" as description of the block
5) Use the following content which will set several variables in Zopim client per visitor:
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + document.location.protocol + "//zopim.com/?[your_Zopim_account_key]' charset='utf-8' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
mail || $user->name ) {
print("");
print('$zopim.livechat.setName('' . $user->name . '');');
print('$zopim.livechat.setEmail('' . $user->mail . '');');
print('');
}
?>
6) A enabled the block in the footer of my website
http://jnetpcap.com
Its a hidden block so nothing physically appears on the screen but the code does get executed everytime a page is redered.
7) I also used page visibility restricted to: "Show on every page except the listed pages."
user
user/*
Hope that helps. I'd be glad to post any other userfull info about this.
Here is a link to a page I created with instructions on how to integrate Zopim with Drupal:
http://jnetpcap.com/zopim/drupal
Hi,
Would like to have it integrated with SugarCRM. Sugar is widely used and one of the best in the market.
Guess what, we already do
We will be announcing SugarCRM integration soon as well (this week), so stay tuned!
That sounds great! Looking forward to it!
Hi Guys,
Any updates on the integration with SugarCRM?
Hi Guys,
Great post:) thank
How about integrating this with Kayako?
How does this legally? Is not this an invasion of privacy
The information is available via RapLeaf, a company that operates within the bounds of privacy law as stated on their privacy page. https://www.rapleaf.com/privacy
To be clear: Zopim simply uses RapLeaf’s API in accordance with their terms & conditions. We do not guarantee the accuracy, nor endorse the method with which they gather consumer data. We are still testing this value-added service on top of our Live Chat solution to see how it benefits our customers. All your honest and frank feedback / criticisms are appreciated =)