* 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!

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 =)