Introducing the Woopra Chat Widget
Our Live Chat functionality is one of the most popular features built into Woopra. But we’ve been asked repeatedly if there was any way we could incorporate inbound chat alongside our proactive outbound chat capability. Well, as of today Woopra’s Live Chat now work two ways – so your visitors can let you know they want to chat live with you!
Introducing the Woopra Live Chat Widget, ready for testing.
Keep in mind that the two way chat functionality we’re discussing here requires the Woopra 1.4 desktop application. So before you enable it make sure you manually upgrade (as discussed later).
The new Woopra 1.4 features chat request notifications that pop up on your computer when the Woopra Desktop Client is running, and provides chat log saving, visitor tracking while you are chatting, visitor history lookup, and more. All of this is combined with the new Woopra Chat Widget!
If you’d like to help test the new Woopra Chat Widget:
- Download the latest Release Candidate per the tester’s instructions.
- Go to the Woopra Members area Settings
- Under Manage, click on the new Widgets section.
- Check the checkbox to enable the Woopra Chat Widget.
- Report your feedback in the forums.
Once enabled, within a few minutes you should see a new Woopra Chat box in the lower corner of your website’s pages. Hover the mouse over the box and a list of “online agents” will pop up. Online agents are those with whom you’ve shared Woopra site access with. We’d love your input on more features for managing online agents as well as additional features for the Woopra Chat Widget.
Once you’ve had the opportunity to test the system out, feel free to stop by the forums and give us your feedback.
Improved Woopra Live Chat Features
In addition to the new Woopra Chat Widget, you can now set your primary chat settings in the Woopra Desktop Client including setting your Name, Title, Online Status and Avatar.
We’ll be adding more features to the Woopra Chat Widget (as well as more cool Woopra Widgets like live stats and maps) so your feedback is important.
Thanks for helping us test this and see you in the forums!
I saw it on someones blog (you know who) a week before this and wonder if it would come out, guess it was answered for me :).
This is great but we would like the ability to customize the widget with some text and without that big Woopra logo.
Thank you…
We’re going to enable real soon the ability to customize the Woopra widget.
Only one word to say: “Phantastic”
[...] Woopra » Introducing the Woopra Chat Widget [...]
Totally awesome. A couple questions. 1. What is the easiest way to have the chat not appear on your site (as in when you go home for the day)? 2. I would be nice to add a sound when a visitor initiates a chat session (in case you looking elsewhere) – and to also modify the time value for automatically ignoring messages.
We’re discussing all this in the forum discussion so here is an abbreviated response. Follow the instructions to set your online status to “Away”. We’re working on adding sounds, and adding timeout options for the alerts, as mentioned earlier in the comments. Thanks! And keep your feedback coming in the forum where we are gathering up notes and digging into the code, looking for all those bugs and buggers.
Great news! We love woopra more and more each day! Customizing (ability to translate messages to Polish) will be brilliant. Maybe own div build in to the page with “contact with us” (exec JS function to call Woopra chat, get available persons etc.) ?
hmm looks cool but i dont think its something i’m going to use
i have a flash irc client
& irc chat rules
Looks great, but would like to be able to link it to one of those generic “Live Operators” logos (the girl with the headset. ) at the top right in my header instead of a floating woopra one. Is that going to be possible?
I agree we should be able to use our own logo for the chat icon
Agree with Jay – the logo/image needs to shout ‘contact us/live support/talk here’. The Woopra logo means nothing to the customer…
Jay, et al…
We are going to be allowing customization of the chat widget soon. Just trying to get it launched for now… Also, it is likely that clients will only be able to remove the branding if they are on a paid Woopra account as opposed to the Basic account.
Having said that, the widget that you currently see is also going to allow you to do more than this first iteration. Currently we are only showing available agents for chat. But later you’ll be able to enable other widget features like maybe showing the number of live visitors on the site currently. Or listing the top 10 most visited pages, etc.
Stay tuned as we work on these improvements.
Cheers,
John P.
The live chat does not work on hover only if I click on it. My laptop uses FF 3.5 and vista.
Did you report on this in the forum discussion? That’s where we’re tracking all the testing reports and bugs. Thanks!
What about the ability to locate the chat button in a different location rather than bottom right where it is at the moment? I was thinking on the side like Zendesk has on its website.
As stated earlier and in the forum, we’re working on customization ideas for placement and more. Come join us in the forums to give your specific feedback where we are tracking all the issues. Thanks!
Great stuff, howver I do not beleive it is professional to show the woopra logo on the chat box, or at least there should be an option to fully remove the logo – I am willing to pay for it. See for example whoson chat feature for good implementation.
Also, how do I change the operator name. It shows my login name and not the friendly name from the settings.
C.
One more..if you click on the “We are Offline” widget, you should have the option to direct the user to the site’s contact support page, and NOT the woopra web page. What does the woopra web page has to do with our sites and what use does our users have of coming to your website? It is not this way you should get more customers…
Also, it would be good to have the opiton to remove the widget box if the agents are online, so it is not shown at all.
Thanks for great software!
C.
Thank you, but be sure and join the party discussing all of this, and reading through our responses, in the forum where this has been discussed in depth.
As per this picture
http://twitpic.com/1avpgv
you can see the chat box is lost when is over WP-Cumulus.
Did you report this in the forums? That’s where we are tracking these issues. There are some things will need to know such as if your cloud tag is running jQuery or AJAX and what the URL of the site in question is so we can check the design functionality.
[...] your visitors ping you and say “Let’s chat!” from the website. We’ve been testing the new Woopra Chat Widget and the feedback has been great. Expect this to evolve over [...]
I am seconding most of the criticism I am hearing here: needs configurability – cant redirect to woopra, logo, etc.
I COULD join the forum, or I could comment here, the first point of relevance.. How many forums do I have to join in this lifetime?
Love woopra.. Not looking forward to paying to get rid of your logo on a little chat box thing.. Probably will just get rid of it altogether.. Sounds like tons of limitations currently.And yeah yeah, report it in the forums.. But when I click on the ‘update widgets’ button, nothing happens – So I havent even seen the thing aside from at the bottom of this very screen.
Keep up the good work, be careful about trying to make people with 1000-2000PVs/month pay $10/month for a chat button…
LOL! Sounds like you didn’t hold back much. The Woopra Chat Widget has been tested extensively, but it is still a new feature and wide spread testing began yesterday. We’ll be adding a lot of customization and configuration and your feedback helps. Currently, the chat is available to all plans. By registering with Woopra, you are automatically registered with the forums. You do not have to use the Woopra Live Chat Widget. You can disable it at any time.
One last thing.. I am sort of assuming the update widgets is disabled as this functionality is basically beta… How much time would it have taken for a note to be added or the button disabled until it works? How many minutes\hours should people have to spend troubleshooting this?
Hi Lorelle,
Just until I know exactly how to use it can you tell me how to disable the Live Chat Widget?
Please follow the information in the article on disabling the Live Chat Widget.
I assume this is not functional with the Basic package?
Never assume. :D The Woopra Chat Widget works with all versions of Woopra plans currently.
[...] big news this month is the release of the new Woopra 1.4 desktop application which incorporates our live chat capabilities. This new release adds many new features and also begins to show off Woopra as the extensible [...]
[...] Woopra Chat Widget [...]
[...] Woopra Chat Widget [...]
1. I am very excited about this opportunity to have this information in real time. Congratulations & Thank You All!
2. I would like to provide important and timely feedback even though I am new to this application:
I would change something in any version of Woopra, paid or unpaid, about the little box that comes up on the site once Woopra is activated on a users site and working and that is that it’s very confusing from a visitor point of view who is outside the Woopra culture, to understand that the message in the box that says” We’re Offline” means that the chat function is offline.
We’re Offline could mean to visitors that the site is down or that something is not working. If you don’t know what Woopra is and does that message is confusing.
If I were you and were receptive, which it sounds like you all are, I would really make a change to that Message in the box, because many people who don’t use chat in this way, or, who don’t know about Woopra, will not understand that message.
That message is only relevant inside of understanding Woopra’s application. Trust me on this. I found it a CONFUSING MESSAGE from the start and am concerned for my visitors. I would try to refrain from being myopic about this and take this suggestion seriously.
STRONG RECOMMENDATION of CHANGE TO THE MESSAGE IN THE WOOPRA BOX THAT SITS ON USERS SITES:
1. Have it say” Let’s Chat Offline” or “Real Time Chat Offline” or “Chat is Offline” or “Woopra Chat Offline”
That box is there to activate a real- time chat as far as the visitors are concerned. As for having Woopras name on it, I think that it would be neat to have a a few different ways that people can access this real- time chat widget and also find out about Woopra by making 2 or 3 different clickable widgets in different sizes that don’t force the placement of the widget on the user by having it sit at the lower right hand corner at the bottom of the users page.
I suggest making it part of the site and not an attachment to the site. Think of it like virtual feng shui. Placement is important. Real Time Analytics are integral to a successful site’s growth and development. Let the user decide where they want it placed. Make the widget flexible.
For example, a widget could be made and placed on the site sidebars or anywhere the user wants to place it. Make it more attractive. This is very important. By having it in a kind of forced area, this aspect makes its placement and the way it appears structurally the sole descretion of Woopra versus the user and their visitors. And since it is about Their Visitors and spreading the usefulness of real time analytics, perhaps this change will be seriously contemplated.
I hope that my suggestions and recommendations are clear and that no one is offended.
Lot’s of love to Lorelle and the entire Woopra team. I am grateful for what you have created.
Kim Greenhouse
Thanks for the feedback, Kim. As you will note, most of these things have been mentioned in the comments and on the forums. We’re listening and will have the next version released soon. Thanks.
I don’t even see it on this page. Here is what IE is telling me…
Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; SU 3.22; GTB6.4; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Alexa Toolbar; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:46:06 UTC
Message: Object doesn’t support this action
Line: 37
Char: 4
This has been reported in the Woopra forums and we’re working on a resolution for Internet Explorer only issues. Thanks. We often post updates and information on such issues on the forum, so please check there.
need to be able to get rid of the logo ….
i would become a paying subscriber to have the ability to get rid of the woopra logo
and replace with my own ….
Can we hold you to that promise? :D As stated, we’re working on allowing customization.
Hi Lorelle,
Mercury Direct are on a Platinum plan, and we are keen to introduce the live chat facility to our website, particlarly now that inbound requests can be made. We have already testing outgoing chat events which ork wonderfully and we are excited to perform a controlled test for inbound chat events. However, we won’t be running this feature live until certain customisable features are in place, such as chaging the logo.
Look forward to hearing that customisation is ready to be used.
Thanks
Does it work for basic Package?
@romapiu: yes.
It’s been a couple months since you said the chat widget could be customized… any status updates?
We have been working on it constantly under the hood. You may have noticed the changes.
We’ll be releasing a full update very soon. Did you check out the new Woopra Web version that was recently remodeled and upgraded?
I do not know where to download, If you know, please tell me, I would be grateful
Download what? Are you registered with Woopra? The installation process points to the download files for the Woopra Desktop Client. There is nothing to download for the Woopra Live Chat Widget. Just follow the instructions in the article to enable it. Thanks.
Can this now be customized?
As stated in this discussion, customization of the Woopra Live Chat is coming as soon as we finish the beta development. Thanks.
is it possible to customizate the language? I mean for those that have woopra in other countries like Spain
IS it possible to change the phrase” We’e online” for “Estamos Online” ??
We will be offering customization in a future upgrade as soon as we are finished with the beta testing of the Woopra Live Chat Widget.
Wonderful! :)
Why is this March 22nd comment showing up as after the June 2010 comments? Bug?