Today, I noticed that a company is offering a free online chat support service that can be pasted into any number of websites. Years ago I used to use a similar service called “Human Click” with my tech support website here at the college. It worked quite well but like many good things that start out as an open source project, the service was eventually acquired by a group of capitalists that started charging for the service so I discontinued using it.
I was naturally skeptical about this new service but I read through the user agreement and saw no blatant gotchas. I signed up for the service and was pleased to see that the chat interface is even free from glaring advertisements – just a simple statement Powered by SirLook. It is a totally web-based service so there is nothing to install on the client side and you can load the script on as many web pages as you wish. When you login to their chat management site, you have a window that lists any chat requests by URL of the website where the request was initiated so one person can respond to multiple sites. You can customize the interface and include as many visitor questions to the chat request dialog box as you wish, archive sessions, track visitors, build a library of canned responses for frequently asked questions, and refer visitors to your own contact forms. The full list of features can be seen here:
http://www.sirlook.com/live/features.php
I am testing the service on my Roman Times educational history site. You can try it out by clicking on the Roman Times link below.
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Emharrsch/romanwonders.html
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