Live Customer Support on Your Website

Userlike.com is an online service for communication with website visitors and a very good alternative to PureChat, which is one of the most popular live chat solutions on the market. It is a live chat that is integrated on your own website. If the tool is activated, a green button appears on the left edge of the browser, which visitors to the website can click on.

This opens the chat window. If the support is online you can chat with it immediately, if it is offline the user has the possibility to send it a message. In this way it is possible, for example in online shops, to offer live support on critical pages, such as the payment process.

Integration into your own website

The installation of such a userlike chat is very easy. In the backend you will find the necessary JavaScript code, which only consists of 2 lines. Just insert it into the footer of your website and the green “Support” button will appear. Alternatively, you can also use an addon, which is available for various CMS. This is available e.g. for WordPress, but also for many shop systems like Magento, xtCommerce or Shopify. With another plugin, co-browsing can be realized and there are also integrations for CRM solutions to transfer the chat logs into the customer’s contact data.

How communication works

As already written, the website visitor starts a chat by clicking on the green button. When labeling this button, you can choose from several predefined options, such as “Support”, “Help?”`or “Live Chat”. If the support employee is online, a new tab opens in his backend and the conversation can begin. Communication with potential customers on your own website

In addition to the normal possibilities of entertainment, the support employee has various other possibilities. For example, he can take a screenshot of the page the user is currently viewing. There are several chat macros that you can use and customize. This allows you to insert standard sentences quickly and easily.

Furthermore you get to see the history with this user (if there is one) and you get some information about the user, like operating system, browser and current page. At the end the chat protocol and if necessary made screenshots are saved, so that one can fall back on it later.

For whom is Userlike suitable?

While I would hardly come to anything else in the blog than chatting with my visitors, the service of Userlike offers a lot of potential for online shops and company websites. Especially with online shops, there are critical moments when the user goes to the checkout and has questions or is insecure. A live chat offers a very good opportunity to prevent the purchase from being cancelled and to answer the customer’s questions.

But also on company websites it can make sense to stand by the visitors. Wherever the user has questions or is unsure and one would like to achieve a certain conversion, the service offers itself. On normal websites and blogs, however, the service is not really useful. Also there interesting conversations can result, but as a rule one will not reach a concrete goal thereby.

It has to be said that at least one employee has to be assigned to support this live chat. You can’t do that on the side. In this respect, this only makes sense for somewhat larger companies. A single self-employed person will not be able to lift this.

Advantages and disadvantages

I like the tool very much and it looks mature. The following are the most important advantages and a few disadvantages that I noticed.

Advantages:

  • The integration into your own website is quick and easy.
  • There are a lot of customization options to customize the chat window and the communication with customers to your own wishes and workflow.
  • The performance is good. I didn’t notice any degradation.
  • The chat itself works very well on the user side as well as on the support side. By the way, if you want, you can also use a messenger, such as pidgin, as a support employee.
  • The communication macros are very helpful and speed up the chat.
  • The fine-tuning can be seen, for example, in the small numbers in the respective browser tab. There you will see a small 1 if you are a website visitor surfing in another tab and there is a new message from support. These are details that show that you have really thought about it.
  • There are extensive tutorials in German that explain all possible aspects of the software. Also exemplary.

Disadvantages:

  • The chat button is always on the left side. With very wide monitors and centered websites, it is not directly in the visitor’s field of vision. One can place the chat button freely. I had overlooked this function at first.
  • If you visit Userlike.com for the first time, you will be greeted in English. But at the upper edge there is the possibility to change the language to German. In the settings I had to change the language to German again manually.
  • Unfortunately there is no single tariff for a support employee. For 29 Euro per month there are 3 “employee accesses”. Certain features, e.g. browser sharing, are only integrated in more expensive tariffs.

Conclusion

After the 14-day test phase, however, it is possible to switch to a free tariff. However, this only allows 20 chats per month. Who has very few customer inquiries, for that this could be an alternative. Even if the handling of the user Chats is well solved the question arises, how well the Tool scales, if all at once dozens customer Chats are started. However, this is generally a problem with such 1:1 communication tools. At the end of the day I couldn’t find many negative things. As I said, the tool looks mature and didn’t cause me any problems.

The domain and the default language suggest that it is a US service. But that is not correct. If you set the language to German and look at the imprint, you will see a German company headquarters. Accordingly, the founders of the service assure that the German data protection law is observed and that the data is protected as best as possible. SSL transmission of the data is available as well as regular backups. The servers themselves are located in Germany, which is of course an advantage over various US providers. For the chat widget you can also make 2 privacy settings. You can set that no personal data is collected and you can display a link to the privacy information.

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