Review: Best Live Chat Software

Best Live Chat Software chat services allow operators to interact with online customers and respond to their questions quickly, helping you convert web queries into customers and site traffic into transactions.

Online consumers are some of the most impatient and demanding around. They expect answers from your online support group right away when they’re only as quick as their computer's Internet connection and processor speed.

Some Features:

Easy Setup & Operation

Look for a live chat service that is simple to set up and maintain.

Customer Convenience

Little conveniences make all the difference to a customer, like knowing their question is receiving attention even before the live chat operator sends the response (typing indicator) or the offer to email a transcript of the live chat session to the customer afterward.

Big conveniences make a difference too, like your customers' ability to receive documents, images or the right webpage from your live chat operator. Look for features like these to delight customers.

Operator/Manager Convenience

Make live chat simple, not a chore for your operators. Features that add to operator convenience include: prewritten chat greetings you can edit, visual and sound alerts, a built-in spellchecker, ability to run several chat sessions at the same time and the ability to transfer live chats to other operators.

Built-in, customizable chat buttons and images can reinforce your company's branding efforts and remote administration means you can make changes on the fly from any computer. Management will be delighted with the automatic online/offline status and messaging system to avoid losing a single customer.

Monitoring and Tracking Abilities

With the right tools, you can collect rich information about online visitors, including the website they came from, what pages they visit on your site and the browser they use. You can see if the visitor has been on your website before, look up past chats and customer information then launch a live chat. Some chat services offer a built-in "Who Is" browser lookup if you want to learn more about a specific customer.

Marketing Features

Top features to look for include live keywords to help you understand your customers' goals, and the ability to send your customer a survey after chat is complete. On your website, you can add a floating invitation to chat, or place advertisements in your live chat window.

Safety Features

If you deal with sensitive data online (such as customer financial information), look for a live chat service that offers SSL secure data transfer abilities so customers can chat about sensitive issues with confidence.

The ability to block an IP address comes in handy when a customer becomes belligerent or aggressive. To avoid further confrontation (and wasted chat operator time), block that customer's computer from accessing your live chat server.

Customer Support

Look for live chat support software that is willing to help you in ways you find most convenient: live chat support, email and/or a toll-free telephone number. With live chat support services, you have all the tools and resources you need to turn a first-time customer into a lifetime customer.

Printers to get Email Addresses

The NYTimes is reporting today that HP will shortly announce printers which have an email address, are always online and are fully touchscreen, and eagerly waiting for print jobs to come in from you. According to the article, HP is claiming that the printers are built for the "iPhone age" because HP has been losing business steadily.

The article points out that the printers will be announced this week and they "build on a limited experiment last year", and they will range in price from $99 to $400 - apparently, every printer will come with a "breakthrough feature" - an email address. HP engineers have said that the email address idea is an "easy, familiar way for people to send print jobs to the printers". Obviously, the idea is that users might take a photo on their phone and email it to their printer so that when they get home, it is ready for them.

In addition, HP is reportedly lining up partners for a website called the "ePrintCenter" which is supposed to be like an app store for printers, similar to what Apple and Google have for their Smartphones. Apparently HP has lined up 40 partners so far to build software and services for the printers - the NYTimes article gives an example of Crayola offering coloring books that can be downloaded and printed through this app store.

It seems like this new information is related to HP's acquisition of Palm last month, which gave them exclusive rights to WebOS - the mobile operating system that runs on Palm phones. HP has previously said that they will be extending WebOS into printers, but did not specify when it would be.

Computer Finally Emulate the Human Brain

Scientists at the Lulea University of Technology announce the development of a new computer model, which is perfectly capable of mimicking a pair of human brain functions in a digital environment. A number of potentially-groundbreaking applications spring to mind, including the development of machines that are able to analyze their own behavior, find their shortcomings, and then fix them. Another possibility would be the conception of machines that are able to suppress the impact of noise in electrical circuits. Each of the innovation could revolutionize a large number of fields of research.

“We have developed a model of how the various sources of information that complement each other, can get a better idea of what is happening. Better to the extent that we may see more than what the different parts look. We have a model, that in important respects, has the same behavior that is measured by researchers that are investigating the nervous system,” explains LUT researcher Tamas Jantvik. The new computer model features a three-module architecture, with each of the individual modules capable of acting like a different “sense”. One of the devices is currently used to model how visual information and stimuli are processed by the brain.

A second one is in charge of doing the same thing for auditory data, whereas a third is in charge of integrating the first two, and making them work together. The main goal of the investigation is to produce such an advanced system, that scientists will become able to take data on how cortical processes such as sight and hearing work, and then include them into engineering practical applications. “An example is when it turns lock in your ears, than we human beings notice that something is 'weird'. There are systems that are designed to detect when a sensor is faulty, but they do not solve the problem the same way that biology does, and it remains to see which method is best,” the scientist adds.

One of the most impressive things about the new model is the fact that it can accurately modify its perception on a sensory input, when a second input begins being added. This is precisely how our brains function, adapting on the go to impressive amounts of data. All these signals come from our five primary senses – touch, hearing, taste, smell and sight – but also from secondary networks, such as the one determining balance, spatial orientation, and so on. What LUT researchers are trying to do is create a machine that is able to integrate this type of data on its own, without having algorithms teaching it how, AlphaGalileo reports.