* Real Assistant, low-cost live operators
There’s no doubt that the more care you take over customer interaction the better your sales will be and the higher that customers will rate your service.
A powerful technique that is starting to appear on lots of consumer-oriented sites is live chat – what you might think of as instant Web messaging. Most of the solution is these market are very expensive but today I have a low-cost alternative that looks promising: Published by infinetSoftware, Real Assistant is an ASP-based live operator system.
Real Assistant provides comprehensive operator management (global operator setup, transcipts logs, messaging, stored response creation and editing, etc.) and individual operator consoles that can be accessed by operators anywhere (great for home-based support staff).
While most chat systems only offer reactive chat (the end user initiates a conversation with an operator) Real Assistant also includes the interesting option of proactive chat. Proactive chat means that operators can see which pages users are looking at and invite them to a chat session. The client user interface supports branding and limited internationalization.
Client requirements are low: A 4th generation or later browser (e.g. Internet Explorer 4) with JavaScript and Frames Support, and for operator audio alerts only Flash 5 or greater.
On the server side Real Assistant requires Windows NT 4/2000 or later operating system with Internet Information Services (IIS) 5 or greater, ASP 3 or later, VBScript 5 or greater, Scripting.FileSystemObject, SMTP mailer object (CDONTS, AspMail, JMail,) Access 2000 or greater, and either SQL Server 7 or greater or MySQL 3.5 or greater. The company claims that a standard shared hosting account will support the software for basic use.
The software is licensed for a single server installation with unlimited clients and operators all for the remarkably low price of $120.
