Hey @nikesh!

A couple months ago, @Nicholas shared this awesome post to enable Facebook Messenger on your page. This might prove useful to you.

Hey @nikesh,

What type of live chat did you have in mind?

The Facebook Messenger option @Jess pointed out is pretty easy to get going, and it’s free. But there are many other options too depending on your needs.

Hi @Nicholas,

I’m assuming the customer would need to be logged into their facebook to use the chat option. Unfortunately, our customers are not likely to be on Facebook.

I was hoping for a static embedded chat in the page rather than a pop-up ala Intercom chat. I’m not sure if it even exists. I want to test it against a standard form.

Thanks in advance.

These days you can pull Facebook Messenger notifications into other platforms, including Intercom. It also works with FrontApp and Sprout Social I believe. So they wouldn’t have to be on Facebook to monitor, but they would have to be signed up for one of those other tools, which might not be ideal.

In my experience, the problem with embedding a chat window on a page is that visitors like to navigate to other pages, and in those cases, they would lose the chat. So that’s why the little popup chat icons in the lower corners of sites are so popular.

As a middle ground approach, one idea is to just have call to action buttons on your page that when clicked, launch the popup chat. I know you can do this with Intercom, and probably many other common chat platforms.

Thanks @Nicholas that sounds like a good approach using the button to launch the chat. I’ll give it a try with intercom and report back.

Thanks again!

I used FreshChat. It seems ok for now. I evaluated a few and freshchat seemed to have the features I wanted and the price was good. Its missing a few things I now know that I want.

For conversion, I didn’t run this feature as an A/B test. The volume we’ve used it on is too small, but I get the sense that you should always ask for contact info before accepting a chat. Otherwise you invest the effort and we’ve seen that chats don’t lead to conversion.

I’ll run an A/B test soon but I’m starting to get a feel that it decreases conversion.

What chat does give you is a sense of what information isn’t apparent or isn’t on your pages that users want to ask about.

@hans thanks I’ll take a look at Freshchat.

Your last sentence is what I’m keen to understand. Conversion rates are not bad at 7-8% but I think there is something missing that could be understood by using chat.