Improved incoming chat flow and status indicator

Over the next weeks we will be deploying an update to Chatlio that we believe improves the workflow for handling new incoming chats. When a visitor starts a new conversation on your site, we currently send multiple messages to your Chatlio slack channel(s). Eg. The first message a visitor sent, and the operator who answers. Also, with the current conversation flow, you are not able to see the status of a conversation. This makes it harder to keep an overview of chats on busier sites.

What is changing:

Our new flow will just post a single message into the Chatlio channel(s) when a visitor starts a conversation, and will update dynamically as operators answer or the status of a conversation changes.

Screenshot of new conversation message.

We believe this update will be better for everyone, but if you have reasons for holding off on the update let us know by chatting with us below. Also, if you have feedback on the changes, feel free to let us know too.

Chatlio and Slack API migration

Hi All! We have been working hard to keep improving Chatlio over the last years, especially 2020 which turned into a popular year for live chat! At the moment we are currently in the process of many back end changes to migrate to a newer Slack API. The user experience will remain largely unchanged for all our current customers, and future cusotmers will enjoy the same Chatlio experience.

Thanks again for all of you making us one of the top apps on Slack app store!

For 2021 and beyond, please let us know if there are any features you wish Chatlio had or annoyances you think could be improved! Just email us at [email protected] and mention this blog post. We will see what we can do to help.

Thanks from the Chatlio team!

p.s. We forgot how to blog in 2020.

New Chatlio features, Feb 2019!

Update, Feb 2019.

Hello there!

We thought you might like a quick update on what’s been going on! We’ve got a few new features and small updates to share with you.

What’s new?

“Peek” messages

We added a new way to display trigger messages. “peek” trigger text is shown in a smaller message bubble next to a closed widget. See the Chatlio triggers tab and check out the new display style setting to enable. All new triggers you setup will now default to the new “peek” style.

Privacy options

We added new privacy options to the widget & dashboard. Now you can require visitors to accept customized pre-chat agreements and also include a custom “privacy policy” link in your widget’s footer. See the Chatlio appearance tab in the dashboard to configure.

Geo restrictions

Want your chat widget to only show in specific countries? You can now show or hide the chat widget based on the country(ies). See the Chatlio behavior tab in the dashboard to configure this.

Improvements to /chatlio ban command

Hopefully you don’t have a problem with trolls 👺, but in case you do, we’ve improved our /chatlio ban command functionality! Read more about other Chatlio commands you can run in Slack here: https://chatlio.com/docs/chatlio-commands/

Platform-specific install instructions

Now it’s easier than ever to embed Chatlio on your website. The install tab on our dashboard now includes platform-specific instructions for easy integration with Shopify, Squarespace, Joomla, Drupal and more! Check out the widget install tab and then click “other platforms.”

New changelog page

Want to track our progress? We regularly update and approve upon Chatlio by releasing new features and fixing bugs, check out our changelog page for the latest updates to our widget, dashboard, and API: https://chatlio.com/changelog/

Thanks again for all your continued support and feedback.

Stop by and chat with us anytime!

Bye for now from Team Chatlio

New Chatlio feature, July 2018!

New feature, Question Groups.

Hello, all!

We’re excited to announce a new feature we are working on called Question Groups, available today on our Pro & Business plans. The Chatlio dashboard settings now includes a tab dedicated to creating and configuring Question Groups.

“So what does it do?”

Question groups can ask visitors a series of pre-chat questions and, depending on their answers, either let them chat in a particular widget or show them the offline form. (Great for qualifying leads).

For example, your question group could start by asking “Is this a sales or support question?” when the visitor opens the chat widget, and then route the chat to your support or sales channel in Slack depending on their answer.

Setup in the dashboard:

Widget:

We’ve created some documentation here https://chatlio.com/docs/question-groups/ for information on how to set it including some examples.

The feature is still in early release, so we are particularly interested in feedback on any bugs/weirdness you might encounter and of course also your thoughts on ergonomics and UX.

Attention Product Hunters

If you like Chatlio and haven’t upvoted our Product Hunt listing, we would be extremely grateful for an upvote! This helps us to continue to grow and provide more value to everyone.

Thanks again for all your continued support and feedback.

Stop by and chat with us anytime!

By for now from Team Chatlio

New Chatlio features and improvements, September 2017!

Hello, all!

Hope you are all having a great year - sorry we’ve not posted recently but we’ve been working away in the background to offer some excellent new features. Some of them are brand new and some of them we released quietly over the past few months, but here’s a quick summary of everything that’s new since we last posted.

New widget design!

We’ve just finished overhauling our widget design! The new designs add a sleek & modern look to our existing, chip, button & tab styles. The widget now features online indicators for all styles of widget, allowing your visitors to distinguish if you’re online and ready to chat more easily. New open and close animations have also been added, as well as a new message alert sound. We’re still developing a few more exciting features that will be added to the new widgets in the coming weeks, so keep checking the blog for further updates.

“How do I enable the new design if I’m still using the older widget on my site?”

The new design is active on all new accounts as of today! If you are an existing customer you can choose to opt-in and enable the new widget design by following the instructions below. This will allow you test/trial the new design with the ability to revert to the old style (temporarily) if you decide that you’re not ready to switch yet.

After 30 days we will automatically switch all accounts to the new style widget and disabling the old design.

1. Get your existing widget code - from the Chatlio Dashboard > Select the widget > Widget Install tab.

2. Find the part which has the element (“data-embed-version”,“2.3”); and replace the existing version number 2.2 with 2.3

3. After you have updated this on all the pages you have the widget installed you can refresh to see the new design. Please do not hesitate to contact us via the widget below if you discover any problems.

Saved Replies

Saved Replies is one of our most requested features this year! Now you can save answers to your most commonly asked questions, to ensure customers get high-quality replies in all situations. You can also configure trigger phrases or words that will prompt Chatlio to suggest one of the Saved Replies send to your visitors. To add saved replies to your Chatlio account, check out the Saved Replies tab of the dashboard Chatlio Dashboard > Select the widget > Saved Replies tab, which is available on Standard or higher subscription tiers.

Trigger Webhook when Chat is Late

For those of you who take advantage of Chatlio’s webhooks, we’ve recently added a new option that can automatically notify you whenever a visitor did not get an answer within 90 seconds and was shown your “no answer” message. Check out all the other Chatlio webhooks..

Reports Dashboard

We’ve added a new section to the dashboard to show you detailed metrics about your team’s chat history, widget availability, average chat response time &chat feedback!

Conversation Ratings

We’ve added a feature that let’s you allow your visitors to rate their Chatlio interactions with your team after a conversation has ended. These chat ratings can be viewed on the reports dashboard or in real time in the #chatlio-support channel.

Bots

You can now add bots to all visitor conversations on Chatlio. The sky is the limit to how your team can use this feature! You can now develop custom chat bots to answer questions from your visitors automatically! Check out our documentation for more info here.

Attention Product Hunters

If you like Chatlio and haven’t upvoted our Product Hunt listing, we would be extremely grateful for an upvote! This helps us to continue to grow and provide more value to everyone.

Thanks again for all your continued support and feedback.

Stop by and chat with us anytime!

By for now from Team Chatlio

New Chatlio features and improvements, October 2016!

Hello All! Here is an overview of our latest updates to Chatlio.

Automatically send messages to visitors on your behalf via Chatlio triggers!

Our number one requested feature was the ability to automate messages to visitors based on what page(s) and how long they have been there. We are happy to announce that this is now possible with Chatlio triggers. When used thoughtfully (please do), triggers can increase engagement with your visitors. Some good examples of triggers are asking if visitor has any pricing questions after 30 seconds on pricing page, or if user likes new feature on the page where new feature is located. But use your imagination as you know your users best.

Visitor unread message indicators

A subtle touch we added for all accounts, is an unread message indicator for visitors. This is best explained by showing what a visitor sees when they have a new Chatlio message.

Multiple users per Chatlio account

A boring, but very useful addition to Chatlio, you can now add multiple users to your Chatlio account, so you can share Chatlio dashboard access with the rest of your team without sharing a login.

Segment Integration

If you use Segment for user analytics, Chatlio now provides built in support for sending chat related events to Segment to give you a full picture of activity on your site including live chat. Details on how to use Segment with Chatlio.

Here are the events currently sent by Chatlio to Segment:

• Live Chat Conversation Started
• Live Chat Conversation Ended
• Live Chat Message Sent
• Live Chat Message Received


Trick or Treat?

(or how to stop those mildly annoying “so-and-so removed you from the channel” bot messages)

Since it is October, we thought we would share a little Chatlio trick. Instead of using “/chatlio end”, you can do “/leave” in a dedicated channel and we will automatically end the conversation if you are the last human in the channel. Most importantly that stops those mildly annoying bot messages that you have been removed from channel. (assuming you aren’t the user who configured Chatlio)

Attention Product Hunters

If you like Chatlio and haven’t upvoted our Product Hunt listing, we would be extremely grateful for an upvote! This helps us to continue to grow and provide more value to everyone.

Thanks again for all your continued support and feedback.

Stop by and chat with us anytime!

By for now from Team Chatlio

How Chatlio connects companies with customers

We are proud to be featured on the Slack Development Site!

We are very proud and honored to be on the Slack Development showcase! Full article here.

New Chatlio features and improvements!

Hello All! Here is an overview of our latest updates to Chatlio.

Use multiple Slack channels with single Chatlio account!

Our number one requested feature was the ability to setup multiple widgets with a single Chatlio account, each one pointing at a different slack channel (eg. #sales, #support). We are happy to report you can now log into our dashboard to upgrade your account to add more channels!

New webhooks and Zapier App

We added two new webhooks and a Zapier App. In addition to the existing webhook for chat transcripts, we now have:

• New conversation started (eg. use, send sms for new chatter, or blast a siren
• New offline message (eg. use, forward offline message to Zendesk)

Go to our docs for more info on usage.

Gracefully transition offline when chatting with visitors

When Chatlio is turned off, either manually or according to your scheduled operating hours, new visitors to your website see a contact form asking for their email and a message. While this is fine, it is important that visitors that are currently chatting with you don’t simply get cut off mid-sentence. You can now configure a “grace period” for ongoing chatters during which they – and only they – can still chat with you. This lets you wrap up the chat(s) you had going on before packing up for the day. This is default behavior for new accounts.

Check it out by going the Chatlio Dashboard > Select the widget > Behavior tab.

Where is everyone coming from?

Sometimes you get a flurry of new visitors to your site and you catch yourself wondering “whooa, what just happened, are we being featured somewhere?”. Now, with Chatlio, you get an additional hint: the last known referrer is included in the meta-data on all chatters. Small change, but very useful.

Ban annoying users

Banning a visitor means marking them as unable to chat with you. We sincerely hope you will never need this but the internet can be a wild place and a determined “troll” can be quite a nuisance to your staff. Chatlio now lets you ban and unban visitors with a simple command you run from inside Slack. Check out the full docs here.

Always on (manual mode)

In addition to automatically going on or offline or using a schedule, we now allow you to force Chatlio to always be online accepting new chatters. Useful for those who want to respond to visitors via Slack mobile app.

Chatlio ask!

Often times during a chat you need to ask the visitor for some additional piece of information, perhaps so you can call them up or email them with a follow-up from your second-line support staff. With /chatlio ask you can easily reach out to your visitor and collect the information in a structured way, making it available to your third-party tools in post-processing. More info and examples here.

And tons of other miscellaneous improvements and updates!

We were also extremely honored to be top featured app on Slack App directory.

Attention Product Hunters

If you like Chatlio and haven’t upvoted our Product Hunt listing, we would be extremely grateful for an upvote! This helps us to continue to grow and provide more value to everyone.

Chatlio friends spotlight: make and receive phone calls in Slack

If you are interested in making or receiving business calls directly from Slack, be sure to check out our friends at yodel.io

Thanks again for all your continued support and feedback.

Stop by and chat with us anytime!

By for now from Chatlio McChatface

Chatlio is #1 featured Slack App

Proud to be the top featured app on the Slack App Directory!!!

We are very proud and honored to be the number one featured app on the Slack App Directory! Welcome to all the new users who have discoverd Chatlio because of it!

New Chatlio features!

Greetings and a happy new year to all of you. Hope your 2015 was great as well. We are very excited for 2016, and have big new features coming soon! Big thanks to all of you who gave us feedback and wishes. Keep it coming!

Here’s a quick run-down of some of the new stuff we’re rolled out in the latter part of 2015.

New widget design and display options

We made big updates to widget design and mobile user experience. Grab the latest embed code if you signed up before September 2015, or wait and we will be rolling this out to all shortly. Also, we have new widget display options: in addition to the classic chat box on the bottom right of the screen, we now provide a full-height sidebar option, inline embedding and a Wordpress plugin.

Go to the Chatlio dashboard to grab the latest embed code that allows for different display options. You can mix and match.

Request screenshots

During a chat you can ask your visitors to send you a screenshot of their browser window. Invaluable for those tricky debugging sessions when you’re struggling to understand their issue.

Additional features and improvements

• Operating hours: turn Chatlio on/off based on a weekly schedule.
• Chatlio is now an [official Slack app] (https://slack.com/apps/category/At0EFRCDQU-marketing)! 🎉
• Typing indicators: Chatlio has them, both ways, and it works great!
• Response reminders: get notified in Slack when a visitor goes without response for more than 30 seconds. Very helpful if you happen to step away from your desk for a second.
• Chat throttling: set a maximum number of chats that can reach you at any one time. When you hit the max, Chatlio will show in offline mode and ask visitors to leave you a message.
• End chats and send transcripts: configure Chatlio send a transcript of the current conversation as an email or to your webhook.
• Files, images, code snippets: uploading files and images from Slack just work. Use the standard formatting for code snippets and emojis, just like you do in Slack.
• Improved Docs: Always underrated, but very important to our customer experience, is up to date and helpful documentation.
• Many, many other improvements in widget, dashboard and the very extensive Slack integration

Big stuff coming soon!

• Marketing automation: push messages to users, canned responses, track who’s currnetly online
• Chat reporting and analytics
• Visitor-side tools: transcript emails, operator rating, file uploads, etc
• And many more surprises to come shortly ;)

Thanks for being a Chatlio customer! And please reach out to us with ideas or feedback of any kind. We take it seriously and you are essential in helping us provide the best livechat software for Slack. 👊

Why Chatlio?

Why did we create Chatlio? Good question! :)

We created Chatlio out of our frustrations with existing customer support and pre-sales options. Adding live chat to your site has many, many benefits (more below), but the existing solutions are complicated to use and setup, forced you to use their web app, and ignored the operator experience as well. We set out to fix that with Chatlio.

Our goal: Make it as simple as possible for you and your customers to communicate.

Most chat products focus on the visitor, which is of course you must, but most chat products didn’t consider the operator’s daily usage before you force another tool on them.

By integrating with the most popular business chat software, Slack, using Chatlio requires no extra tabs, client downloads, context switching etc. This is what sets Chatlio apart from the others.

We also believe more and more customers prefer chat over email/phone when they have questions about a product or service. Just as most of us are messaging more now on our phone, Facebook, etc. as opposed to a call or email, we are seeing that trend continue with our online interactions for sales and support related questions, moving away from traditional call trees or email support.

There have been live chat services for years, but all of them require you to use their web interface, etc to respond to customers. We took it one step farther and integrate directly with Slack, the most popular business chat software, so the operators can efficiently respond to site visitors without leaving the chat software they already use and love internally.

What is the importance of real-time chat?

We have seen what started as very frustrated customers who hop on chat and get an instant response turn into extremely happy customers that tout their experience with us to others online and offline.

In addition, a lot of our customers, including ourselves, show that having live chat as part of the sales funnel greatly increase conversions because you can engage the customer with the few questions they might have during the most critical stages of the signup process. This means a live chat product can more than pay for itself.

Who are we?

We are a small team of real humans making a product we use ourselves and many others enjoy. We work out of Seattle and Stockholm. Feel free to talk with us right now. :)