On the road? Want to check your website’s traffic? Better yet, answer live chat requests from your online customers? Now you can. SmartMax, a company that provides online live chat and monitoring support for businesses, recently introduced an app for the iPhone that will allow you to do just that: iMaximo SightMax Live Chat. We tested the app this week, and were extremely impressed with its capabilities. It plugs into SmartMax’s existing server product, the SightMax Installable Live Chat and Monitoring product. SightMax (the server software) provides online businesses with the ability to monitor the traffic of their website, and to embed a Live Chat box within the site. Users click on the chat box to speak with a live customer service representative.
Live chat support software has been around for awhile, and is becoming increasingly prevalent as a way to cut service costs while reaching more customers more quickly. iMaximo (the iPhone app) is a fantastic addition to an already useful business product. Now, you can log in and answer live chat requests while you’re on the go. Simply open the app and you get a view of all of the traffic (identified by IP address and location) on your site, as well as any open conversations that your customer service representatives are having with customers. You can view those conversations, or start your own with customers on your site who are waiting for a rep to become available. Furthermore, you can open a direct chat with one ofyour customer service representatives that is currently logged into SightMax.
Clearly, you wouldn’t actually replace your customer service rep’s keyboard and mice with an iPhone. The productivity decrease alone wouldn’t be worth it. However, if you have traveling salespeople or are yourself away on business, this is a great way to keep your tabs on site traffic without having to plug in that clunky laptop and find a WiFi connection. In our tests, we found that the app worked perfectly over 3G, though EDGE was a bit too slow for sustained customer engagement. The UI was extremely intuitive, and as long as you’re OK with the iPhone keyboard (I still think its better than a physical blackberry keyboard), you should find it an effective app for chatting with customers about their issues.
That said, the use cases for this are likely to be small, and the app will primarily sell to reps of SMB’s whose salespeople put on many different hats or to mid-level managers who need to keep appraised of their customer service team’s performance while out of the office. Nonetheless, if you are a small-town realtor who wants to engage with more of your customers, or a small online chocolate shop wanting to provide excellent customer service, this app may be a good addition to your online engagement portfolio.
Another great feature are the sound notifications built into the app. If a salesperson sends you a direct instant message or a new customer logs in, you are notified via a bell sound. Though this is useful, I found one major feature to be missing: push notification. If I was a traveling salesperson, I would want my fellow customer service representatives to be able to ping me with a question or to be notified of any open chat request from a customer that is not likely to be filled by my existing reps. We are told that functionality may not be available until the end of the summer, or later, and I don’t know if iMaximo could be complete without it.
The iPhone app comes at $40 per operator, and the cost of the server-side software is $300 for one operator or $1000 for ten operators. SightMax also has installable software that provides live chat support for mid and large-sized businesses. Additionally, you can outsource the hosting to SmartMax via its SightMax OnDemand SaaS product. An iPhone app that talks to the SaaS product is coming soon. At $20 per month for one operator, small companies can use SightMax’s SaaS offering without the hassles of setting up and maintaining their own server. Even if you don’t have any need for it, it is incredible the utility that the iPhone can provide to enterprise users, and iMaximo is another example of a company actualizing that potential.
I just bought the SightMax App and I can tell you one thing : I cannot be any happier. I feel like its Xmas for me. I am so happy to be able to see who is on my website, and to actuall see the visitors footprints. I currently own and operate two ecomerce websites and it’s really helpful to see how many visitors I have in my shopping cart. I love how the app just sits in standby and how it triggers the sound notification when you receive a new visitor or a new chat request. A++
Very nice software…shame about the uncheap price. But it will help out struggling iPhone software authors to convert some sales, no doubt.
Hi Screen Sleuth,
That’s a one time price per phone, whereby you own it and there are no monthly fees. We do have a hosted solution (SaaS) that we just submitted to the App Store. It will be offered as a monthly service without needing to own the server software (or a server). Hopefully we have a solution that fits everyone.
I just bought the App in the AppStore and the process was pretty easy. I wonder if there are any guides out there, that would be very helpful.
Hi Robert.
I hope you will like our iPhone live chat app, it’s very cool.
We have an iPhone Application Guide available on our website:
http://www.sightmax.com/livechat/Sightmax Live Chat – iPhone Application Guide.pdf
http://www.sightmax.com/livechat/SightmaxLiveChat-iPhoneApplicationGuide.pdf
Hey, now this is really something I must look into. This will most likely come in hand everytime you have a technical problem. Nice software!
Sounds really great, but a bit expensive for small businesses and thats what the software is for, isn’t it? big companies have enough employees so one doesn’t have to give support via iphone.
Being a part of a social networking website management team, this App enables me to check the status of our members and website very easy.
I use this on a daily basis and helps me track around more than five websites. I don’t think $19.95 per month is too high, that is just 66 cents per day!! and you can even invite your members to chat…
Do you care enough about your visitors and your websites to spend 66 cents per day? If you don’t, then you should :)
Go buy it, it’s well worth it.
SighMax is great. We use their software to manage conversations on our clients sites. Chatting with your visitors provides you with a great opportunity to convert them into customers. The amount of information you capture is invaluable.
Thanks Joel! Come see us in Tulsa sometime.
Great idea need a little redesigning for the basic look.
There are many services like that out there. But they all cost you and depend on another host, etc.
With LiveZilla (http://www.livezilla.net) you’re getting the functionality completely free and you can host it on your own server. They don’t haven an iPhone app yet, but all the other features are there and it works like a charm.
Is this an advert or an article? I can’t tell.
Is this the direction MobileCrunch will be taking from now on?
Also, what is “SmartMax”?
Also, what is the random dropping in of “small online chocolate shop “?
Agree, looks like paid advertising …
This is a review of a product, not a news article. As such, I wrote my opinions of what I thought of my experiences with the product. It worked perfectly and it has clear utility for certain types of businesses. So, it was a positive review.
That said, there were downsides (highlighted in the article): it’s for a niche market, and it doesn’t have push – which is damn near essential for the product.
A review with suspiciously planted keywords and phrases.. hmm….
Sorry Peter and Andrew, so good customer service by replying to potential and existing customers turns into advertising? We stay on top of everything, we follow where our product is placed online, we answer our email and have real humans that answer our phone. I know some companies could give a crap about their customers, we aren’t one of them. If it looks like advertising because we are alive and responding, so be it. As long as customers ask questions about SightMax here, we’ll be answering them.
I wasn’t talking about your follow-ups, I was talking about the article itself, looks like a paid one or something
When will Google talk be available on the iphone? I wold much rather have that
I’m not sure why anyone would want to do customer service on their iphone. Yet, it is probably a great marketing move to get some extra sales. Our company uses http://www.livesupport.com now and are pretty happy.
Livesupport actually sucks. Call their support and see if you get a human to answer the phone. If you are mobile and need to monitor a site or answer chats what else would you do?