Engage More Visitors with Zopim – Review & Comparison

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. ~ Bill Gates

Driving traffic is a vital task but capturing lead information and engaging with them effectively is by-far the most important task. Driving traffic gets validated only when you can gather visitor information, pull them to your website and retain them. Companies spend years in understanding their ever-evolving customer base and catering to their needs from time to time. Various marketing strategies and campaigns make up the daily routine for a marketer. But what if an interested customer wants to interact with you directly? How do you cater to his/her doubts and solve them immediately?

When an interested visitor tries to connect with you directly, it is obvious that you have successfully reached out to your targeted customers. The next step is to retain them and make them trust you as a brand.

It is true that internet has solution to everything. Along with that, the bigger truth is if you do not solve your customers’ queries and problems, there are many other competitors who will. There are many tools by which you can pull in leads but when I turned to look at my conversion funnel, I realised that the leads who ask questions from websites, gets converted in 30 days. This has happened with my EasySendy service, which provides self-hosted email marketing solution for growing businesses. For this, I used Zopim live Chat Widget. I know there are many other Zopim alternatives, but why I chose to stick with Zopim, I will explain to you in this blog post.

Engaging visitors with Zopim

Zopim is a instant messaging widget that comes handy when you want to interact with your website visitors real-time. It is easy and smooth. It is a smart instant messaging system which pops up immediately when an user visits the site.

Zopim comes loaded with many wonderful features that facilitates instant communication with customers for small and medium business websites easily. Lets take a detailed look at the features of Zopim.

Analytics that help to monitor chat activities

Zopim is all about live messaging in order to understand and solve your customers’ query / questions. In order to whether you are actually helping your customers or not, you will need DATA. That is exactly what Zopim gives you. Zopim provides you with chat reports that helps you to understand, optimize and strategize your customer support.

• You get access to Chat statistics that graphically shows you a detailed comparison of all your chats, either on an hourly, daily or weekly basis. Along with that you also get to know how many chats you have missed and how many served.
• The Satisfaction ratings lets you get an overview of the good and bad chats in a given time period.
• Chat Timings helps you know the length of time your customers had to wait to chat and when was the first response made. This way you will know whether you are optimum in reaching out to your customers.

• Analytics also allows you to know how many agents have logged in and how many chats have been recorded. You can also have a detailed breakdown of the entire report.
• To track your activities with individual agents, you can login and see how many chats you could serve, how much time was spent and other analytical details.
• You can filter your reports as required, either by last 24 hours, or 7 days, 14 days or 30 days. The limit is 90 days. You can also filter chats on the basis of department like sales, support, all chats, etc.
• Zopim allows you to download all your analytical reports in form of a CSV file which you can use for further evaluation.
• Not only that, you can have analytical reports emailed to you on daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Schedule your Online Presence

You can schedule your time according to when you would want to be seen online and available for a chat. It is known as enabling “operating hours”.

It has to be kept in mind that by enabling operating hours, you are no more shown to be idle in that time span.Once your operating time is over, you are automatically shown as Invisible.
You can create an offline form to showcase immediately after your operating hours are over. This way you do not miss out on your customers.

Send and Receive files on Zopim

This features allows your customers to attach a screenshot or any other relevant files while chatting. This way you directly understand what problem they are facing and go ahead to solve them. Once your chat is over, Zopim automatically generates a link to the file sent/received and it can be later retrieved from the chat history.

There are few restrictions when it comes to sending and receiving files on Zopim:

• Only PDF, PNG, JPEG, or TEXT type of files can be exchanged.
• The files cannot be more than 5 MB in size.

Trigger Feature

Zopim has this cool Trigger feature by which you can trigger a message based on a certain condition. For instance, in a situation of “if…then”: IF a certain thing happens, THEN only the message set by you will be triggered. For example, if a customer waits for a response on chat for 30 seconds, automatically the message that you are offline and will be back in sometime is triggered. This is one one of the most useful chat automation tool, that help you automate many things at once.

You can create the trigger ( I must call it recipes ) easily by logging into the dashboard. The step-by-step guideline is:

Dashboard-> Manage-> Triggers-> Create a new Trigger-> give a new name for trigger-> enter a brief description about what it does-> enable/disable it by checking the ‘enable’ checkbox-> check the box saying “Each visitor will receive this message only once” to ensure your visitors don’t get the same message all the time->Customize your trigger->set conditions-> Create Trigger.

You can add more than one condition.

Third-party Ticketing integrations

Zopim has its doors opened to various third party ticketing/CRM solutions like JIRA, uservoice, zendesk, OSTicket and so on.

Mobile friendly

The iPhone and Android apps perform without much lag, making Zopim the first choice for a SMB.

Recently, after adding the video update of Zopim, ChatToolTester has ranked Zopim 4.5 out of 5 stars. The only disadvantage highlighted is the ‘idle’ settings of Zopim. Zopim will show you idle when you are online but working on a different browser. To maintain your ‘online’ status, you have to be constantly fidgeting on the Zopim page.

How to Sign up and Launch Zopim from desktop

Zopim has an easy signup process. You need to enter your name and email ID to sign up. After agreeing to the terms and conditions of Zopim, you can straight away proceed to your Dashboard.

Setting up Zopim on Desktop is not at all difficult. Whether you are using Chrome in Windows OS or Mac, you can easily launch the web application.

To launch Zopim in Windows using Chrome browser-

1. Download Chrome browser ( Hope, you are reading this post on PC and must be having this )
2. Install the same.
3. Login to zopim.com
4. Go to Tools option-> Select “Create Application Shortcuts”.
5. Select any of the options from the pop-up: Desktop, or Pin to taskbar
6. Then hit “Create”.

Now you can launch your Zopim dashboard from your computer and start communicating with your visitors.

To launch it from MAC:

1. Install Fluid. Free version of Fluid can support Zopim.
2. Open Fluid and enter the following information-
3. URL: “https://dashboard.zopim.com/?lang=en-us”
4. Name: Zopim
5. Icon: Save the icon from this link : zopim-icon.png

Now you are ready to Launch your app.

How we used Zopim to engage with visitor

In above section I explained about how to start communication with costumer, here I will show you, how to use Zopim Widget. After signup, you must put the Zopim code at footer of every page on website, from where you want to communicate with your website visitors.

To convert more visitors into interested lead, with contact information, I used this easy to follow Zopim chat widget on EasySendy website, kept at bottom right side. Here, I configured the widget to show “Have any Question?”.

Then, on next screen, ask the visitor to introduce themselves with Name and Email, and finally a message. This flow, easily pulls the visitor inside chat widow to fill contact information and message easily.

This small tweak in Zopim widget resulted in more visitors asking questions. This way, we collect more information about the visitor, then convert them to interested lead. Over time, I also observed that, if we are going to reply them with proper answer within few minutes, the probability of lead conversion increases.

Zopim is affordable

Zopim has managed to win the trust of many with its easy to use UI and its affordable price range. This live chat app has a freemium model in which the first 14 days are free . After that you need to shift to a paid mode to continue experiencing the cool features of this app.

Like any other app, the free version has all the basic features. However, the best ones are reserved for paid packages. here is an overview of its pricing model-

LITE: This is the free option, good for individuals. And is free forever for single chat session.

BASIC: This is good for lean teams and comes at $11.20 per agent/month (if billed annually). If you take for monthly billing, it is $14.00 agent/month.

ADVANCED: A perfect option for established teams, this option comes at $20 per agent/month on an annual billing system and at $25 agent/month if billed monthly.

PREMIUM: This is best for industry leaders. It comes at $44 per agent/month if billed annually. for monthly billing, it comes at $55.00 agent/month..

To know what features are included in each package, you can hop into Zopim’s Pricing Page.

Zopim Alternatives

It has been established that Zopim is an affordable app in the market but it is not alone in the competition. There are many Zopim alternatives that strive to make a mark in the market. Few alternatives worth mentioning are: Olark, LivePerson, ClickDesk and Snapengage.

Now, when we have alternatives, it becomes extremely necessary to draw a comparison of these with Zopim. You can view a live comparison of all the alternatives here on Live Chat Software.

Zopim vs Olark

Features common to both:

• Freemium model
• Analytics and reporting
• Proactive chat feature
• Custom CSS
• External Integrations

Zopim Vs Olark: Recently on Quora, Zopim’s Content Strategist gave an overview on Zopim vs Olark.

Olark is more targeted towards to IM clients while Zopim offers a numerous ways to interact with customers via its web dashboard.

Zopim vs LivePerson

LiveEngage powered by LivePerson is a similar cloud-based chat application that connects brand with consumers. According to statistics on Live Chat Technologies Market Share Comparison, Zopim takes the lead among live chat applications. On comparing these two apps, we can see:

• Zopim’s monthly price begins from $11.2/month while LiveEngage has its price-on-demand model.
• LiveEngage does not have any trial version unlike Zopim’s 14 day free trial period.
• Features like Unlimited chat, unlimited triggers, departments, widget customization, chat and agent analytics, operating hours scheduling and weekly analytics reports are not available on LiveEngage.

Zopim Vs SnapEngage

According to latest updates from Datanyze, Zopim ranks #1 while Snapengage ranks #9. The comparison includes facts like-

• There are 154,512 Zopim websites whole SnapEngage Websites are only 13,080. [as of May 24, 2015].

While digging deeper, I found that

• Zopim does not have co-browsing feature and Ticket creating feature unlike SnapEngage.
• SnapEngage offer a 15-day free trial, and the plans start at $60/month, unlike, Zopim $11.20 per agent/month Basic Plan.

Zopim vs ClickDesk

ClickDesk allows businesses to engage their customers by directly using their choice of IM like Skype through ClickDesk’s multi-channel engagement platform. The platform has a combination of live chat, browser phone and social toolbar.

On comparing Zopim with ClickDesk, we can see that:

• Starting price for Zopim is only $11.2/month while it is $19.99/month and $203.88/year for ClickDesk.
• ClickDesk does not have any trial version unlike Zopim that has 14 days free trial version.
• In terms of features, Clickdesk has video chatting options which is not available on Zopim.
• Also, Zopim is solely for business purposes while ClickDesk can be used for both business as well as personal purposes.

Zopim and integration with Facebook Messenger:

Facebook shook the internet literally when it announced that its popular messenger app will open up for third party developers. With around 600 million active users on messenger, it came as a boon to businesses who are constantly trying to interact and know their customers better. The day Facebook made this huge announcement, steadily riding on its back came another news- Singapore startup Zopim, recently acquired by Zendesk will have the Facebook business messenger app powered on its website.

To initiate a conversation with a retailer, users can simply click and start conversing on messenger. Zopim was quoted that it will partner Facebook to “power the initial companies on Businesses on Messenger” by integrating the feature in its chat app. However, it is yet to be known what will follow next after the aforementioned “initial” stage.

Zopim is set to rule

With the rankings on various comparison sites, Zopim is at #1 position beating its alternatives steadily. An affordable price chart and smooth UI has won Zopim an awesome brand value. Now with Facebook Messenger being integrated in its Chat app, it looks like Zopim is set to rule the market.

Use Zopim for free for 14 days for your business. Its features are worth a try. Sign up for Zopim here.