Integrate Slack + SupportKit for Free Live Chat on Your Website - #AgencyToolbox

Welcome to episode number 10. Hey, it's number 10 already of agency Toolbox. My name is Gray Mackenzie, I'm your host and today we're going to be talking about how to set up free live chat on your website through Slack using a tool called Support Kit. So last time we talked about how our inbound marketing team gets the most out of Slack, the chat application that we use to manage our business, our agency Guava Box, and also do Inbound and get our team on the same page there. But today we're going to be talking about how to set up. If you're already living inside of Slack or you're considering moving to Slack and you want to have live chat on your website and get that set up for free, we're going to talk about how to set that up using a tool called Support Kit. So let me take you into the back end. I'm going to take you into the front end of Support Kit and then we'll also take a look at how these things are set up on the back end so you can set it up for yourself. Alright, so here I am, I'm on the Support Kit homepage and Support Kit is basically a tool that allows you to add messaging inside of your app or website to engage with your users, to start up conversations, to answer their questions, that kind of thing. So here's what it looks like in a website context, the little chat bar that you're used to seeing at the bottom of your page and you can start a conversation right here, which we will do right now. All right, so I just sent them a message. We'll see if they say anything back to us. But basically I already have this set up for Guava Box. So I want to share with you guys how this is set up and I also, I may actually have this. It may be disabled at this point in time based on our schedule right now. I have also written a little JavaScript plugin that we use Acuava Box so that we only show the Support Kit chat during business hours when we're going to be available to answer. Because what we don't want to have happen is this experience right here. Now I'm being patient. I don't have a problem with this taking a couple minutes to give me a response. But what we don't want to have happen is someone sends us a chat message at 1am Eastern time and we don't have any team members online to respond and they wind up not getting anything back from us. So I'd rather have them just fill out the contact form at that point in time. So I've written a little JavaScript plugin that will only show the Support Kit chat functionality during certain hours. So. And here they. This may be automated as well. I am not sure what's going on here, but it looks like they. This is kind of odd though. It's between 9am and 5pm as I'm recording, recording this right now, so it looks like they're just getting back to me. But anyways, let me take you to the back end what this looks like and then I'll also take you over to, to the inside of Slack. So Support Kit, I sign up for an account and I set up my application and now I just need to authenticate everything. So I authenticated to my Slack chant, to my Slack organization. I created a Slack command. I'm going to pull this token out. You guys can go back and freeze it and see my token if you want. So in that case I'm just going to put it back in. I'm not concerned about anyone taking the token but. But the token here is something that you're going to generate and then that's going to set up your integration for you. You're going to pick a channel where Support Kit requests will be posted. So this is when somebody messages you, where will this show and some other settings. Now what this does is each time that someone sends us a message, I'm gonna get that message inside of. Let me jump over to Slack here real quickly. I'm inside Slack now. I'm gonna get that message inside of my web chat channel. So I have some conversations here. When someone starts up a conversation, you can see that it just assigns them a random name, right? So they're going to start a conversation. Now how I respond to this person is I type in the slash command, which is sk, and then I'll start typing away. And as I type this response, this would open up a new channel for that specific conversation that I'm going to have back and forth to that person and anyone else on my team is going to be able to see that. So we won't have multiple people responding to that at the same time. So that's what it looks like on the back end now. So this advanced setting makes a little bit more sense with that context. Once someone stopped chanting, chatting with me, and I no longer have, I'm now going to have WebKit soft tarantula or something like that because this person hasn't identified themselves yet. So I'm going to wind up with all these channels. So I choose to auto archive those. Once they've been inactive for a certain period of time now, they could come back and start chatting again. It'll reopen that inside Slack, but that is kind of the gist of how we get conversations. Start it on the website, continue them in Slack, and then one of the things that you may be interested in is if you're a HubSpot user right now you're saying, well, this doesn't set up a HubSpot profile for them. From what I'm seeing. This also doesn't capture their email address or anything like that. And you're exactly right. If you're trying to do that stuff, Support Kit is probably not the best tool for you. You may be looking for a tool like Zopim or Olark. There's a number of chat solutions. For us, the volume of web chat is relatively low. You can see the number of conversations at least that are still showing up in here. And you know, we're looking at one or a couple per month. And I'm a little bit back in time here, but. But really not that frequent. The conversations that we have. Most folks reach out to us via. There's a lot of conversion opportunities on site, so a lot of folks will include their messages there or send us the contact form. We also one of the things that's different about Guavabox from a number of sites is that our phone number is on the site. And I think that a lot of agencies are in that same boat. So you may get a decent number of inbound calls rather than the chat messages. So chat for us is not a huge thing. The other thing is that we have it locked down in terms of the hours. We only want to offer it when we're sure that someone's going to be available. So we have it locked down a little bit more than most of the sites that you're going to see out there. So that probably impacts it as well. But if you do want to set up live chat for free and have it live inside of your Slack channel, this is the way to do that. So I want to share that with you. Any questions that you have, if you find a way to improve this, obviously you can ask for the person's email address or say, hey, can you give me your name or email and I'll get in touch with you and then do some research. At some point you're going to point them to a conversion opportunity most of the time anyways, but that's just something to keep in mind anyways if you have ideas for improving this or questions about how it works, send them over to me graydoinbound.com and if you are not yet subscribed to the podcast feed in iTunes or the YouTube channel, go ahead and subscribe there so you can stay tuned in for the next episode and future episodes of Agency Toolbox. And until then, until episode number 11. I hope that this was helpful to you and that you keep moving your agency forward.