
Show HN: Chatlio – Live chat with your web visitors directly from Slack - johne20
https://chatlio.com/
======
cdolan92
I set up chatlio over 5 months ago for my business. I do not have enough
positive things to say about it. We close over 20% of our Chatlio
conversations. Here are other highlights:

\- Took me under 5 mins to sign up and have this running on our entire site.
They use a good CDN, because adding it to our site has had no noticeable
increase in page load times.

\- Highly accessible. Chatlio leverages all of the notification features built
into slack. I couldn't ask for more. Our entire team had access when it was
set up, without needing to create new accounts, or log into another site on
yet another Chrome tab.

\- Great customizations. Check their site for full details, but coloring,
language, and contextual stuff (what to say when there is no attendant, etc)
is super easy to work with.

\- John (the lead at Chatlio, I believe) has been nothing but helpful. When I
asked for help making the chat appear on a 10 second time delay, he had the
code back to me in less than 20 mins. I was impressed.

\- They are already making great updates. They recently launched a 'take
screenshot' feature, message editing, and have reporting and operator rating
features in the pipeline.

My company struggled with implementing and making a profit center out of live
chat functionality. Chatlio has been fantastic. Its worth every penny.

If you want to see a live implementation, ours is here:
[http://sequoiawaste.com](http://sequoiawaste.com). I'll be hanging out
chatting with people who are interested for the next hour or so.

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creamyhorror
Definitely a needed sort of product; my congratulations to the team.

A non-Slack alternative: I was looking for this feature, but wanted to move my
company away from Slack to one of the free chat platforms like Rocket.Chat,
Mattermost, Zulip, etc. So I researched, and found that only Rocket.Chat has
its own version of this live-chat feature (though no doubt much less mature).
I'm looking forward to switching over to Rocket.Chat soon (I have no
affiliation with them).

[https://rocket.chat/](https://rocket.chat/)

[https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/519](https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/519)

Hope this helps folks out there looking for live-chat integration options.
It's pretty cool to be able to chat with potential users directly from company
chat!

~~~
jay-saint
Thank you for sharing this we are currently looking at alternatives to our
current live chat. This could be a great choice.

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nswanberg
Cool. It's patio11's chat thing turned in to a product:
[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/682430323905282048](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/682430323905282048)

I don't mean this as a dismissal in any way--if this works as advertised I'd
much rather show this product to a client than have them goad their developers
into trying to build and maintain a feature spec'ed on a (to them) random
person's tweet.

~~~
johne20
Thanks! We have iterated on this for over 1.5 years, and worked out a lot of
kinks associated with these types of integrations.

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seyz
Trendy kind of app. e.g. [https://www.talkus.io](https://www.talkus.io) :-)

~~~
seyz
Discover one more: [https://slaask.com/](https://slaask.com/)

~~~
johne20
We (Chatlio) like to think we started the trend ;) But verify that with the
wayback machine. :) And if imitation is a form of flattery, we are very
"flattered" by these.

But in all seriousness, before you install a Slack App, make sure to verify
how much permissions they request. We at Chatlio strive for asking for as
little permission as possible. If some feature requires more, we ask for that
on an as-needed basis after signup.

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HorizonXP
When a visitor messages us, does it start a new channel, or are they given a
temporary user on Slack?

~~~
johne20
Good question. Each visitor gets a dedicated channel. It makes it easy to
respond back to them. When conversation is ended, we archive the channel. If
they ever come back we unarchive it and you have previous chat history.

~~~
pimlottc
How does it identify the user when they come back?

~~~
dvdplm
We store a UUID in their browser and send that along so if they chatted before
we un-archive their previous channel to give the Slack operator all the
context.

~~~
michaelmior
Is there any way to get/set this UUID so I can allow the user to use the same
channel if I have my own way of identifying them?

~~~
johne20
This is in the works. We will provide a way for you to "sign" a request with a
userId, so we can guarantee you set the id, and not someone else.

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propter_hoc
This is truly awesome and I'd love to become a user. How might you recommend
integrating video calls? We do KYC checks of clients and sometimes need a
brief face-to-face.

~~~
dvdplm
We'd love to look closer at that (and will). There are rumours about Slack
itself working on something similar, and then there's the screenhero
acquisition a year back, but nothing definitive yet.

DISCLOSURE: I work at Chatlio

 _EDIT_ Slack has some recommendations on this: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/208492868-Making-vo...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/208492868-Making-voice-and-video-calls)

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schappim
Anyone made an open source version of this?

~~~
joeyspn
There's this... looks like a nice starter boilerplate..

[https://improvi.github.io/slack-chat/](https://improvi.github.io/slack-chat/)

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_AllenStone
I use this for one of my companies, and getting ready to roll it out on my
second. It's worth every penny.

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asadlionpk
I really love the idea. Though we currently use Intercom and would be hard to
move from it. I really want this integration in Intercom (and I am sure they
will do this soon). So you might want to plan on how to tackle them.

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surds
This is very awesome!

Is anyone aware of something like this being available for commenting services
like Disqus which are used on blogs? It would be nice to manage replies
through Slack, as a lot of time is already spent there.

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jxm262
This reminds me a bit of Prudio
[http://www.prudio.com/](http://www.prudio.com/) Saw that project on the old
assembly site (was a cool idea).

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thoughtpalette
Glad to see another competitor in this space! Looks to be a great product.

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lumberjack
What are you using as your chat engine? Ejabberd or something else?

~~~
johne20
Our backend is written in golang and frontends React/Raw JS.

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NikolaeVarius
Any plans for something similar for hipchat?

~~~
johne20
We are constantly taking demand for other platforms. Hipchat being one of the
most popular ones. Check my profile for my email to send us a message so we
can get you on the list to be notified when we make changes.

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elwell
Now let me embed the widget in my app?

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misiti3780
awesome idea

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dannylowney
Nice!

