Providing support to your customers

**Dan** · #1 (**permalink**) 03-09-09, 01:57 PM

Many people (possibly yourself) sell web hosting space to other customers in the form of a reseller account, VPS, Semi-dedicated or full dedicated server machines, providing support for these customers usually comes at a great expense.

The leading software companies such as Kayako and WHMCS are all rather costly, especially in your first months. Providing LiveSupport for free is now an option with the freeware software Livezilla!

You can download LiveZilla at the following URL:

LiveZilla - Freeware Live Help / Live Chat / Live Support - Official Website

**James** · #2 (**permalink**) 03-09-09, 03:38 PM

That's great to hear, it would now become easy for the resellers to cut their monthly expenses.

Hexosphere · #3 (**permalink**) 03-09-09, 09:48 PM

That looks quite good, I've personally tested craftysyntax for live help.

It's not too bad, but can appear a little complex.

Will have to give it a go

**Harry** · #4 (**permalink**) 04-09-09, 06:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hexosphere

That looks quite good, I've personally tested craftysyntax for live help.

It's not too bad, but can appear a little complex.

Will have to give it a go

What made you think so !!! any specific feature which is hard to digest

Well, just wondering why their Live Support is Offline at the moment..... can we rely on such FREEWARE ?

Hexosphere · #5 (**permalink**) 04-09-09, 07:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by harry

What made you think so !!! any specific feature which is hard to digest

Well, just wondering why their Live Support is Offline at the moment..... can we rely on such FREEWARE ?

Any Live software that you can use to support your product is a good thing, providing it's easy enough to use, and not just for you but those you employ to support. It has to be easy enough for all involved to understand and utilise to it's potential.

Just because something is free, doesn't mean that it's no good. There are many reasons that people offer software for free, though usually to help establish a name for the product and generate user awareness, which can be recouped later by addons, or alternatively updates to the codebase.

As for their own live support, I can't say for sure, but like i said there's a possibility it's a small outlet, I only looked into Live support software a few months ago, and didn't come across this one.

There are many applications that I use that are provided free, some of which i wouldn't be without, but that doesn't make it any less of a product, the operating system that I use on my main machine for example, OpenSuse 11 is provided freely.

As with anything, I'll give anything a go once, and put it though it's paces within a testing environment first.

**Dan** · #6 (**permalink**) 04-09-09, 11:48 AM

Livezilla is probably the closest that you'll get to one of the leading Livesupport softwares such as Kayako and Livesupport.net.

**Harry** · #7 (**permalink**) 06-09-09, 11:53 AM

Hexo, don't get me wrong

I had tried such FREE live chat application on one of my blog but unfortunately it didn't work great for me.... it was taking ages to get into chatting mode

may be it was hosted on slow server.

Still i agree .. not every FREE product is worthless, even i can't live without " Irfanview ( Free image editing software ) but when it comes for business purpose i would rather check it twice.

Hexosphere · #8 (**permalink**) 06-09-09, 12:06 PM

You're quite right harry, when evaluating something for business purposes, you should check out any software before you place it in your live environment, I've been there and done that in the past, and it's turned round and bitten me.

I now personally run my own development server, which has an exact replica of what runs on my site, including all the software that runs on there. This is where I check anything out first hand, I also allow others access so i can get feedback as to what they think of it. It's an invaluable step to having a website, in that you can throw anything on the development server to test it, make sure that it all functions with the current code that's their and nothing out of the ordinary is going to happen. Then after those tests, you can roll it out to the production server, even if you roll it out to an alpha testing area within your site, rather than having it placed directly on the main area, this way you can point people to it, but if you find there are problems after making it live, it can easily be disabled.

I use my own machine as the main testing ground (personal testing), which has apache, php, mysql et al installed, so you don't necessarily need another server/vps/webhosting as a development area. The next level is a subdomain called development.mydomain.com which sits atop of the main hosting account and the site is protected via htaccess, so no one gets into it without first having logins / passwords, this then allows for others to test it.

**Dan** · #9 (**permalink**) 07-09-09, 07:41 PM

Has anybody got any reviews on Livezilla?

**Harry** · #10 (**permalink**) 08-09-09, 03:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dan

Has anybody got any reviews on Livezilla?

Dan, can't we start with you ? You have introduce it to our community so try to offer your valuable feedback/suggestion on this

**Dan** · #11 (**permalink**) 08-09-09, 12:11 PM

I quickly tried it, the setup was fairly simple and swift and the interfaces can be easily customised. I'd say it has the same features as Kayako but more customizable and free.

I only briefly tried it as I don't have a full use for the software yet.