This being only chat, what about email support?
Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
31–40 of 81 posts
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#32Having worked in this field for a while, you should look at tiered and tagged assignment. E.g. escalation tiers / priority assignment and assignment by browser language / geo up. From what I recall these were important as you look at supporting large organisations. Customisability (design) and pre-chat forms were also headline features.
Email channels and pre-ticket forms are dealbreakers for being a Zendesk replacement. I can live without a lot of ZD's features (and be happier for it) but those two are table stakes for me. I could see this being a replacement for Intercom, but Intercom isn't a fit for us either.
The stuff ZD and Intercom (and SFDC) are awful at, where there are opportunities for something else to swoop in: even partial Markdown support for incoming messages, integrations with third-party docs/KB sources, live queue dashboards/visualizations, toggling features based on different support plans, and facilitating handoffs for follow-the-sun support (multiple queues, defined regions/hours per queue, auto-reassigning active tickets across agents and queues, cleaner or richer ticket summarization options).
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#33Here's a blocklist for all these super annoying chat widgets: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/master/... You can import this into uBlock origin so you never have to see these things again.
Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites.
The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using the website itself for the sake of their principles. Hilarious.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#34Having worked in this field for a while, you should look at tiered and tagged assignment. E.g. escalation tiers / priority assignment and assignment by browser language / geo up. From what I recall these were important as you look at supporting large organisations. Customisability (design) and pre-chat forms were also headline features.
Email channels and pre-ticket forms are dealbreakers for being a Zendesk replacement. I can live without a lot of ZD's features (and be happier for it) but those two are table stakes for me. I could see this being a replacement for Intercom, but Intercom isn't a fit for us either. The stuff ZD and Intercom (and SFDC) are awful at, where there are opportunities for something else to swoop in: even partial Markdown sup…
Yeah agreed, KB integration was another big one, as well as shortcuts when you have agents who do 3-4 chats at the same time. In fact the ability to define agent capacity individually and by role to begin with is important.
The ability to define different capacities for the same agent across different queues and how to aggregate that is also an advanced feature which is useful. E.g. I can take 3 in English or one in French and one in English. Or I can take 4 tier one tickets or 2 tier two tickets. Or I can do x tickets for customers on basic support but if I'm on with a customer who has priority... Etc
Queueing and assignment logic gets tricky because requirements can be vastly different across organisations. Hence why there are companies at the high end charging enterprise money.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#35The least interesting part of intercom at this point is the chatbox itself.
Intercom at this point is / is moving towards a tool to reach your customers / specific audiences sitting atop your eventing system to Target specific users at the right time (where a single one of those avenues may be through the chat widget).
The realized the least interesting part of this all is the chatbox itself, what's more interesting is leveraging internal information towards a better customer experience (through chat or other messaging channels)
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#36This being only chat, what about email support?
Chatwoot Co-Founder here:
We are still working on email support. The feature is halfway done. It should be ready by the end of this month.
progressing here on : https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/tree/epic-email-inbox
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#37Here's a blocklist for all these super annoying chat widgets: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/master/... You can import this into uBlock origin so you never have to see these things again.
Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites. The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using…
I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back.
TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market.
Furthermore, today’s ad blocking detection can be very good at detention, so there you go - you have your script. When sites detect my adblocking and nag me, I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#38The least interesting part of intercom at this point is the chatbox itself. Intercom at this point is / is moving towards a tool to reach your customers / specific audiences sitting atop your eventing system to Target specific users at the right time (where a single one of those avenues may be through the chat widget). The realized the least interesting part of this all is the chatbox itself, what's more interesting…
Do you think that holds true for both sales and support?
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#39Congrats on pivoting this to open. As an Intercom customer ( perhaps paying too much ), it would be very helpful to see a basic feature comparison table and ideally an in-progress roadmap so that I may assess the opportunity costs for a possible migration. And if not a matrix, at least a simple list of top-level features, which I could not find in the docs. For me, "Alternative", is a very loaded word that comes with…
Chatwoot Co-Founder here:
Thanks a lot for the support.
Totally get your concern about "Alternative". In terms of the scope of features, we are still behind many of the current market offerings. But we will be making some steady progress over the new couple of months.
Meanwhile, we are updating the website & repo with feature comparison and an in-progress roadmap. It should be up in a day or two
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites. The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using…
I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back. TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market. Furthermore, today’s ad blocking detection can be very good at detention, so t…
>>I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back.
Unfortunately, if this is actually true, then you are the exception which proves the rule. That's precisely why I call these people "freeloaders". If they actually stopped visiting my website and wasting my site's resources based on such principles, I would be ecstatic to see them leave.
>>TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market.
That's because you already paid for it, and the payment was what allowed the content to even get created.
>>I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back.
That's an interesting example, considering the number of times you see non-paywalled links here on HN.
Freeloaders exist only because they are being subsidized by those who actually pay. That's exactly why paywalled articles also have non-paywalled versions. If you don't believe me (that non-paywalled versions are subsidized by people who pay), just ask someone who produces the content and report back. Or better yet, ask the same person who produced the content how long they will keep producing content if no one paid for access. As the old saying goes, at some point, you run out of other people's money.