Using Telegram or Slack to Have Live Website Chats

One of the things that I love about what I do is that I get to talk to people about tech; they might be prospective clients or longtime customers. Regardless, I always find nuggets of info to pick and utilize. Recently, I launched a new site. The client had asked me about website chat clients and whether they should use one or not.

Update 3/14/18 – LinkChat is no longer free.

That question spurred some research on my part. You see, I’m using Olark here, on DigiSavvy.com. Olark is fine; Olark is great until you want to chat and then you can use Olark’s webchat capability. If we’re honest here, the web chat client thing sucks. I should be able to respond instantly to website inquiries from folks on the site at a given time.

Instant communication is not a new concept either. Collaborative chat tools such as HipChat, Slack (love it), and Telegram (really love it!) make it easy to keep in contact and communicate as you normally wood. I love Slack and Telegram, although I tend to like Telegram a lot better.

Enter LinkedChat, for Slack and Telegram.

LinkedChat is a dead-simple integration for Telegram and Slack. It allows you to host a chat client on your websites and then allows you to have bi-directional conversations with people who initiate a chat from your website, and you respond with either Telegram or Slack. Upon signing up, you have a single line of Javascript you place in the footer, and you’re off to the races.

There’s not too much to the service (which is free for the time being) regarding what you can do with it and no other drop-in integrations at this time. The commands!screen /on or /off  allow you to take a screenshot of the page a user is on based on their last message and whether to set the chat client status online or offline, respectively.

The idea is to connect website users with tools we already know and love.

There are some services or products that allow you to chat with customers hitting your website. SameRoom and Chatlio client, among others.

I will say that I do like the client, and I think it’s pretty rad. It does lack in the integrations area for the time being. I’d like to see it integrate with something like Zapier and be able to do something with the data the chat client collects like adding it to a CRM.

Below is a gif that gives you an idea of what it looks like. On the right is a chat initiated on the site. On the left is the convo in Telegram. Telegram is cross-platform, too. Flippin’ sweet!

That said, it’s free, and it’s awesome. Take LinkedChat for a spin while it’s still free!