We recently had an opportunity to review a live sales/support mechanism from the developers at OSI Codes. The following review was based on a four day trial window of their PHP Live hosted solution.
At first glance, http://www.phplivesupport.com comes across as a professional, clean driven solution. Unfortuantely, our conclusions leave little to be desired about glorified interfaces - appearances in fact, can be exceptionally deceiving.
PHPLive offers two versions of its live chat software, a purchased (self hosted) for $99.95 and a hosted $19.95/month solution. Their trial platform is a hosted solution, which is what this entire review has been based on.
Introduction
It should be stated that this review is entirely based on their trial mechanism. Regardless of the trial status, any trial solution will reflect the quality of a product or service, and often times will over-emphasize the stability of a product or service.
Getting Going
Engaging the trial system was clean and harmless. A quick, automated order process got us on our way within five minutes. We were welcomed with a very clean web based setup interface, which we were able to customize with our logo and preferences in a seamless manner. The next step was to add a user to the system, which would then provide access to an operator’s interface.
The operator’s interface was also clean and intuitive. With the click of the mouse our operator’s window was loaded and ready to analyze traffic.
Tracking Traffic
A few lines of code in each page we were tracking was all it took to get the traffic analysis flowing. We were quickly logging all traffic to the core portions of our site in a up to the minute fashion.
The operator’s traffic window flowed in a flawless manner. Each user visiting a page with the embedded code on our site was displayed by IP address, current URL, and referring URL. The option was available to track their foot prints and initiate a chat either via popup or animated graphic at will.
At first glance the system was working wonderfully. We embedded a textualized link to the live chat system on our order form, enabling live chat to clients who had questions during the order form process - a seamingly fantastic new addition to our order form.
We whipped up a quick custom script on our end to handle the rare moments of silence, or sales blackout as we like to call it, to check for the presence of a representative at Network Redux - if not present on our end all pages reverted with no presence of live sales. This was a quick fix to get around the presence of a ‘sales is offline’ graphic.
Testing their support
With every system comes the need for technical assistance. Our first experience came during the 2nd day of our trial. We spoke to a technician by the name of Leslie, who was able to answer the following questions for us regarding the services:
Support for non-IE browsers?
We were curious on the lack of support for Mac enabled browsers such as Camino, Firefox, Safari, etc. Leslie informed us that work was being done to correct the issues with these browsers, and that currently the client interface did work with the Safari browser. It was heartening to learn that development was in progress, as the Mac OSX platform is steadily growing amongst system administrators and developers.
Customization of the hosted solution
We were also curious as to the levels of customization of their hosted solution. As it turns out there is very little customization that can be done in regards to appearance and graphics. The best bet would be to purchase the downloadable version for complete control.
Serious issues arise
Shortly after our first dealings with their support mechanism, we found our entire operator interface to be offline. To be certain it wasn’t an issue of routing, we tested the connection from multiple locations, and found that the entire service had gone offline. Due to the embedded nature of the code on various core locations of networkredux.com, this outage resulted in those portions of our page not loading, thus breaking the pages.
We contacted support, and received an immediate reply that it was being checked into. We were then informed that there was a problem with the server, and that it would be back online within 10 minutes. These minutes had passed so we telephoned the support line, who issued a similar response.
It should also be noted that we were told by the support technician that this was a trial server and their trials had greatly increased in the past month. We took the tone as an implication that the trial server was not as high a priority as the other aspects of their network. We couldn’t be certain that the trial server was in fact differentiated from their paid solution, so we gave them the benefit of the doubt and waited the outage out.
It gets worse
One typically does not question support hours, unless you are in a troublesome situation that requires after hours support when it is not present. Days three and four of our trial landed on a Saturday and Sunday, which are not covered in their Monday through Friday support hours.
It came to our attention that once again, various pages of ours were broken as a result of an outage at PHPLive. All mechanisms of contacting their offline support were utilized, including a voicemail at their telephone support department. We were hoping that this outage was resulting in notifications to their administrators, for a quick resolution - it turned out to be a several hour outage, with the occasional ‘service temporarily unavailable’ window popping up due to ‘’Too many connections.’
Connectivity came back later in the day, and we loaded up the embedded code for traffic analysis and kept an eye on the system for additional outages. Additional outages were again noted, so we removed the entire system from our pages in utter disgust. Nothing hurts more than a broken order form during any portion of a Saturday afternoon.
Sunday came with further outages and messages of ‘Too many connections,’ with aboslutely no indication that anyone in their entire organization had any knowledge of such issues. Support status remained offline during the entire weekend, as did their trial system.
Conclusion
After this four day trial, we have determined PHPLive to be a nicely written and designed live chat mechanism, backed by a support department and hosted environment which leave little to be desired.
We cannot even go so far as to recommend purchasing the downloadable version, as their support department has no method of escalated or emergency support, which is absolutely necessary for any real time enabled service.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this service is the fact that this was a trial run. By definition, trial windows give developers a chance to show off their achievements. A trial window is a point of sale, and should exceed or at least reflect the nature of service. The fact that this trial service remained offline during a significant portion of the trial run, with no sign of technical support to resolve the problems, has led us in search of another solution.
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