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The trial version of their hosted live help services is easy to test, as Whoson instantly emails you a username and password; you download the console software and then log into the account. The trial version is set to monitor one of Whoson's "test" servers so all you have to do is visit the test server website with any web browser (Netscape, Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.), and you'll see your visit appear in the console. When you use the subscription (paid) version of Whoson service, you'll add specially-encoded HTML on your own website webpages as the final step in adding live chat and monitoring. The geo-location information, where you can see the website visitors' geographic locations (based on their ISP), was amazingly accurate. Also, seeing what webpages my website visitors viewed (and were viewing) was interesting -- usually that type of information (the path) is only viewable when you go into your website logfiles AFTER the visitor is long gone. To have the ability to see the visit in real-time was really cool! Initiating a chat from the console was as easy as just right-mouse-clicking the website visitor listed and selecting "initiate chat"; while simultaneously in my browser window I could see the chat request come up. From the web browser when you accept the chat, it opens another smaller chat window allowing for secure communications via Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). When the chat finishes the website visitor is asked if they want the transcript of the chat emailed to them. A feature I always like to see in any console is the ability to create 'canned responses' -- where you save, and can call up during a chat, pre-typed messages in response to a live chat request. One feature I didn't get a chance to test yet was the language-translation option. I'm interested in seeing how that works as most language-translation software I've used work modest at best; but it was nice for Whoson to have that as an add-on. Whoson comes in different flavors, from the software you install on your servers, to the "hosted edition" where you only need to add HTML code to your webpages to make it work (the latter being the easiest method). This guide only reviewed the hosted edition. -Dave Swanson
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Developed
by United Kingdom-based Parker Software, Whoson is one of
the first live help & real-time monitoring services that I tested.
Subscribing to their "hosted edition" of live support
services was easy enough -- I received an email with the username
and password needed, along with the instructions on downloading
the Microsoft Windows version of the customer service console (software)
so that I could do live chat and real-time monitoring of my website
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