WhosOn

Author: Jenna Vasquez

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The Good

• Prospect detection
• Site monitoring
• Page tracking
• Multiple reporting options
• Co-browsing and other powerful features
• Up to 32 triggers, depending upon your subscription level

WhosOn has over 7000 happy customers. The company gives customers the option to try the product risk-free for 30 days (some companies in the industry only let customers try the product for 14 days). WhosOn has service levels available for both small businesses and enterprise-level users. Co-browsing was a powerful feature in WhosOn. You can assist users with their browsing. You can see what your customer sees and guide them along the path that they take through the website. You can also analyze the page views and time on page for each viewer. You can also get authorization from site users to take control, pointing them to where they need to go. We are really glad that WhosOn didn't abandon the site analytics engine that was contained in the product's original release. They have streamlined their prospect detection, allowing you to embed multiple triggers on your website's pages. You can set the webpage, time on a page, and other factors that initiate a live chat. We also liked the video chat feature in WhosOn. For the record, ZenDesk and Zopim, some of the standard website chat tools, depend heavily upon third-party plugins to power video chat. If you want to get video chat with WhosOn, you can go to your account page and purchase it immediately. Your machine and the visitor's machine will need Adobe Flash for this product to fully work. Some of the operator chat abilities of this product were also great. There is a great feature called "whispering," that lets supervisors help guide an agent during a troublesome chat. There is also chat escalation available, which helps an agent pass on a chat to a senior manager who can better handle a customer's needs. We found the following price schemes available for small business level users:

• 1 user: $45
• 3 users: $135
• 5 users: $180

One of the best features that we saw with WhosOn is file transfer feature. WhosOn's financial sector customers for ID verification purposes have used this heavily. A customer can scan or take images of their documents with their scanner or smartphone. To verify an ID, the customer can then hop onto a live video chat. Moreover, there are some benefit stats with WhosOn that we loved:

• 10% fewer abandoned baskets.
• Sales after 25% of chats.
• 100% ROI after two weeks.

The "abandoned baskets" statistic proves that WhosOn is a great e-commerce feature. Finally, we liked the rule-based option for live chat. You can create different chat environments for different areas of your website, assigning agents to different departments within your online business.

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The Bad

• Add-on prices
• Limited usage studies
• Social media

We didn't find too many negatives with WhosOn. We did feel like some of the add-ons would increase the price of the package, such as video chat and remote desktop access. However, with ZenDesk and Zopim, customers have to get a third-party plug-in to enable some of these features. We also felt that, with the prices, there wasn't a good middle ground for a low number and high number of users. One thing on the website was that we didn't notice a lot of usage studies. We only saw one usage study, a type of white paper, for WhosOn. We would like to know more about how different industries use WhosOn. Another issue with WhosOn was that we couldn't get a good picture of how many triggers are included in the small business editions of the platform. We were able to get a "blanket quote" of up to 32, but overall, we would like to know specific numbers of triggers for each different small business service level. From our perspective, WhosOn has not really reached out into social media. There was a blog article on the website about social media starting to be included with chat, but we only were able to see that analytics in WhosOn will tell you if your social media campaign is working or not.

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The Bottom Line

We liked WhosOn. We feel that they are an underdog, when compared to companies such as ZenDesk. Their developer API site makes it easy for you to customize certain aspects of the chat box and the service integrates well with the standard CRM platforms. They seem to have developed a powerful platform for helping customers interact better with businesses. One area for improvement would be to make more "middle ground" options available for small businesses. At 10+ agents, you will be paying enterprise-level prices for WhosOn. Finally, we would like to see more case studies showing how different companies and industries use WhosOn.