(feature request) Live Support chat addon / minimal, preconfigured UI

[naturallymitchell]

Description

Intended audience is websites that want to give viewers an instant, live contact session. For businesses using Matrix behind the scenes, this would make the most sense, since clients can have a way to enter it, or at least a room inside of it where they can invite to meet other users in the system.

Examples:

• https://www.kandy.io/sites/default/files/inline/website-chat.jpg
• http://customericare.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/video-chat-support-for-website-admin.png

[MTRNord]

might be working with the new group/communities pretty neat (having a group with support agents and auto adding rooms to the group. rooms = users that use the live chat. (just throwing in a idea)

[lampholder]

Not something I expect the core team to have any bandwidth to process any time soon, but I think this would represent an excellent usecase for Matrix.

[MTRNord]

Might be something for the matrix-whishlist by @turt2live

[turt2live]

(added to wishlist as https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-wishlist/issues/98)

[n1trux]

I have been made aware of maubot/supportportal*, which does exactly this with a client of your choice. There's still a need for a Riot configuration though :)

---

* The bot acts as the primary customer support user on Matrix who is invited by users. When the bot is invited, it'll join and announce the invite to a management room, where one of your customer support agents can claim the task by joining the room.

[tgr]

How does a bot help here? What would be needed is a web client (maybe a special mode of riot, more likely a separate client) that can be loaded on top of any website and presents a very minimal view to the user (probably only supports 1:1 chat, probably only displays comments).

[n1trux]

Of course you need a front end or minimal mode for Riot, but you also need a routing component on the server. Or do you just want to throw everyone into the same room or onto the same support account?

[t3chguy]

I actually made a prototoype of a single-room Riot, see https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/4398#issue-402646116

[kaktux]

Wondering if Matrix has a Livechat feature i found this thread. Much needed feature if matrix wants to be used for customer support.

i think Rocket Chat has this solved quite nice: Add Managers+Agents set departments set triggers (for the livechat widget) customize appearence

So you can easily integrate a livechat into any website - and customers can login without needing an account into support rooms where agents can wait (or a bot for the first questions and to refer to a human agent).

[kaktux]

In the matrix blog i just saw https://github.com/nomadic-labs/safesupport-chatbox An embeddable chatbox built on Matrix.

Both those ideas are quite similar - so maybe they can build upon each other and not live as two seperate projects. The main difference would probably the collection of data you would want in a support chat - but making this optional would fit both use cases.

Have a look.

[jryans]

While I agree this an interesting use case to explore, I don't think it makes sense to track here, as it would likely take the form of a separate project, so tracking in separate wishlists and such seems best.

As a another example, @arnav-t is working on this idea for their GSoC project this year: https://github.com/arnav-t/riot-embedded (work in progress).

[natrius]

@jryans Well, the separate and single-room riot may be, but the problem with the support-chat is not. In my opinion this issue should be opened again until the support-chat is solved.