Co-browsing with Live Person

Posted December 28th, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings

When I was working for JK Kids, the managing director was wanting to use a technology which allows the call center people to interact with the customer's desktop to help them out if they were having issues ordering. It took a bit of research but I finally found that the technology is called "co-browsing".

The sole purpose of this post is so I have somewhere to remember the name of the technology because I keep forgetting it! It was difficult searching Google for what he was wanting and I tried a number of different search terms. When I finally worked out the techbology was called co-browsing I was suddenly able to find a lot of providers.

What co-browsing does is to allow an operator to see what's on the customer's web browser and to actually interact with it, helping them to navigate through the website and complete forms etc.

What appeared to be the best solution was the one offered by Live Person. You can read more details about this at: http://solutions.liveperson.com/sb/cobrowse.asp and there's also a Flash demo so you can see how it works. I am not affiliated with Live Person in any way - their service just seemed to be good and good value.

At the time of this post, JK Kids had not yet implemented anything like this so I don't know if and when they will, or if they will use Live Person for their solution if they do.

Just one final note, the Live Person co-browsing technology uses Java, as I would assume most (if not all) of these solutions do. Obviously some customers will not be comfortable with something like this running in their browser but it's clearly a great solution for those who will.

I did a live chat with one of their sales people and found out the following system requirements:

Windows:
- CPU: Intel/AMD 1GHz or better
- 256MB RAM (512MB recommended for Windows XP users)
- Windows 98 / 2000 / XP / Vista
- Internet Explorer 5.5/6.0 or Firefox 1.0.7
- Windows-compatible Sound Card

OS/X:
- Operating System: MAC OSX 10.4
- Memory: 256MB
- JVM: J2SE 5.0 (can be downloaded free of charge from the Apple website)