Papercups is a free open-source can posted website live chat system that you can use. It comes with the integration of Gmail and Slack. You can host it on a server that you own and manage all the channels from there. Where you get a consolidated inbox where you can manage user conversations, and even invite your teammates here to manage them. You can assign a new chat to any member of your team. One of the best features of this live chat is the customization that it offers to tweak the look and feel of the pop-up chat window.
There are many live chat services that we have covered, but they come with certain limitations and are closed source. But if you want some live chat that you can host your server and then you can just rely on the one I have mentioned here. It can even be installed on platforms like Heroku. There are not so many technical things you have to do in order to set it up. In just one click you can install it on a server and manage the conversation channels. It has a very simple interface for now and you can create as many users as you want to manage the customer chat, prioritize them and even assign them to some other person in your team.
Using this Free Open Source Live Chat with Slack, Gmail Integration:
The best way to install Papercups is on Heroku. You just go to the GitHub page of the service and find deploy to Heroku button. If you have a hero account then make sure that you are signed in into that. Next users create your Heroku app and then deploy it.
Wait for the installation process to complete and then finally open the app. Right now it uses Mailgun for email notifications and you will have to include the Mailgun API key in the installation if you have it. On the main interface, you sign up for a free account and then you will be redirected to the main dashboard.
The very first thing that you have to do is create a chat widget. To do that, go to the getting started section. Here you have to generate the script code chat widget. You can customize the color of the widget and see the changes in the real time on the right-hand side.
Now when you have generated the code, just paste it in the head section of your websites. And before season the changes to your website, you have to change the URL of the server where you have hosted. In case of Heroku, you have to change it with your app’s URL.
No it’s all ready to work. You just send some message from the website to the conversation channel on the dashboard. You can handle chats coming from different channels or even assign it to some member of your team.
The chat that you are currently dealing with can be added to the priority list as well. And apart from all that, when the customer query has been resolved, you can close a conversation on the main dashboard.
Next you can configure the integrations. For now, it supports only Slack but Gmail integration is coming in the later update. Till then, you just keep tracking its releases on its GitHub page.
In this way you can use this simple powerful website like chat service. You can use it however you want and there is even a hosted version of it available if you don’t want to get into all the installation. No matter where you use it, you can only set it up and get it really in just few seconds. The best part is that it is really easily manageable and you can work on customer queries with your team.
Final words:
There are not so many open source live chat for this is available. One of the major advantage of having them is that you will on your all data on the server where you install the application. So, if you’re looking for some self hosted live chat service for your websites to resolve customer queries then you are at the right place. Just grab Papercups from its GitHub page and install it wherever you want.
