Currently our website has a link to our Discourse site and also a “Let’s Talk” button that pops up an awkward looking email form.
Instead of the “Let’s Talk” button I want to have a more inviting chat box like Intercom or Crisp would provide.
Ideally the process would lower the barrier to visitors joining our Discourse, so we can start growing a community there.
Can I have recommendations on how to do this?
What would the box be prompting the user to do? A lot of customer service chat apps don’t require accounts and are staffed with someone live on the other end, so they can skip right to chat.
Would it be prompting them to create a new topic (would you get a lot of duplicates)? A new account? To search existing topics?
It would work like a customer service chat app using support data from Discourse.
The chat-bot would attempt to answer and if it could not then it would attempt to contact a live person.It would also encourage them to join the Discourse.
Oof, that sounds like quite a bit of work. I wonder if the shortest possible path would be a theme / theme component which puts Intercom on your instance?
I haven’t tried it personally, but I imagine throwing Intercom’s scripts with your app id into </body> or similar would get you close.
Can you explain more about “puts Intercom on your instance” ? What is the instance?
Oh, I meant your installation of Discourse. One of the customizations you can make to your site (by visiting /admin/customize/themes => Edit CSS/HTML) is adding (somewhat) arbitrary javascript which will run each time someone loads your site.
If that (somewhat) arbitrary javascript were to load Intercom, that might be an easier way to get where you want to go.
Thank you, I love the idea. I am putting it on my try-on-a-brave-day list.