Update #40 – Upgrades. Mostly Chat Upgrades.

Happy 2024! 🎉

Are you ready for new customers acquired because you have ChipBot on your website? The answer is yes—an “over 9,000” kind of yes.

We’ve been hard at work while you were opening presents, relaxing with family, and putting together new business goals for 2024. Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, or X (Twitter) for specific feature demos from our product update. I’m leading our team to add more product demos on our social so you can visually see how new things (and old things) work. My process is I use this post as a “roundup” of what’s recently been released, then use social media to really demo everything. I’m open to feedback on this process!

One other minor announcement before we get into features: you’ll see a name change from “Search” to “Help Desk” in the coming weeks. This should reduce some confusion around that feature. We’re constantly testing ways to communicate our top features.

Here’s what’s new for 2024. ✨

• 💬 Chat: Added ability to update customer profile data manually from the dashboard
• 💬 Chat: Added ability to archive chat conversations and toggle between active and archived chat.
• 💬 Chat: Added canned message support. By using the hashtag “#” you can pull up reusable chat templates. These canned messages can have special variables that get auto-populated.
• 💬 Chat: Added help desk knowledge base support within chat messages. Like canned messages, you can embed reusable FAQs directly within a message.
• 💬 Chat: Added timestamp on chat messages.
• 💬 Chat: Added new Zapier integration to look up thread information (like participants and customer meta data).
• 💁‍♂️ General: Added a new social media component for the help desk. This also benefits when using it with ChipBot Direct.
• 💁‍♂️ General: Added custom SMTP support for customizing email notification email sender (you must have a non-spammy SMTP provider or this will not properly work).
• ✨ Beta Feature: We have added a new offering called ChipBot Web Services. If you have video processing needs and want to leverage our video API, please reach out for tech specs and pricing. We also have a demo to share on request. More APIs to be released in the future. We are following Amazon’s footsteps.

Another note: we are updating our mobile app to reflect some of these new features. We’re expecting a new mobile release by the end of the month.

• 💬 Chat: Improved message load performance by 5x-7x (depending on account). We added a few new indexes that help fetch message threads extremely fast.
• 💬 Chat: Fixed an issue where some email replies would not get recorded because some email clients change the casing of our email addresses. Old conversations are not backward compatible with this fix.
• 💬 Chat: Fixed an issue where chat would scroll up while typing.
• 💬 Chat: Fixed an issue where sometimes a new thread wouldn’t refresh the UI immediately.
• 💬 Chat: Improved organization of customer profile data and actions on the right side of a conversation.
• 💬 Chat: Improved Zapier support to leverage our internal webhook system instead of polling for new chat threads. This makes zaps able to respond instantly to new messages.
• 📼 Videos: Fixed a visual defect when delaying buttons on landscape mode.
• 📼 Videos: Fixed an issue where a horizontal scrollbar would appear on the design icon page.

• 🛠️ Fix: Buried situations where ChipBot text was coming through.
• 🛠️ Fix: Added non-branded CDN host for videos streaming through a white label account.
• 📈 New: Added formal pricing support for 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, and 250 ChipBot customer plans. Email support to get the price for a plan you want.