Instant and high-quality customer support are crucial for businesses and creating successful product and engagement channels. Poor communication channels have the potential to impact your customers negatively. Although there are many instant communication channels like phone, email, self-service, social media, and forums; nowadays businesses need advanced support channels.

Live chat support is one such advanced support channels. With live chat, customers can get instant support without waiting a long time for a reply. This makes customers feel comfortable when reaching out for support. Now, there are lots of live chat services like Zoho, Zendesk, and Freshchat. But in this blog, we will be learning about Chatwoot and how to deploy it on Heroku.

So What Exactly is Chatwoot?

Chatwoot is an open source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, and HubSpot. It is not just about supporting live chat, but also offers integration of multiple channels including email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. So why do we need Chatwoot if the market is already filled with a number of customer engagement tools?

The main reason behind Chatwoot's success is its open source nature. A source code created and modified by globally distributed communities help to keep Chatwoot updated more frequently than closed source software. Moreover, users can use Chatwoot for free by hosting on their own infrastructure. Other features that make Chatwoot a perfect choice is its shared inbox feature, automation so projects can easily turn into auto-pilot, and access across multiple channels. These channels can be viewed under a single hood, making it easier to switch between channels.

In a Nutshell, Chatwoot’s Features Include:

Shared inbox: Collaborate with your team with a shared inbox means you can assign different tasks from the same inbox to different agents.
Live chat: Add a live chat widget to your website and improve your customer experience.
Channels: Support for multiple channels like Email, WhatsApp, Twitter, Twilio, Facebook, Instagram, and Line. Also, you access all the channels from one place, no need to jump between channels.
Automations: Automate repetitive tasks.
Chatbots: Build chatbots with Dialogflow or Rasa and connect to your inbox.
Mobile apps(IOS & Android): Engage with customers instantly from anywhere with Chatwoots' IOS and Android apps.
Integrations: Integration options available for Slack, WordPress, Dialogflow and Rasa.

How to Install Chatwoot on Heroku?

Chatwoot offers a self-hosted version and Chatwoot cloud. With a self-hosted version, you have full control over your data and infrastructure. Let's see how to install Chatwoot on Heroku.

Prerequisite: Create a Heroku account if you don't have one. (Free tier available)

Step 1: Deploy to Heroku

Click on the Deploy to Heroku button. This will initialize an app on Heroku with all the basic things configured.

Step 2: Setup and Deploy our App

Give a name to your app in App name. For Choose a region, leave it "United States".

In Config Vars, for FRONTEND_URL, replace CHANGE with your app name.

Click on the Deploy app.

Wait for the app to be deployed, this may take a few minutes.

Step 3: Configure Your App

Now your app is available on https://YOUR_APP_NAME.herokuapp.com. Create and login into your Chatwoot account.

In your app dashboard go to settings -> Config vars make sure to configure your mailer and storage options by adding necessary env variables. For example, if you are using SendGrid as your mail service, you have to add these,

KEY	VALUE
SMTP_ADDRESS	smtp.sendgrid.net
SMTP_USERNAME	apikey
SMTP_PASSWORD	password
MAILER_SENDER_EMAIL	example@company.com

Your own Chatwoot instance is ready! 🥳

Other Chatwoot features you can explore:

Labels: Categorize conversations with labels like important, pricing related, product related, etc so that you can quickly assign them to the right agent. To add a label, go to Settings -> Labels -> Add label
Automation: Set some automation rules to avoid repetitive tasks. To add automation rules, go to Settings -> Automation -> Add Automation Rule
Canned Responses: Quickly reply to common messages by creating reply templates. You may notice these at the end of a conversation. Just type "/" to pick a reply from saved templates and quickly reply. To add canned responses, go to Settings -> Canned Responses -> Add Canned Response
Integrations: Chatwoot currently provides slack and webhooks integrations. To get started with integrations, go to Settings -> Integrations -> Choose what you want.
Dialogflow: Use the power of Natural Language Processing. Build chatbots with Dialogflow and connect to your inbox to better handle communications. To add Dialogflow, go to Settings -> Applications -> Configure Dialogflow -> Add a new hook

Conclusion

That's it! This article shows how powerful Chatwoot is and all the functionalities it provides. If you are a first-time contributor looking to work on open source, then follow the contributor guide to begin your journey.

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How to Install Chatwoot?