With ordinary live chat applications, you end up speaking to a random consultant who is as faceless as they are nameless, and its near impossible to build rapport because it is highly unlikely that you will be able to get the same consultant again.

Having dealt with many traditional live chats (especially with technical support) it’s always a feature I would have liked because it would help the consultant on the other end understand my level of technical understanding when troubleshooting a problem.

Social Support however takes all this and more in mind!

For a user, it allows you to choose a consultant (or one at random) and even if the consultant you want is unavailable you can send them an email direct from the application.

Once inside a chat, a user is able to rate the consultant (as many times as you want during the chat) and have a transcript of the chat emailed to you once the chat is finished.

And of course what would a chat application be without emoticons ? The emoticons can be customised by the admin user as needed and have multiple uses (including a swear filter ).

The consultant also has the ability to send the user additional help material (such as embedded YouTube videos, images or text/HTML) that open in a lightbox over the chat.

The reference material can be configured as needed by the admin user and appears as clickable icons to the consultant.

The consultant even has the ability to change the greeting they have when the chat begins which replaces [name] with the users name. The consultant gets visibility into the workings of the application (in real time), including how many people are online, how many consultants are currently in chat and a streaming list of activity from the other consultants (IE Steve left a chat with *user*).

And to keep things simple, the same application interface is used by consultants and users, consultant users are identified via their Facebook user id which are setup by the admin user.

Reports, Reports, Reports

What good would an application like this be without reporting? Because Social Support is built on our Social Media Fusion platform we capture as much as we can about the user and the ways that they interact with our system. From clicks, to browser type, we capture as much as we can, so brands can better understand their users and the best way to engage them (keeping in mind user privacy of course).

Via the Fusion data warehouse we can tell everything from sentiment, to time spent on app, if the users “like” the page and even demographic age group, being able to collect granular data then aggregating so that the data is in a digestible format.

Hit us up

We have a number of different options and variations on this app available from drag and drop file sharing to consultant departments (for brands that may have multiple levels of support). Remember that this is built on Facebook so it provides another way for your users to engage you one on one.

We even have the option to build in a payment system which can be used for a brand to create customised carts for a user. The user can then check out while in the chat; extremely useful for any brand that has customised products or packages that could be put together via the chat session, or to provide customer service leading to a sale.

The application is available now and we would love to have a chat with you to demonstrate what it can do and to answer any questions you have, just click the icon below.

The X.Commerce Innovate Developer Conference, now in its 3rd year, is the biggest E-Commerce developer conference in the world with the conference attracting developers, agencies and web industry types from all reaches of the globe.

This will be my 3rd year attending, In previous years this is the event that has launched some of the most revolutionary PayPal payment methods the likes of which the E-Commerce industry has never seen. One of my personal favourites, Chain Payments, which enables websites to act as a gateway between buyer and seller much the same as the way eBay operates.

Indeed this year will be no different and eBay/PayPal is sparing no expense in setting up a great conference with some big announcements lined up such as the new Facebook and eBay/PayPal partnership to the official launch of X.Commerce platform.

For the first time ever Thinktank Media is going to be at Innovate with myself and Ben Acott flying over next week to San Francisco to rub shoulders with the who’s who in the web industry and showing off what we do best from Web development to Social Media Strategies. We have also lined up a live demonstration of our cross platform Social Media Fusion.

From the Pre-Innovate VIP dinner to the Key note we will be reporting directly from where all the action will be taking place so stay tuned for plenty blog posts and updates on here and via our Facebook page or on Twitter @thinktankmedia

You can also follow me on Twitter @developersteve

The Innovate Hashtag is #innovate2011 or follow them on twitter via @x_commerce

The mobile direction is thanks in part to a framework called Corona which allows us to develop an application that can be deployed to iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android (2.2) and with us only needing to develop once for both Android and iPhone (with talk of Windows Mobile 7 being supported soon) it speeds up development time, which means – we can build your custom apps for multiple platforms all at once.

To prove how much quicker it is to develop, on Sunday our developers took part in the Corona Hackathon. A Hackathon is a Developer challenge of sorts where app developers have a set period of time to develop a app or game in a period of time usually with a theme. Sunday’s Hackathon didn’t have a theme but was open to developers’ imaginations as long as it was something created using the Corona framework.

After an early start (1am Australian time) our developers had come up with a game based on the classic early ’90s “Dope-wars”. In “Dope-wars” you play a character that buys and sells narcotics in a game environment only the economy is localised to that game. In our version, the economy runs via Social Media Fusion, which allows players to affect the overall globalised game-economy.

Not only that, but the game itself can be run on Twitter and Facebook to allow players to play the same game in all 3 mediums and can even allow us to offer extra content to entice usability on any of them.

While we haven’t opened the game for public release yet, we will be releasing it in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

We also managed some time to do a quick interview on the radio (Computer and Technology Radio) in America during the hackathon too, feel free to have a listen.

Below is some mobile screenshots from our game “Transporter: Narcotics” from the Corona hackathon (‘scuse the drug reference, but you get the idea).