Do you customize or style your Intercom, Drift, or Crisp widgets? If so, what did you do and how?
I've been thinking about ways to customize and style my chat widget to better fit with my website/brand (more so than the options provided by the service).
Have any of you folks tried doing this? If so, what did you do and how?
Hey Derek!
I use Drift at ConvoPanda and I love the branding features it offers.
Bot persona / Brand mascot - Louie the Panda is ConvoPanda's brand mascot and bot persona. It's much better to use a brand mascot then just your logo, the default bot image, or a dreaded stock photo of a call center agent. If you don't have a brand mascot think about using your pet or a team member's pet as the personality. It's a great way to spark engagement and give you the opportunity to build a relationship with site visitors without being salesly.
Design - I change the colors and the fonts within the chat widget to match my brand. I also fully build out my organization profile with all the links to my different social media accounts and describing what my company does. Simple but effective.
Copy - I use a lot of welcome messages and sophisticated chatbots to engage, connect, and qualify site visitors. I make sure that each message is on-brand. That it matches the topic, tone, and personality of the current page the site visitor is on while making sure the it's written from the perspective and needs of the site visitor.
So other than the provided custom branding settings (bot image, color, links, and different messages), you don't really see a need to customize it further?
Hmm for my needs no not yet.
Derek what's an example of further customization that you're thinking of?
I guess like the activation button styles, the message styles, send message button style, form styles, etc.
I guess just styles everywhere that can be better tuned to make it seem more like an integrated part of the website rather than a third party chat tool.
Drift offers 4 different versions of the activation button plus the ability to add your own. I haven't had the need to add my own because most sessions trigger a chatbot so the activation button isn't visible for too long.
Regarding CSS styles I feel like the best chat widgets have clean simple unobtrusive styles. If you're trying to build a business (unrelated to customizing chat widgets) I don't think there is meaningful ROI in tailoring the styles further. Your users won't care or notice. I'd only consider that if I was a very established company where my design / branding is a major differentiator and everything on my site matches a distinct company style guide.
Derek what is your project?