Welcome to our new chat experience!

We previously used a third-party service to deliver our on-demand customer support experience. In the the first half of the year, that third party introduced capabilities that created  instability in their product, so we decided to build our own.

What’s in it for you, you ask?  Lots.

File upload support

Need to send us a screenshot or a data file? No problem! Either paste or drag-and-drop the file into the message area of a chat window, once you have an open session with one of our Customer Success Engineers. When the file upload is complete, we’ll present a link to the file for both you and the Customer Success Engineer you’re chatting with.

The system supports attachments of up to 6.5 MB.

Window pop-out and resize

One of the more annoying aspects of our former chat implementation was changing the size of the chat window.  The new version allows you to pop out and resize the window as needed.

Also, if you’re working in ThousandEyes across multiple browser tabs and want to move the chat window into a different tab, just click the Chat with Support link in any tab displaying the ThousandEyes app, and we’ll pull your chat into that tab.

Chat conferencing

If a chat needs to be handed off between engineers on our side, you’ll now have a more graceful experience.

Instant chat feedback

Love our chat but hate the emails that follow? To end a chat session, click the X icon in the upper-right corner of the chat box. You’ll be able to state whether your issue was resolved, as well as provide comments to the management team. Check the box beside Issues were solved during this chat. The case can be closed, and provide any commentary to the team. No emails will be sent to you.

Notifications

We see a lot of sessions where people are working in multiple browser tabs, and don’t notice updates from the Customer Success Engineer. We’ll notify you upon response in two ways: sounds and notifications within the browser.

Sounds

If the window with your chat is out of focus when we send you a message, we’ll notify you with a sound.  The sound is configurable on your end.  If you don’t want to hear sounds, right-click the tab and mute it.  We’ll only make a sound when you’re not focused on the window.

Browser Notifications

The new system uses the browser’s notifications API to provide notifications to end users. When a message comes in on a tab that is out of focus, you’ll get a notification in the notifications area of your computer.  Here’s how some of them look:

In most cases, you’ll need to add the site to a list of sites that are allowed to send notifications. Most browsers will prompt the first time a notification is received.

Managing notifications

The settings for managing notifications are specific to each browser.

Open chrome://settings/content/notifications, and allow notifications from app.thousandeyes.com:443 (or https://app.thousandeyes.com). If you've accepted the one-time prompt when first notified, this entry will already be in the list.

Open Safari > Preferences > Notifications, and ensure that app.thousandeyes.com is allowed.

Open Firefox > Preferences > Content and ensure that https://app.thousandeyes.com is set to allowed.

At this time, browser notifications are not available when using Internet Explorer 11.  Previous versions of Internet Explorer are unsupported.

Follow this guide from WindowsCentral - https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-web-notifications-edge-windows-10

Technical changes

We swapped out our previous provider, Olark, for a custom implementation of Salesforce.com’s LiveAgent.  Customers who had previously whitelisted access to *.olark.com to allow access to ThousandEyes' support chat can now remove the whitelist configuration.  All components for the new LiveAgent implementation are sourced from https://app.thousandeyes.com.