Easy to Ask. Easy to Answer.

Pubble is a customer support app that simplifies how teams communicate with their customers

[pubbleio]

Pubble Live Q&A - Alternative to CoverIt Live?

TLDR: Pubble is a better product than CIL, shifting over is a no brainer.

CoveritLive was a competitor that we came across occasionally in the live event space. Their Live Q&A product competed with Pubble’s Live Q&A app. Towards the end of 2018, they announced that they would be discontinuing their service.

Since then we’ve had a steady stream of enquiries asking: 

“Has Pubble got the same functionality as coveritlive?”

“We are currently using Cover it Live for Qs and As. Would Pubble be a possible replacement?“

“We have used a platform called CoveritLive for live chat events in the past, but have just found out that they are seizing to exist at the end of the year...”

and so on...

Hence we felt the need to write this blog post. We needed to have something to point to!!

Both Pubble Live Q&A and CIL Live Q&A are designed to be embedded on your website. At a high level, the purpose of the products are similar - to enable the client to host the event on a page on their own website. However. the important differences are in the detail. 

Rather than doing a complete feature comparison, we reached out to a few customers who recently shifted over from CIL to Pubble. Here’s their un-edited feedback in-full.

Aston University 

“At Aston University we were advertising a live chat to prospective international students using CoverItLive. We had to quickly come up with an alternative and after undertaking some research we took up a trial with Pubble.

We found Pubble to be an incredibly effective chat tool, which offered a much more sophisticated experience. It is particularly useful for sharing rich content such as videos to help reinforce the messages being delivered through the chat.

Given our predicament we were very pleased with the support provided by the Pubble team to help us get up and running. In the end, we had a very successful chat and are now signing up to use Pubble as our long term solution.”

Paul Hebron, Head of Marketing (Aston Business School & Postgraduate)

University of Leeds

Moving to using Pubble has turned out to be a no-brainer. It’s a much more slick platform, with a variety of easy to use features, giving you and your audience a great user experience. Pubble has given us the opportunity to lift our scheme to a new level, bringing together current functions and introducing new ones under the same platform, whilst allowing us to capture data and report on engagement in a much better way.

Annica Murman, Engagement Manager

We are confident that Pubble is an excellent alternative to CoverItLive (CIL). Without exception, the feedback from clients who have shifted from CIL to Pubble, has been that Pubble is a better product. Distilling their feedback, the key themes

Easier to use.

Events are more effective.

Customers and moderators prefer it.

Here are some recent examples of events that where Pubble replaced CIL:

Leeds University: Study Abroad at Leeds

Aston University: Postgraduate Live Chat

Loughborough University: Discover Loughborough web chat

“Web Chats” are very popular with Universities. They are really efficient way of engaging with a group of prospective students around a defined topic (ex. placement offers to International Students, Post Graduate Programme Q&A’s, etc.).

If you have been using CIL and are now looking for an alternative, Pubble really is an excellent product to power your Live Q&A’s. If you want to check out the features or see how the app works, take a look at the Live Q&A Product Page.

If you have any questions that you would like us to address, use the Ask button on the Pubble site and we will be delighted to help.

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update for June & July

We've been very busy during the Summer months of June and July working on underlying technology improvements.  Also, imminent is an online payment system to make it easier for those of you who would prefer to pay by credit card.  The payment system will be coming on stream in the next few days.   

Facebook not playing ball

Due to the recent Facebook scandals with Cambridge Analytica et al, Facebook have made some permission changes that impact all 3rd party integrations and all apps have to undergo an updated review process.  Therefore, we've had to re-submit our app to Facebook for re-approval. Unfortunately, we don't have a timeframe for when the app will be re-approved as it's out of our hands.  In the meantime, we have temporarily removed the Facebook integration and we'll send an update as soon as we have it.  Apologies to those of you that use this functionality. 

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update for May 2018

GDPR

A look back on May and I'm guessing that everyone is probably fed up with emails about GDPR at this stage!  So very quickly this is just to let you know that we have pushed our GDPR update live and a reminder to set your privacy settings in the Pubble Admin panel if you haven't already done so.  You can see the instructions on how to do so here.

Audit log

The Pubble audit log tracks anything on the Pubble app that can be added, updated and deleted. This is an extensive list that includes things such as community, account, team members, visitor posts etc. The audit log records who made the change with an associated time stamp. This gives a community administrator a log to refer to in case of an audit.  The Audit log can be found in the Analytics tab of the Admin Center:

Post as community

This feature was added a while back but it's a request we sometimes get so I wanted to raise it.  Some customers want a team member's name to appear on the chat window as it gives a personal touch.  Others prefer the organisation name to be displayed.  If you want to post as the organisation name, you can set this in the post options under the "Apps" tab in your admin center.  

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update April 18

GDPR

The GDPR deadline is nearly upon us and we have been focusing our efforts on everything GDPR over the last month.  In addition to updating our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy/Statement, Data Processing Agreement and Technical and Organisational Measures, we have made significant technical changes to Pubble to ensure that the Pubble service is GDPR compliant. 

Privacy Panel

One of the main additions we've made is adding a Privacy Panel to the Admin Centre.  The Privacy Panel is designed for you, our customers, to make it easy for you to set the options in the backend so that you can be assured that the GDPR is being adhered to when it comes to collecting personal data using Pubble.  Here you can set your data requirements as well as being able to approve the sub-processors that Pubble uses. It's fully transparent.

Please note that the changes have NOT been pushed live yet. Our target date for the GDPR update is May 18th.

For further information see: How Pubble is preparing for GDPR 

Retail Excellence Expo 

Outside of GDPR, we're looking forward to the Retail Excellence Expo on May 15th and 16th at the Citywest Convention Centre, Dublin.  We have a stand there, K5, close to the e-commerce stage, so please come by and say 'hi'.  

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update March 18

GDPR Update

As part of our continued efforts to adhere to the GDPR regulations, we are in the process of reviewing our security/privacy policies.  Security of personal data is extremely important to us.  One of the recent changes that we have made in relation to this is the automatic expiry of conversation links. Conversation links will now expire after 48 hours. If the customer tries to access the conversation from an email/SMS notification after this time, the Messenger app will prompt them to generate a new access link. One exception to this is if the user accesses the conversation from the same device and browser - in such cases, they can access the conversation as normal. 

Outside of this, we are working on documentation that explains exactly how we store data and where it is used.  In short, we only store data and use it to provide a service to you, our customers.  By outlining what we do in a clear, unambiguous manner, it will allow you to integrate that into your own privacy policies allowing you to be completely transparent about how your customer's data is being processed.  Once the documentation has been finalised, we'll be in touch. 

We will have more updates on this next month. 

Back to Pubble features

Because they are so beneficial and they work hand in hand, I continue to highlight FAQs and Smart Prompt.  These are real time savers so I encourage you to keep adding FAQs to your system.  If a customer asks a question and there is an FAQ defined for it, the Smart Prompt bulb will light next to the input box:

The question asked is "What are conversations?" and because I have an FAQ defined for that question, the Smart Prompt bulb lights.  Clicking the bulb takes me to the suggested answers and by clicking one of the answers, it automatically inserts the answer into the conversation.  This is really efficient, especially on mobile where it takes more time to type an answer.  We know, we know.....it's really cool :-)

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update January 18

GDPR Compliance

A few customers have been asking us about GDPR so I'd like to reassure everyone that we are working hard in the background to ensure that Pubble is fully compliant with the upcoming GDPR regulation.  From a technical point of view, there is a lot of unseen work happening to ensure that we meet the requirements as set out by the EU.  This is a very important area and it will be a central part of our development strategy going forward.  We'll give more updates on this closer to the deadline. 

Don't forget your FAQs

As you know, FAQs are great for reducing the need to answer repetitive questions.  Don't forget that you can add images, urls, or documents to an FAQ to add context to the answer.  For example, a url could be a link to directions to your store or a document could be instructions on how to fit a child's car seat.  The FAQ below has an image attached showing our Smart Prompt feature:

Desktop Apps

While we've had desktop apps for a long time now, we're not sure if many people are aware of them.  Installing the desktop app means you don't have to access your dashbaord from a browser as the Pubble icon will appear on your taskbar as another app.  You can find the apps for Windows and Apple Mac here. 

The icon looks like this:

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update December 17

Happy New Year 2018 to everyone!  We have some updates that we included in December that we'd like to share with you.

Live Typing

This feature request came from quite a few of our US customers actually.  It's now possible to see what the customer is typing as they are typing, giving you a heads up on what the answer should be.  All in the name of saving time!  As the customer is typing, the text will appear in grey.  Here's a screenshot of how it looks:

Follow-up Reminders

Should you need to get back to a particular customer at a later date, it's now possible to set a reminder from within the question.  This can be found on the right hand panel when in a question.  Here is a link to the help doc explaining the feature. 

Help Centre

Don't forget that the help centre can be accessed from within your dashboard (by clicking on the '?' on the bottom left) or by accessing https://www.pubble.io/docs/

[pubbleio]

Announcing Sessions from Pubble

/Sessions

Sessions are 45mins webinars designed to help you to learn from others in the Pubble Community. This is something that we have been planning to launch for a while.

The talks will focus on a range of topics centred around customer support, live chat, live Q&A events, etc.

Our aim is to make them fun, interactive and packed full of real life insights and examples.

First-up, we have Stefan Drew who is a renowned marketing professional, published author and an Amazon Bestseller with Creating Business Growth and Advertising Secrets.

Stefan has implemented Pubble in several Higher Education Institutes in the UK. During this session, Stefan will share the techniques that he uses to optimise Pubble focusing in particular on leveraging the Pubblebot to automate customer support.

Stefan’s webinar is on Thursday 14th December at 1pm GMT. If you would like to attend the free session, please pre-register on:

PRE-REGISTER HERE

Hope you can join us for Stefan’s session. It will be 45mins where you’ll learn a lot!!

[pubbleio]

Announcing Our Teamwork Desk Integration

Pubble is excited to announce our shiny new integration with Teamwork Desk.

Teamwork Desk is an incredibly powerful Helpdesk solution that is used by thousands of organisations around the world to streamline their customer support. If you are running a helpdesk, you really should take a look at Teamwork Desk. The team behind it and the product, are awesome.

We  are genuinely excited to announce this integration - it's been one of the most requested integrations over the last 12 months. Beyond responding to customer requests for this, we also believe that it adds enormous value to Pubble and Teamwork Desk: You get to leverage the best features of both platforms to serve your customers how they want to be served. It’s win-win.

How does it work?

With this integration you can push questions from Pubble to Teamwork Desk. When pushed, a Pubble conversation becomes a ticket on Teamwork Desk. The ticket is created directly from Pubble containing a full transcript of the conversation, and new messages will be automatically added. Any replies from Teamwork Desk are pushed back to the conversation in Pubble.

Whether you reply in Pubble or Teamwork Desk, the conversation keeps flowing between both platforms in real time. Not only do replies on questions and tickets sync, but so do conversation notes and replies on support file attachments!

Another important feature of this integration is the sync between both Pubble and Teamwork Desk agents and customers. Once you configure the integration during the setup, all current and future agents and customer contacts will sync bi-directionally between Teamwork Desk and Pubble. This keeps all contact information consistent and up to date across both platforms!

Set-up

Setting-up this integration is very easy. You need to have a Teamwork Desk account with Admin access (so that you can generate an API key). Full details of how to configure the integration are available here: Configuring Teamwork Desk

If you need support adding this integration from the Pubblers, reach out here. The Teamwork Desk Support team is available on: [email protected]

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update November 17

Pubble is excited to announce our shiny new integration with Teamwork Desk.   Teamwork Desk is an incredibly powerful Helpdesk solution that is used by thousands of organisations around the world to streamline their customer support. If you are running a Helpdesk, you really should take a look at Teamwork Desk. The team behind it and the product, are awesome.   We are genuinely excited to announce this integration - it's been one of the most requested integrations over the last 12 months. Beyond responding to customer requests for this, we also believe that it adds enormous value to Pubble and Teamwork Desk: You get to leverage the best features of both platforms to serve your customers how they want to be served. It's win-win. Read more..... 

Announcing Sessions from Pubble 

Sessions are 45 mins webinars designed to help you to learn from others in the Pubble Community. This is something that we have been planning to launch for a while. The talks will focus on a range of topics centered around customer support, live chat, live Q&A events, etc. Our aim is to make them fun, interactive and packed full of real life insights and examples.

First-up, we have Stefan Drew who is a renowned marketing professional, published author and an Amazon Bestseller with

Creating Business Growth

and

Advertising Secrets

Read more.....

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update October 17

Hi Shane

This month we have another customer story for you.  Petworld is a great example of how Pubble can be integrated into an organisation to improve customer service.  Petworld rolled out Pubble to each of the Petworld shops meaning that Pubble is available to their in-store and purchasing staff on all devices.  Read their fantastic implementation story here: Petworld Case Study.  Thanks to Lee and the team for their help with this.

Some of the main features added in October:

Contact Card

If you are chatting with a customer but they have not yet supplied their contact details, you can push a contact card to them manually from the dashboard.  This can be done from within the conversation by selecting “Prompt Contact Card” from the input box menu (see image).  The right hand side of the image shows how the card displays for the customer.

Paste Image directly to Input box

This was developed on the back of requests from some customers.  If you take a screenshot, you can now paste the screenshot directly into the input box within the conversation.  This saves you having to paste the screenshot into a 3rd party application and then copying and pasting that file into Pubble.  When you choose paste (using CTRL-V for example) you get a dialogue box like below giving you the option to upload or cancel.

Add an attachment to an FAQ

It’s now possible to add an attachment to your FAQs.  As an example, you may want to add a pdf instruction guide showing how to assemble furniture.  To do this just choose “Upload file” from the FAQ menu:

WordPress Plugin

We have created a plugin for those on WordPress.  The plugin can be found here: Pubble WordPress Plugin

Mobile Apps

Our mobile apps have been updated also so please make sure that you have the latest app downloaded from the respective stores.

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update September 17

September was a HUGE month for us in terms of pushing updates.  In fact, there are too many to mention on this mail.  However, our Smart Prompt update is one of our coolest features yet and you should definitely check it out!  Here's how it helps you. 

Smart Prompt

Before this update, the Pubblebot had a defined role at the start of a live chat. When a question came in, the Pubblebot queried the FAQ’s and prompted back up to 3 relevant FAQ’s.   

With the Smart Prompt update, the Pubblebot’s role in each customer conversation is significantly expanded. The bot still handles the initial query and FAQ look-up on the customer side but now, he also helps YOU as you ‘live chat’ with the customer. This is a big change.

During your chat, anytime that the Pubblebot thinks he can help you, the Smart Prompt bulb lights up. The bulb is on the reply input box in the Dashboard (see image above). When you click the bulb, the suggested answers are listed. If you want to use one, click it and edit as you wish.  Check it out - it will save you a lot of time! 

Twitter Integration

With Pubble you can stream tweets into your Pubble dashboard based on #hashtags. This is designed to be used in conjunction with live events using our Live QA or Live Blog thus enabling you to display tweets by designated hashtag to your event participants.  You can read more here: Pubble Twitter Integration.

As I mentioned at the start of the mail, there were too many updates to mention but details of all of them are available on the following blog post: Pubble AI Enhanced Live Chat.

[pubbleio]

AI Enhanced Live Chat

Last week we added a host of updates to Pubble: Twitter, Contact Cards, Question Tags, FAQs, etc.  This really was a big week for us in terms of pushing live features that the team has been working on for the last few months. 

For now, I wanted to highlight a feature that we’ve added to the Pubble Dashboard app that we are really excited about. We call it Smart Prompt and it’s designed to help you (the “agent”) at every stage of the conversation with your customer. 

“Pubble is expanding how it leverages the artificial intelligence in the platform “the Pubblebot” to help you throughout the full conversation lifecycle.” - John Dineen

Here’s how it works.

Before this update, the Pubblebot had a defined role at the start of a live chat. When the a question came in, the Pubblebot queried the page and community level FAQ’s and prompted back up to 3 relevant FAQ’s.

This works really well because we focused on optimising the UI on Pubble Messenger to encourage the customer to start the conversation with their question. You probably noticed that very few of your chats on Pubble start with “Hi” / “Hello” / “Howdy”, which is the natural way to start a chat.

Up to now, that was the extent of the Pubblebot’s role in the customer conversation. Essentially, Pubblebot had one shot at delivering an instant answer to the customer and then it was over to you. 

With the Smart Prompt update, the Pubblebot’s role in each customer conversation is significantly expanded. The bot still handles the initial query and FAQ look-up but now, he also helps you as you ‘live chat’ with the customer. This is a big change.

During your chat, anytime that the Pubblebot thinks he can help you, the Smart Prompt bulb lights up. The bulb is on the reply input box in the Dashboard (see image above). When you click the bulb, the suggested answers are listed. If you want to use one, click it and edit as you wish. 

We’ve been testing the Smart Prompt feature internally for a while. We are confident that Smart Prompt is going to be a big hit. It will save you a tonne of time in not having to retype answers that are already in the system and ensures that you are answering questions consistently.

Give it a try. Hope you like it and please ping us with any feedback!

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update August 17

This month focuses on features that help you guys when it comes to adding extra information to customer questions and also replying if you have forgotten your sign-in details. 

Tags

Adding tags to questions is a great way to categorise questions making it easy for you to search questions based on specific criteria later. For example, you may tag a certain question as a "lead". Just add the tag in the right-hand panel in a question. The tag will appear under the input box as shown:

Tags are defined in the Admin Centre on the "Community" tab.  This ensures tag consistency across the team.  You can then use the search option to find the information that you are looking for.

Notes

It's also possible to add notes to the conversation.  These are internal notes that can help the agent when they re-visit the conversation at a future date.  You can see where the notes are added in the first image above. 

No sign-in reply

Did you get an email notification while you were on the move about a new question asked on your site?  Perhaps you can't remember your login details to access your dashboard?  Don't worry!  We've got you covered. We've added a no-sign in reply to allow you to answer without signing in.  (I know, I know....it's really clever - you don't have to tell us! haha).  Just click the secure link as shown below and you can reply to the question. Now that's magic! 

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update July 17

IMPORTANT Update:

We released new versions of our mobile apps during July.  Please visit the Play Store or App Store from the links at the bottom of the email to make sure you have the most up-to-date version. 

Also, why not follow @pubbleio on Twitter? We regularly post some great tips on how to use some of the cool features in Pubble.

Thank you again to all our customers that provide invaluable feedback on our product.  It really helps us to improve!

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update June 17

There are some major updates from Pubble for June. 

You may have noticed that there is a new look and feel to the Pubble Messenger app.  We have a cool new "Ask" button and when you click it, the chat window opens in a more compact view:

Be Trigger Happy!

A major new feature is the ability to define triggers. Triggers can be set per page or as a default message across the site.  Many customers have asked for an avatar (profile picture) to accompany the message, so we've included that too:

You can set the triggers in your Admin Centre on the "Community" tab under "Actions" and then by clicking "Add Greeting Rule".  There are a number of options in the dialogue box:

Triggers are a GREAT way of pro-actively driving engagement on your site. If you have any questions on how to set them, please let us know.

Thanks for reading!

[pubbleio]

Pubble Update May 17

NEW VERSION OF PUBBLE!!

In May, we released a major upgrade of Pubble.  The release version is 1.4 and here are some of the main updates: 

Conversation Tags - you can now tag conversations with keywords to make them easier to find. Use whatever keywords make sense for your business. For example, in Pubble, we tag conversations with Messenger, Live Q&A, Community Q&A, etc. By doing this, it’s easier to filter the conversations by product type later on.

No Sign-in URLS - for questions that you assign to less frequent users of Pubble, they can now answer the question without having to remember their Pubble login details. This is great for infrequent users of Pubble that only have to answer the occasional question. We don’t recommend power users using this option as you lose a lot of the productivity functions that the Pubble Dashboard offers.

Our Community Q&A app is looking great with its new UI.   Community Q&A allows you to have public threads on your pages.  So, for example, retailers could show questions and answers relating to a particular product on a particular page.  You can see and test the product here:  Community Q&A  We have also integrated the Pubblebot into the app. This means that FAQ’s that have been defined for the community / page will be pushed into the thread, by the Pubblebot, in response to relevant questions. This will help to reduce the number of repetitive questions that you have to answer.

In a busy month of development, there were also updates to our Live Q&A and Live Blog apps.  You can read an in-depth breakdown in the following blog post.  http://blog.pubble.io/post/160983659161/pubble-version-14-whats-included

Thanks for reading!