To All Free Userlikers – The Unified Messaging Migration is Near
The end of the beta is upon us. On the 17th of April, 9 p.m. CET, new Userlike signups will only have access to Unified Messaging (UM).
Paying customers will still have access to the “old” live chat product, but free users will be migrated to UM. We’d like to explain to you what this means and how you can prepare.
Good news
I believe you will quickly recognize that UM is a big step forward – especially for small businesses, which most of our free users are. Here are some of the benefits you can expect:
- Reduced need of being online. If you don’t have a dedicated service team, maintaining an online presence to answer the chat is challenging. With UM, Userlike has moved to a messaging type of communication that you’re familiar with from apps like WhatsApp. This allows you to hop on and off without breaking the customer experience.
- No need for other tools. With the old Userlike, you had to switch to your email tool to follow up on offline messages. Now you can answer all messages – “live” or “offline” – from the Message Center.
- No more limits on transcripts. We've been wanting to get rid of the access limit to transcripts and offline messages for a while. Now is the time :)
- Packed with new features. Almost all new features we've been adding lately were added to UM. So get ready for a big upgrade – including features like multimedia support.
- Built on the latest technology. We've built Unified Messaging from scratch. This was a necessity , but one nice side benefit is that it allowed us to build on top of the latest technologies. The new Userlike feels similar to the browser versions of the messaging apps you’re used to – but with a business layer tailored toward sales and support.
- Messaging Channels. With the new product being based on messaging , it has finally become possible to connect Userlike to mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS. These are only available for our paid plans , however.
I hope you’ve warmed up to the idea of moving to the new Userlike. Now let’s dive into what will happen.
What will happen?
The migration to UM most significantly impacts your Userlike widget, which will be changed from a live chat to a UM widget. How this happens depends on whether you’ve already made the jump to UM.
- If you haven’t been using UM yet , your live chat widget will be replaced with a UM widget that adopts the language settings of that chat widget.
- If you have already been using UM , then you can continue using it.
- For the rare case that is using both widgets: your live chat widget will be replaced with your UM widget.
In all cases, you don’t have to re-implement any code. The code on your website will automatically trigger the UM widget instead of the live chat one.
After the migration, the live chat area will still be visible in your dashboard. But it will be below UM, and you will only be able to access your offline messages and chat transcripts. We will keep this limited access to LC for at least a few months.
Your customer communication could be absolutely crucial to you, so we want to offer ample time for you to migrate it. Still, we recommend that you prioritize exporting the offline messages and chat transcripts that you’d like to save.
Once migrated, you will lose access to other LC areas:
- The Chat Panel
- Chat widgets
- Widget goals
- Chat topics
- Chat macros
- Push macros
- Download macros
- Macro groups
Of course areas like your profile will remain unchanged.
How to prepare?
Concerning your widgets, in principle there is nothing you need to do. Especially UM users. If you’re currently still using the live chat product and you like to be in full control, then you can already do the migration manually now. The German (subtitles available) video below shows how:
For this, you first customize your UM widget . Then you go to the “Install” tab and you use the option “Replace Live Chat Widget”. Hit “UPDATE WIDGET” and you’re done!
Now, like we mentioned above, you will lose access to all the live chat areas besides the chat transcripts and offline messages. The elements in these areas will not be migrated automatically. If you want to transfer them, you will need to do so manually.
Your chat macros you can export from live chat and import into UM. The following, however, you will need to set up in UM by hand:
- Goals
- Chat topics
- Push macros
- Download macros
- Macro groups
It’s important that you do this before the 17th of April, 9 p.m. CET to not lose these elements.
The great migration
Resisting change is natural, but we're confident that you will end up thinking of this migration as a great migration. Not because it’s such a big effort (it’s not), but because you will notice that UM is a tremendous improvement.
More than ever, our product reflects our ideal for customer communication. We've been talking about these changes and been working on them for a long time. To be able to build this product, we've first had to rebuild our company. It's been a long road to get here, but I’m proud of what we've accomplished.
When you make the switch, I hope you’ll understand why.
If you’d like to get a quick tour, then here is a webinar by Tim. It's in German, but English subtitles are available. We will have an English webinar ready for you next week!
