Hello Dear Writers,

We are close…we are very close. The developer tells me we may be able to go live with chat Friday. It looks good and it works very well.

Several years ago, the company responsible for the (in my opinion, ugly) design of LetterRep said that the site needed a personality…someone with whom customers could connect upon arriving. Back then I paid a model and a photographer and posted the pics of someone, not a writer, all over the site.

The model is now gone and the writers are LetterRep’s personalities. It’s a much better fit. Chat has been designed around you, the writers, with an emphasis on giving you better opportunities to connect with and assist customers. There isn’t just one goal - there are lots of them: 1)More sales; 2)Opportunities to collect more information; 3)More satisifed customers by leading them to letters better suited to their needs; 4)Building rapport with customers so they will return to you for more letters in the future. There are probably other goals and good reasons for them.

Now, a really nice Chat app has been loaded. If you have ever used Facebook and Facebook chat then you will be no stanger to ours. It’s virtually the same…we’re just going to use it differently. Here’s how it works:

1)Customers arriving at the customer-side of LetterRep will see something like this:

A few things to know about this page are the writers are going to be arranged by # of Letters, Availability (online or offline), and eventually Rating.

The ‘First|Scroll left|Scroll right|Last’ will be links allowing the customer to scroll the row of writers without reloading the page.

Also, the ‘[#] letters’ above the pic but below the names will soon be linked to a page showing just that writer’s letters.

Next, the ‘Rating.’ This is completely subjective at the moment. As far as I’m concerned, all of you guys deserve 5 stars, so I gave you 5 stars. I, however, am a biased party, so we are determining a fair way for customers to assign a rating to writers. A cumulative score by customers, somehow rating letter quality, quality of the assistance experience, etc., will someday replace my biased scores.

The pics, for the time-being, will be linked to chat for that writer. Soon, we will link the pics to the upcoming writer mini-sites.

‘**Online**/**Offline**/Ask this Expert’: This small piece of LetterRep is driven by a technology called AJAX. As I will explain below, writers can turn-off their availability so they can do things like upload letters. When availability is turned off, the writer appears offline. If a writer is truly signed out, he/she also appears offline. If, however, a writer is online and fully available the ‘**Online** Ask this Expert’ text appears below the picture. AJAX also assists us in dynamically reorganizing the writers by those who are online coming first in the list and those who are offline appearing further to the right.

When the customer clicks the writer pic or the ‘Ask this Expert’ link, the chat window below appears:

Before moving on, please notice that the ‘Ask an Expert’ link remains, even after chat is initiated. We are working on changing this so that ‘Ask an Expert’ changes to ‘Currently Chatting’ automatically. At the time being, writers can click the settings icon (it’s the small flower-like icon in the bottom right of the image) and change their availability as explained above. More on that later.

In the image, the customer has just written ‘I need a letter of recommendation for dental school.’ The writer responded and from the writer’s side the writer is conducting a search for any letters he/she may have to suit the customer’s need. (Currently, search from the writer’s accounts only searches the writer’s own letters. This will likely expand to all letters on the site once we work out a referral program between writers.) A Search block now appears on the writer-side homepage and on each writers’ ‘My Live Works’ page. Here’s the search result from this writer’s account for ‘dental school’:

You will notice below the search result the text ‘Link to join’ and a link. The writer highlights this text, copies and pastes it into the chat window. After entering, the link is sent via chat to the customer and appears like this on the customer page:

In some browsers, like mine, the link does not appear underlined, but the link can be clicked by the customer to be taken to the letter purchase page. At the moment we are working on the page to be loaded behind the chat window rather than opening in a new window or tab.

As mentioned above, a writer can set his availability as it appears to customers. To do so, writers must click the small flower-like icon and choose their setting:

(At the moment, The ‘My Status’ and ‘Disable sound notifications’ appear. We will remove these distractions soon.) Clicking Available changes the customer-side availability of the writer to ‘**ONLINE**. Clicking Busy change the availability on the customer-side to ‘Currently Chatting,’ and clicking Invisible changes availability to ‘**OFFLINE**.’

Let me know what questions you have at this point.

**STAY TUNED FOR PART II**

~Rob

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.