How Coosto built a chat feature for their content management platform

We had a chat with Paul van den Broek, Head of Product at Coosto. He is making sure that Coosto builds the right things, the most relevant features and delivers value to their target audience.

Paul told us how and why they added TalkJS to their array of features, and doing so offered more value to their customers and increased product engagement, while offering vital live chat capabilities to their customers.

He explained how the TalkJS Chat API made it possible to integrate a chat feature into their SaaS product and the benefits of partnering up with us.

The power of TalkJS is that it’s highly customizable and user-friendly. We feel very comfortable talking to customers about our chat integration, because we can offer them a plug and play solution and give them the possibility to adjust the chat widget to their needs.

– Paul van den Broek, Head of Product at Coosto

About Coosto

Coosto is a social media management platform that is focused on managing online content and conversations. Coosto helps businesses perform better in terms of customer satisfaction, brand reputation and awareness, and getting more conversions from their social media content. It’s a robust platform used by 30.000+ professionals and organizations, like Coolblue, Lidl, Mars, and TUI group. Coosto helps brands connect with people.

Adding the chat into the Coosto platform

The Coosto platform does an amazing job with managing conversations from social media and messaging apps – but the product team from Coosto wanted to expand possibilities by creating a live chat feature similar to Intercom, Drift, or Zendesk. That way, businesses would be able to manage all online conversations in one place and stay in touch with their customers through all different social media platforms, and directly on their website.

The idea was to offer a chat widget that Coosto customers could easily add to their website. Via the chat widget, people who are visiting a website, are able to directly chat with this business. Depending on the type of business, the purpose of the chat could be to offer direct support or to use it for marketing activities and convert website visitors into leads. For managing all incoming chat conversations, the customers of Coosto needed to have a chat interface inside the Coosto platform for managing these conversations.

From a business perspective, the live chat would work as a new revenue stream by up-selling the feature to the customers of Coosto. They price the chat feature like a typical Saas product for a fixed price on a monthly basis.

There were two options for them to add a chat into their SaaS product, by building the feature from scratch or using a chat API and SDK like TalkJS.

“We wanted to partner up with a chat vendor that is optimised for the use cases we are providing with a user-friendly chat solution in order to fit seamlessly into the Coosto platform. ”

– Paul van den Broek, Head of Product at Coosto

Working with TalkJS Chat API & SDK

Coosto got all the tools necessary to build the chat feature into their social media platform. The API works great with any language or framework, so the developers had no problems working with TalkJS code. The chat API allows developers to basically turn any <div> into a chat feature in a couple of hours.

Using the Javascript chat library, the dev team was offloaded from a lot of front-end work as there was no need to design or code the user interface from scratch. The chat UI is pre-built and with a design that’s easy to customize by changing a few lines of CSS.

The product team at Coosto wanted to make the code snippet for the chat widget as small as possible. It was extremely important for them to provide their customers with a plug and play experience regarding chat implementation.

“We created a small code snippet for our customers to implement on their website to make sure it doesn’t harm the loading time of your website. It works plug and play and can be installed directly on a website or integrated in Google Tag Manager.

– Paul van den Broek, Head of Product at Coosto

<script>
 var COOSTO_WEBCHAT_OPTIONS = {
        appId: "<App ID>",
        companyName: "<Brand Name>",
        companyLogo: "<Link to Company Logo>",
        customerRole: "role",
        notificationsEnabled: true,
        autoOpenDelay: 1000,
        welcomeMessage: "Welcome to our chat. Please let us know if you have any questions."
      };
</script>

There are also some variables in the code snippet that customers can customize themselves, like the name that appears in the live chat widget and the avatar that they have, and other branding elements.

The TalkJS multi-licence partnership

The partnership between Coosto and TalkJS gives customers of Coosto the flexibility to add live chat as an add-on to the Coosto platform they are already using. The collaboration between Coosto and TalkJS is a great fit for a SaaS company and makes it easy to distribute the chat feature to end-users.

“There’s always a lot of communication happening when starting a partnership and integration. Both parties had close contact with each other and we had great support from TalkJS when implementing the chat solution into the Coosto platform. This results in the possibility for us to offer more value towards our customers.”

– Paul van den Broek, Head of Product at Coosto