I just discovered Crafty Syntax this past week in looking for a Live Chat solution for our corporate site.
I checked out a few others, Volusion's Joomla plugin, as well as the Chatango Joomla plugin... but:
Volusion's solution is really just a loss leader to get you to buy their commercial version. The free version is woefully under - featured.Chatango is simply janky.Both solutions require desktop software to be installed, which I'm not too fond of.
Crafty Syntax on the otherhand, is totally free (though I did donate), and completely web based. It has an automated setup process, and lots of configuration options. It basically provides everything the commercial version of Volusion does... albeit, in a not-quite-so-sexy interface.
My favorite features include:
Referrer reporting (where did your user get to your site from? what keyword?)Page tracking (what path did the user take through your site?)Chat invite & auto-inviteAnd of course, all design / graphical aspects are totally customizable so you can make it suit your brand.
I'm not sure how effective a website live chat will be to boost sales with a boutique web development shop like ours, but I'll give it a try and we'll see.
