Summer is in full swing here at GoSquared HQ in London (translation: it’s raining), another month has rolled around, and it’s time for another hack day. Here’s what the team got up to in July:
Current session in Inbox
When you’re talking to a visitor on your website via Live Chat, it’s useful to know where they have been on your site and what pages they’ve seen. This gives you a better idea of the context of the conversation and what that visitor may or may not already know about you.
In GoSquared’s Live Chat, we already show you the page someone was viewing when they sent their latest message. But we wanted to go even further and show even more information about their current visit to your site.
So Leo and Geoff set about adding current session information to the conversation view in the Inbox app. This involved adding a tab to the user information card on the right to show details about their current visit: where they came from, which pages they viewed, and the page they are currently viewing.
The information also updates in real time as your visitor browses around, so you’re always aware of what they’re seeing, and how long they’ve spent on each page.
Current session in Inbox is still an internal project but we can’t wait to bring it to you in future!
Marketing site updates
As usual, James spent some time on the marketing site ensuring it’s up to date with the vast array of new functionality and improvements we’ve been making to the GoSquared platform.
Among other things, we now tell you about Chat Prompts on the marketing site – one of the most popular features in GoSquared for encourage website visitors to engage in conversation and ultimately increase conversion.
CSS Modules the things
JT spent his hackday doing a lot of refactoring inside the codebase of the GoSquared Inbox to use CSS Modules in a lot more places. Compared to some of our previous methods of developing front-end JS alongside CSS, CSS modules has some great benefits, most notably that it makes it much easier to move around and reuse components (both React components and non-React alike) in JS without also having to worry about keeping track of the corresponding (but separate) CSS.
Making components more portable and reusable is a key step towards some ideas we have for bringing data together across People CRM and Inbox, to create a unified feed of messages, notes, browsing activity, and all data from integrations on a single person’s profile. Stay tuned for future announcements!
In the process of doing lots of CSS refactoring, JT also took the opportunity to tidy and neaten a lot of the styles you see in the Inbox UI. A lot of the changes are very subtly, but everything is now slightly neater and more efficient in its use of space. If you’ve noticed any of the changes, we hope you like them! And if you have any suggestions how we can improve things then we’re always open to feedback.
