20 September, 2018

Resolve your questions quicker with flespi chat

Real-time communication with the flespi team right from the flespi panel.

Some of you might have already noticed a new icon that quietly sits in the top right corner of the flespi panel. Now we say it out loud — we have added a built-in support chat into the flespi.io. No need to pick a suitable messenger. No need to switch to another tab to write an email. Contact us from where your questions are — the flespi panel.

Let’s briefly look at the interface and the functionality that the flespi chat features.

User side

The flespi chat has a simplistic and intuitive view for efficient communication. No distractions, fancy stuff, and complicated procedures. Just type your message and send it.

Flespi team side

Even though no-one of you will see this interface (since it's used by us to support you), we want to highlight some concepts that we introduced to improve your satisfaction and our performance:

  • All members of the team can see the chat and contribute to it. This way we minimize response time and share responsibility.

  • When the new chat is initiated by the user, the flespi team gets a notification from the special Telegram bot. So no chat is ever left unnoticed.

  • If approved by the user, we can quickly generate a link to access their account and check certain issues (e.g. settings, logs, etc.) firsthand.

Technologies used

Unlike most chats that rely on HTTP protocol, flespi chat uses MQTT protocol, which uses publish/subscribe paradigm instead of traditional request/response. The idea is that the MQTT broker hosted on the server sends a message to a subscriber as soon as it is published by the publisher. There’s no need to make requests to the server to check if any messages have arrived. This, in turn, results in minimal delays.

Let us explain what we mean by minimal delay on the following split-screen:

Flespi chat operates based on the flespi MQTT broker — the first MQTT 5.0 compliant broker on the market and uses the following concepts:

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Next time you have questions on the use of the flespi platform, try shooting us a message in the chat :)

P.S. You can run flespi support chat as a separate HelpBox app

P.P.S. Now it's possible to chat with the flespi team via HelpBox bot in Telegram.