If you want to offer online chat support alongside your help desk, there's plenty of options out there. And most of them are pretty easy to integrate to Zendesk. We've set up a very basic widget sample integrating to our preferred chat provider Campfire from 37Signals.

You can see it demonstrated on the Zendesk support Home page, and the widget code is straight forward:

<p>Zendesk live chat support</p>
<form action="https://CampfireAccountName.campfirenow.com/RoomID" id="loginForm" method="post">
<input id="name" name="name" type="text" value="{{ user.name }}" size="15"/>
<input value="Join" type="submit" />
</form><p>
<center>
<a href="http://www.campfirenow.com">
<img src="http://www.campfirenow.com/images/campfirelogo-small.png" width="105" height="32"/>
</a><br/>
<h6>Powered by Campfire</h6>
</center></p>

To make it work you need a Campfire account. And remember to type in your CampfireAccountName and RoomID in the widget. Widgets are administered under ACCOUNTS / Widgets. If you're logged into Zendesk Support, your name is automatically transferred to the chat, using the {{ user.name }} widget placeholder. For further integration please notice that there's a complete API for the Campfire service.

We're going to inhabit our Campfire chat room the next week or so to demo the functionality. Come join us weekdays for a live chat. The login button is located in the bottom right corner of the Zendesk support Home page.