Adding live chat on WordPress is essential today because most people prefer chatting over emails, contact forms, or phone calls. This is because these methods are more formal and do not give a personal touch in communication. Similar to the chat platforms, we can send messages through chats. According to your business domain, the use of live chat differs.
If your WordPress site is a blog, you may get feedback or topic suggestions. If it’s a business selling services or products, customers will likely send pre-sale inquiries, maintenance requests, and support queries. Tailor your live chat to meet customer support needs, as you may receive hundreds of inquiries daily and need to share various articles, support documents, and other files.
This blog helps you integrate the best live chat plugin out there, and how it can help you streamline your WordPress website.
The Idea of a Live Chat Plugin for Customer Support
As I have already mentioned, there are many uses of live chat on a WordPress website. In order to make your customers more comfortable with you for assistance, you have to provide a convenient way that they prefer. If you are planning to set up live chat on your website for customer support and assistance, you need to choose a live chat plugin that has the features to help you streamline these tasks seamlessly.
Customers always prefer quick responses. A live chat can offer just that. It is like an open place to communicate rather than sending an email and waiting for hours. The live chat plugins will help you to leave automated responses when you are not available online.
Even though every customer needs personalized assistance based on their situations and the products, up to a limit, you can reduce the number of queries or tickets with AI integration.
If your website has been integrated with a helpdesk or support ticketing system plugin, you can choose a live chat plugin, which will help you convert a chat conversation into a ticket. And if your website is a WooCommerce website, it should have the option to sync as you need to suggest products or easily access the orders that the customers have placed.
The Idea of a Live Chat Plugin for Pre-sale Assistance
Pre-sale is also as important as customer support and maintenance assistance after the sale. You should be able to convince and attract your customers to your website to make a valid lead for your business. You should be able to convert a simple site visitor to your loyal customer. Hence, you can choose a plugin that has the option to monitor the live visitors of your website and should be able to send a pre-sale message to the customer who is hovering over your product pages or service page in just one click. It will be more interesting for the customers if you reach them for assistance even before they send a question or query to you!
How to Choose a Live Chat Plugin for Your Store?
To make sure you have the right plugin at hand, you have to check the features of the live chat plugin to see whether it can fulfill all the requirements of your business’s communication with customers. Go through the product pages and documentation of a number of live chat plugins and get an idea of the features they offer. If they match your requirements, go for it!
It would be good if you choose a live chat plugin that is AI-integrated. Sometimes your customers may be from another country or continent. So their working hours and working days will be different from yours. And the holidays and the temporary unavailability of the agents may make the customers disappointed. In such cases, you can turn on the AI-initiated conversations. If you are online, you can assist them individually as well!
Which Is the Best Live Chat Plugin in the Market?
If you are looking for a live chat plugin that is AI-integrated and rich in features to provide the best customer experience through the live chat platform, then WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin is the best choice. As it comes up with a handful of advanced features, you can configure your live chat according to your business requirements. And also, it has a lot of advanced customization features, which will help you to set up the chat widget according to your website theme and colors.
Advantages of Using WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat Plugin in Your WordPress Website
This robust, advanced plugin is a complete package for your WordPress and WooCommerce website. And it is highly mobile responsive since the majority of the customers might browse your website through their mobile phone. It does not break the design of the widget when opening from a mobile phone screen. Additionally, it uses the maximizing option that will ensure the widget fits your mobile screen for a better chatting experience. And it comes up with interesting emojis!
Before going through the steps to integrate WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin to your website, let us go through the major features of this plugin.
Higher security
Given the sensitive nature of customer interactions, where confidential details and credentials might be exchanged through live chat, maintaining robust data security is of utmost importance. Disruptions to the live chat functionality caused by external dependencies are unacceptable, as customers expect swift, precise, and error-free responses.
The WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin addresses these concerns by ensuring your data is stored solely on your own server. This exclusive ownership grants you complete control over your information, ultimately leading to significantly enhanced security measures for your business and your customers.
Option to add unlimited agents and other advanced features
According to the size and nature of your company, you may need to add more agents to deal with the tickets from the customers. While expanding your business and recruiting more agents, you have to add them to the plugin accordingly without any limit. Here, the WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin does not restrict you from adding agents. Additionally, you can import agents from the WSDesk – WordPress Helpdesk & Customer Support Ticket System plugin, as these two plugins are highly compatible with each other.
Unlimited chat history
You can store all the conversations happening through the live chat plugin. If you want to refer to any of the conversations that happened in the past, you can retrieve them at any time. This will be useful when you want to check the data that you have shared in the past.
Tracking of live chat visitors and the option to initiate a chat from the agent side
You can see all customers or site visitors along with their details, such as their IP address, the operating system of their device, the page that the customer is viewing, and the time duration they spend on your website. With an IP address, you can understand the location-related details of the customers, and viewing the page on which a customer hovers will help you to understand what product or service they are looking for.
With these details, you can initiate a conversation from your side to assist them in choosing the best one according to their preferences. In just one click, you will be redirected to the chat dashboard where you can send messages to the customers. You can also use the details for analysis and get to a point at which a product or service you need to market more.
Agent alerts and triggering notifications
Since everyone needs fast and accurate replies without making them wait, we have to let the agents know that a ticket has been received and that an immediate solution should be provided to the customer. You can enable a sound or email notification to alert the agents for an instant revert.
Customization options for the widget
Many live chat plugins provide default templates or themes of the chat, which may not perfectly fit into your website’s theme and color. This will make it feel like an odd visual impact on your website. With the WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin, you can customize the theme of the widget according to your website theme and color.
Agents can customize the backend dashboard color. The plugin offers options for customers to send files, images, audio, and video, rate the conversation, forward it to an email, and includes a default mute button.
Pre-chat form to not skip any customers
If you are not available online to give immediate answers, or it is a holiday for your company, you can enable the pre-chat form, where customers can enter their details in a form and leave a message for you. When you are available, you can use these details and get back to the customer as soon as possible.
Mobile responsiveness and interesting emojis
As the mobile phone is a comfortable device to search for products and services, some customers will reach you through their mobile phones. As an AJAX-based live chat plugin, your chat widget will not break when it is accessed from a mobile phone. Using a button to expand the widget to make it fit into the mobile screen will improve the chatting experience.
Emojis are also part of the conversations, which makes it more expressive visually. This will make the customers’ chatting experience more interesting, and they will feel a friendly connection with you!
AI integration
There are so many reasons to integrate your live chat with AI. It will help you trigger automated responses based on the query from the customers. This plugin is highly compatible with Google’s Dialogflow tool, which helps to implement machine learning in your live chat. You can trigger audio, video, images, and other file formats besides simple text replies. Hence, the majority of the tickets will be reduced when they get immediate responses from the solutions and support documents you trigger.
You can also integrate ChatGPT to make the responses auto-generated and appropriate to the situation or query.
WooCommerce compatibility
If your website is a WooCommerce store, you might need to assist them in shopping and queries, or solutions regarding the products you sell or the orders a customer has placed. With this plugin, when you are chatting with customers, you can see the orders they have made, the products in their cart, and you can even suggest products from your store to the customers. Hence, WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin is a perfect choice for WooCommerce stores.
Well, we have gone through the benefits of choosing the WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin. Now, let us go through the step-by-step process of setting up a live chat on a WordPress website.
Step-by-Step Procedure to Do Live Chat on WordPress with WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat Plugin
Step 1: Install and activate the plugin.
Go to the product page and subscribe to the plugin. Then go to your WordPress dashboard > install and activate the plugin. Then, you can see the plugin in the dashboard:
Step 2: Set up WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin.
For that, go to dashboard > WSChat > Settings> Toggle on the Live Chat
Only when you toggle on the Live Chat, it starts showing up on your website. The next step is to enter your credentials and then Click on Verify and Save, and then on Save Changes.
The Live Chat Toggle shows up like this on your website home page:
When it comes to the pre-chat form, you can enable the pre-chat form first, and you can also enable the option to enable the pre-chat form only when your status is offline. And by clicking on Add Fields, you can add the required fields to be displayed on the form. You can also set a pre-chat form label to be displayed for the customers to understand what needs to be done, such as “Please fill out the form”. Check the screenshot:
I have added an extra field called Interest. Here, you can add a field, name, field type, and enter necessary values. The output window for the same looks like this:
For more information, you can also refer to an article- How to Set Up WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat Plugin?.
You can set restrictions as to where to display the chat widget. Not just the pages, but also based on email addresses, IP addresses, user roles, etc.
Step 3: Reply to the Customers.
This is one of the most important parts, as you need to give a solution or response to the customers properly and accurately. For doing that, go to WSChat > Live Chat.
After clicking on that, a new window will open with three tabs: All, Unassigned, and My Chats.
You can reply to the customers by entering the response and typing to enter or clicking on the button to send. You can also attach files to be sent to the customers for support.
For checking the chats on the Chat History tab, go to WSChat > Chat History.
There, you can find the session ID, user name, user email address, agent name (if the chat has been assigned to an agent), and last date of the chat. Check the screenshot:
You can delete the chats by clicking on the Delete button.
Step 4: Track the Real-Time Website Visitors and Initiate Chat from Your Side for Pre-Sale Assistance.
For tracking the site viewers of your website and initiating a chat from your side, go to WSChat > Active Visitors.
You can find the user name or ID, the IP address of the visitors, the URL of the page they are currently viewing, the logo which indicates the operating system of the customers and the browser, and the time they have been spending on your website. Check the screenshot:
You can also start a chat with the user from the live visitors page.
Step 5: Configure the Widget’s Appearance.
For setting the widget appearance, go to WSChat > Settings > Widget Appearance.
Choose the colors you need to apply to the entities on the chat widget by pointing to the colors that appear when you click on the field.
Step 6: Add or import agents from WSDesk – WordPress Helpdesk & Customer Support Ticket System plugin
Go to WSChat > Settings >Agents tab.
Click on Add Agents and enable create user option, then add the agent’s email ID and password to create the agent profile on this plugin. Then you can click on the Submit button. You can also remove the agents from this plugin by clicking on the Remove button.
Step 7: Set up Email.
For setting up email, go to WSChat > Settings > Email Settings.
You can set this up to let users send emails from the pre-chat form. You can enable the ‘Email Notification’ for sending an email notification to the ‘from’ mail ID you have added when a chat is initiated. You can send the emails as a feedback form or as an email transcript of the chat. Check the screenshot:
Step 8: Trigger Automated Responses by Setting Up Integrations.
Go to WSChat > Settings > Chatbot AI (Dialogflow) for setting up that.
Google Dialogflow: Enable Dialogflow, and add the information such as Google Project ID, Google service account private key file, and choose an agent language if required.
To get the Google Project ID and Google service accounts private key file, you have to create an account on Dialogflow with your Gmail account. To know more details regarding how to take these data, check out an article: Detailed Guide on Setting up Dialogflow – Artificial Intelligence Based NLP, Optimized for the Google Assistant and Chatbot Development.
WSDesk Integration: You can also integrate the ELEX plugin WSDesk to convert chats into trackable tickets. You can mark the chat as a ticket, and you will be redirected to the WSDesk ticket.
ChatGPT integration: By integrating ChatGPT, you can respond to WSChat responses using AI-generated responses.
To sum up
As we have gone through the benefits and steps to set up a live chat on WordPress, I hope you got an idea about it, and this article will be really helpful to set up a live chat with WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat plugin on your website.
Adding live chat to your WordPress website enhances customer support, boosts sales, and increases engagement. WSChat allows you to manage conversations, automate responses, and deliver a personalized support experience, all from your WordPress dashboard.
FAQs
- Why should I add live chat to my WordPress website?
Many customers prefer chatting rather than email or contact forms. Live chat offers a more personal, instant way to communicate and can help with pre-sales and support. - What features should I look for in a live chat plugin for WordPress?
Key features include fast response / automated replies, visitor tracking, chat history, mobile responsiveness, integration with help-desk or AI tools, and for e-commerce stores, compatibility with order/product details - What are the general steps to set up a live chat plugin on WordPress?
The basic steps are: install and activate the plugin → configure settings (widget status, pre-chat form) → reply to chats → optionally monitor visitors and initiate chats yourself → customize widget appearance → add agents (if needed) → set up email notifications → optionally enable chatbot automation → analyze reports. - Can I use live chat for pre-sales as well as support?
Yes — the article points out that live chat can be used proactively for pre-sales by monitoring visitors’ pages and initiating a chat when a visitor looks at, say, a product or service page. - Is mobile responsiveness and security important in a live chat plugin?
Absolutely. A good plugin should be mobile responsive (so the chat widget works well on phones) and offer secure data handling (e.g., storing chat data on your own server) for safety and reliability.
