Integrating a live chat to your WordPress site will help you a lot in improving user experience. Most website users would want a quick response to any issue or query they may have. This is especially relevant if you are running an eCommerce store on your WordPress site. A lot of pre-sale queries may come to your site and you can improve conversion rate if you are able to answer them promptly.
This is where a live chat solution will be useful for your site. In this article, we will discuss how to integrate live chat into your WordPress website and open a faster communication channel with your customers.
How live chat can help you improve user experience?
Live chats are a common feature that you see in most websites these days. Any visitor to the site will see this option for chat that they can use to get in touch with the site owner. Why is live chat a common feature and how is it helping to improve user experience on your site?
Opens up a quick channel to deal with user’s queries
Generally, website visitors will have a set of options to interact with the site owners when they are on the site. These might be a contact form, direct email, self-service through the knowledge base, or a telephone number. All these options will take time to get a response. Most website visitors would prefer to get a response right away, and a live chat option offers exactly that.
Compared to other options, it is a faster mode of communication and a lot of new generation users would prefer it as well. Moreover, for eCommerce stores, it will be a conversion booster as presale queries can be addressed quickly.
Furthermore, you can set automated instant responses with various options using Google’s Dialogflow. Responses can be in the form of text, image, audio, video, and document.
It can also give a personal touch by fetching values from the customers and include it in your next response by prompting. You can see an example of this in the below screenshot:
Better user engagement means loyalty
A better user experience is key to building long term relationships with site users and customers. With the help of a live chat widget, you will be able to interact with your users in a more personalized way. Naturally, this will help you maintain better relationships with your customers and consequently, users will prefer to come back to your site more frequently.
Helps you generate and follow up on leads
Most live chat tools these days are equipped with tools to help you with lead generation as well. You will be able to get information about active users on your site, along with the pages they visited. And this information will provide you with vital information on users’ interests.
Combine this with an option to initiate a chat from the agent’s side, and you have a great follow up tool. Statistically, live chat offers better chances for conversion as well.
Reduce the workload of your support team
If you have a customer support team to handle all customer queries, you might be following a standard process. The average response time of a helpdesk might be longer and it can be bypassed for simple issues or presale queries. If you are consistently offering quick responses through a live chat window, customers can be conditioned to raise support tickets only for serious issues.
In fact, this will help in reducing the workload of our customer support team, and thereby improves their efficiency.
How to integrate live chat to your WordPress website?
Depending on the solution that you opt for, the setting up process will be different. Here, we will describe how you can add a live chat window using WSChat – ELEX WordPress Live Chat Plugin. Since this is a WordPress plugin, you can manage this just like you would do with any other WordPress plugin. Here are the steps.
Step 1: Purchase the plugin and download the zip file.
Step 2: Install and activate the plugin.
Step 3: Configure chat settings and enable the widget status to ‘Online’.
Now you can see the chat widget will be enabled on the frontend of your site with default settings, which customers can use to chat with you.
Step 4: Customize the appearance of the widget.
The plugin offers several advanced features to make the chat widget more interactive and functional. Let us see some of the advanced settings that you can manage with this plugin. Based on the nature of your website, you can choose specific options as applicable.
Chat header
First, you can customize the text displayed on the chat header.
On the chat widget that is displayed on the frontend of your site, customers will have different features:
- Option to mute the chat.
- Request to email the entire chat history.
- Send a file as an attachment.
- Choose the ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ option to rate the chat experience.
- Record a video and send it.
You can enable or disable each of these options according to your requirements from the settings page.
The plugin also allows you to add a pre-chat form to the widget, where you can collect details from the user before initiating the chat.
Pre-Chat Form
The plugin also allows an option to add a pre-chat form in your chat widget that will accept user information before proceeding with the chat. Additionally, you can choose to enable this form, when you are offline. You can add desired input fields like a textbox, text area, checkbox, radio button, and drop-down according to the requirements.
Widget Appearance
You will also find extensive options to customize the colors used in the widget.
Adding Agents
From the plugin settings, you can add agents who will respond to the user’s chats from your end. You can simply select from the available users in your website or create new users as required.
Email Notifications
You can also customize the email notifications that you send to users. From the settings, you can enable notifications as well as customize the sender’s name, email, and the subject line.
AI Chatbot
This plugin has an option to enable an AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered chatbot, which will carry on a conversation with users, and keep improving through machine learning. It is based on Dialogflow, a Natural Language Processing (NPL) conversational interface offered by Google. You can enable this in the plugin settings and also enter Google Project ID and Google Service Account Private Key File. The AI Chatbot features include the following:
- Can create training phrases and set responses.
- Can fetch values and include them in your responses for customizing solutions.
- Can create custom payloads for sending images, audio, video, and documents to customers.
- Integration with Facebook, Google Assistant, and Slack, etc.
- To offer quick replies to the customers even if you are offline.
- Easy integration with Firebase for storing response files.
- To generate project ID and Google service account private key file in JSON/P12 format.
This is the basic setting up process of WSChat WordPress Live chat plugin. Now your website users will be able to initiate a conversation with you and you will be able to respond to them from the backend.
Feature highlights
Here is a quick look at the important features of this live chat plugin:
- It helps you manage instant conversations with users on your website.
- Users will be able to record and send videos as well as upload files
- AI chatbot to carry on a conversation with machine learning support.
- Can offer your support to the customers even if you are not online with AI integration.
- Can customize the responses even if it is generated automatically.
- Offers a simple and cost effective on-premises solution.
- The user interface is simple, responsive and Ajax based.
- Easy to install and configure.
- Extensive customization options to change the look and feel of the widget.
- View details of the active users on your website.
- Proactively initiate conversations from the backend.
- Display pre-chat forms to get user information before initiating the chat.
- No restrictions in the number of agents that can be created.
- Superior reporting features to gather actionable information.
- Offers better data control and security over SaaS-based solutions.
How to choose the most suitable live chat solution for your website?
Now, when you decide to add a live chat window to your website, you will find quite a large range of choices. How will you identify the most suitable solution for your website? Here are some tips that will help you pick the best live chat solution for your WordPress site.
1. It should help you offer real time support
One of the major reasons why businesses opt for live chat is because of its capability to offer quick support. You can resolve issues and answer queries in real time to improve the user experience. Before choosing one, you need to understand how easy the interface is for those who are handling the tool from the backend as well.
2. Should have customization features
A chat window is a frontend feature and because of that, it has to match the overall design and appearance of your site. Also, you might want it to be in accordance with your site’s branding elements. For all these, the live chat solution you choose should have good customization options.
3. Offer assistance to lead generation
Live chat is a great way to proactively initiate conversations with your site visitors. This will enable you to gently persuade a customer to make a purchase decision or introduce them to a new feature or product on your site. Check the features list of a live chat solution to find features for marketing assistance.
4. Integration with other tools
Live chat solutions need to be complementing some of the other communication and management tools that you may be using. The one that you choose should offer smooth integration with your customer relationship management tools, helpdesk system, etc.
5. Control over user data
When you search for live chat solutions, you will see some are cloud-based, SaaS solutions and some others are on-premises tools. If you are keen on control and security over user data, on-premises solutions will be more advantageous. Moreover, on-premises solutions, like WordPress plugins will be more cost-effective as there won’t be monthly recurring charges.
6. Reporting features
You need to ensure that the live chat solution offers good reporting features. It should let you view custom reports to get an idea of customer satisfaction, agent performance, overall support efficiency, etc.
Hopefully, this article has given you a good idea on integrating live chat into your WordPress website. Before choosing one, you need to check out some of the best and popular live chat solutions and analyze how they complement your business model.
