WordPress Live Chat – How to Choose the Best One

Many WordPress site owners decide to implement live chat for better customer support. This should come as no surprise, since WordPress is an excellent website builder for creating professional web pages for any purposes you may think of.

Very often, it is used for launching business e-commerce websites or blogs. But how to pick the best live chat service when there are so many concurrent chat options? Luckily, we have the answers.

WordPress is compatible with numerous live chat applications, but choosing one can be challenging. However, we have a couple of tips on what to consider when trying to select the best live chat for your WordPress site.

Read on to learn how to select the best live chat solution for your business.

What is WordPress live chat and what are its benefits for businesses?

WordPress live chat is a tool that your customers can use to ask for help if they need it and get answers immediately from a support agent.

Using live chat for WordPress is an excellent way for businesses to communicate with their customers in real-time. It allows companies to provide customer support, answer questions, and resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

Many different WordPress live chat plugins are available, so choosing the best one for your business can be difficult. Below are a few tips to help you choose the best live chat plugin for your WordPress website.

#1 Consider your budget and what features you need

When choosing a live chat for your WordPress website, you need to consider many factors. The critical one is your needs - think about what you expect from a live chat and what your most significant focus is. For example:

• driving sales
• increasing conversion rates
• live support
• improving the user experience

Do you need unlimited chats per month, canned responses, offline messages, chat notifications, or email notifications? How about compatibility with WordPress secure hosting? Check what functionalities are offered on premium plans as well as free ones and compare them to find the best option for you.

If you are not quite sure whether or not you need some chat functionalities, check if you can start a free 14-day trial. Another factor that can influence the price is the number of agents, so check how much you need to pay per user per month.

#2 Read reviews and compare features

Carrying out research is probably something you should do in the first place after defining your business needs. Look at what chat functionalities the competition offers and their pricing plans in order to compare them. Also, make sure that performing an upgrade is an easy process. Even if you don’t need a premium plan right now, as you may still be growing it’s a good idea to keep scalability in mind.

You should verify the limits beforehand too. Conversations or agent limits in your monthly plan are good indicators to start with, but you should also assess them internally.

If you want to shorten the response time from your sales team and boost agent ratings, you should run an internal audit first to check if limited features would be okay for you or if you need features like chat tags, chat transfer, real-time analytics, customer email design, proactive chat invitations, video chat, auto-updates, or CSV exports, etc. This can also become a part of your employee onboarding.

Additionally, reviews are a great source of information about live chat software. There are many review websites and community forums on which people give feedback about live chat software and their features. Besides, you can read some reviews to get an honest opinion about a solution from a users’ perspective.

#3 Look for compatible plugins with your version of WordPress

Chat plugins are very convenient for implementing live chat on your WordPress website. Some of them require only a few clicks, so consider if a live chat app provides a WordPress plugin in order to save you some time.

If you are interested, WordPress offers a premium plugin with additional paid features from apps that you may use.

#4 Check if your live chat software provides customizable chat boxes

Check if you can change the chat branding to match your website colors thanks to advanced widget customization. A beautiful chat box may seem like a small detail, but a chat window that doesn’t like an integral part of your website can be less welcoming.

Ensure that your chat widget is not too big or small so that visitors can use it easily and it doesn’t disturb them while browsing your product or service. You can also check if a solution offers email chat transcripts if that’s something you’re after.

Some pieces of live chat software offer a white label on the chat window for full customization, which means that there is no branding of the chat platform.

TIP: to add a personal touch to each conversation, add a photo of the agent and their name using basic widget customization.

#5 Determine if visitor insights are available

Good live chat software gives detailed information about the visitor. For example, you can see what they tend to browse and buy. Knowing the context of customers when chatting with them is a great help - proactive chat operators can see whether someone is shopping with you for the first time or they are a loyal client.

Visitor tracking is crucial and can be further used for marketing automation or your email marketing efforts, but you can also use that data for understanding customer behavior and improving your support.

#6 Find out if you can get a thorough analysis of conversations

With a decent tool for customer service, you can track how many chat cases your agents handle, how much time they spend on each case, and even how long it takes them to respond to each one. All of that data is crucial when you want to base your further business decisions on numbers and statistics.

What features should you look for in a live chat plugin?

For those who want to add live chat to their WordPress sites, chat plugins are a great solution. They are quick and easy to implement in a matter of minutes.

If you want to find the best WordPress live chat plugin, there are a few features you should look for.

The ability to chat with multiple customers at the same time

Being able to chat with multiple customers simultaneously can help improve your chat agents’ workflow. As a result, they will be able to manage many chat sessions simultaneously while waiting for replies in order to save some time.

A mobile-friendly interface

Using a mobile-friendly interface chat application facilitates agents’ work. They can chat easily with customers on the go using a mobile device wherever they are, be it at the airport or on a train. It should be secure as well, so make sure that to access it you need to implement two factor authentication.

Integrations with other applications such as CRM software

To deliver the best customer experience possible, check if your live chat software integrates with other applications such as CRM software. This will allow you to manage your communication with clients more easily. If you use Hubspot or Mailchimp for managing your customers’ contacts or marketing purposes, make sure it is integrated with your live chat app.

Automatic transcriptions of chats

With an automatic chat script, you can get access to all conversations whenever you need to in written form. And if your chat plan offers unlimited history and analytics, you can further optimize your chat capabilities.

The ability to chat with customers in real-time

Chatting with customers in real-time allows you to build bonds with them and provide superior support, increasing customer satisfaction rates. Compared to other customer support methods, 82% of users are satisfied with their live chat experiences.

You can choose the best WordPress live chat plugin for your business needs by considering these factors. With the right plugin, you can provide excellent customer service, answer questions quickly, and resolve any issues efficiently.

Measuring efficiency

Ensure that your live chat enables you to get insights and statistics to measure your progress. Drawing conclusions based on numbers is crucial if you want your business to grow and provide the best online customer service possible. For advanced analytics and measuring results, check if your live chat plugin integrates with analytics tools like Google Analytics or has some built-in ones.

If you don’t yet know which live chat tool to use, we have a suggestion that may interest you.

Check out Smartsupp live chat for WordPress

Smartsupp integrates with WordPress, and installing a chat plugin on your website only takes minutes. But the service has more to offer than just live chat, it:

• drives sales
• improves conversion rates
• brings the in-store shopping experience online
• makes the buyer’s journey much faster by personalizing the shopping experience
• improves the user experience thanks to video recordings

Smartsupp live chat: advanced features and advantages

Thanks to Smartsupp’s unified multichannel, your agents can manage all messages in one place: email, live chat, and Facebook chat. This improves productivity and allows you to stay in touch with customers across multiple channels. Additionally, agents can support multiple clients at once by replaying chat messages in the blink of an eye.

Also, real-time visitor monitoring is possible with the video recordings feature. View your website visitors and potential customers’ activities, clicks, and where they get lost on your website. You can choose what to record, such as mobile devices, form inputs, or email addresses. Thanks to this chat option, you can catch any blind spots on your website and find out what needs to be improved.

Your visitors can let you know about any complex issues with an offline contact form even if outside of business hours. This is a very handy solution, especially for smaller companies with few employees and tight budgets. Offline contact forms allow you to collect leads by storing the email addresses and contact information of visitors who are interested in your products or services.

Even if you can’t afford to provide customer support via live chat, Smartsupp also offers a chatbot service. Using chatbots is a great way to automate some tasks like answering frequently asked questions or helping customers choose the best product for them.

Smartsupp’s mobile app is great for staying in touch with visitors on the go. Chat moderators can support customers on desktops and via mobile devices.

Smartsupp is ideal for teams. You can manage your workload by distributing chats among team members to increase efficiency.

Also, file transfer is possible with Smartsupp. This chat feature is really useful for both agents and visitors, who can send files to each other via chat. Sharing a photo or screenshot can facilitate the conversation and help solve problems much faster.

For measuring your team’s chat performance and customer satisfaction, keep tracking the graphs and statistics that Smartsupp displays. You can monitor the number of:

• chat conversations
• conversations that have been replied to
• resolved conversations

Managers can set goals for agents and check if they get accomplished. Also, statistics allow you to find out what specific areas employees need to improve upon so that you or a manager can assist.

With the convenient visitors’ panel that Smartsupp provides, you can see who your agents are chatting with. Also, it lets you categorize your customers into:

• all
• active
• in chat
• customers
• auto-messages
• block visitors

So you get a comprehensive overview of your online visitors and customers in your admin panel. You can also see where each of them came from and what page they are on. Furthermore, use conversation tagging to organize your work. Thanks to that, you can see if a certain topic occurs more often than others. This is also a hint for you about what to streamline in your product or service.

Smartsupp is a great chat application for big e-commerce companies, small SaaS businesses, and individuals. The pricing plans are adjusting to both demanding clients who need a solid set of features tailored to their needs and those on tight budgets. For some more detailed information about pricing and the features included on each plan, click here to see the full offer of pricing plans.

How to install Smartsupp live chat in WordPress in a few easy steps?

To install Smartsupp live chat, pick one of the three options provided below. It is super quick, and no technical skills are required.

Use a plugin to install Smartsupp live chat on WordPress

First things first, log in to Smartsupp. If you do not have an account yet, sign up. It only takes two minutes.

Secondly, log in to your WordPress site and select Plugins in the left-hand menu. Then choose Add New and type Smartsupp in the search bar. Click on the blue install icon, and Smartsupp will be automatically installed in the background on your WordPress website. You have to activate the plugin by clicking on the blue active button to finish the installation.

Then, find the Smartsupp plugin in the list of all your plugins. The list will automatically appear after clicking the install button. Next, open the settings and log in to the Smartsupp account. You will see a notification that everything is set up.

In the final step, you need to open an admin dashboard in WordPress and select Smartsupp in the left-hand menu and click on Chat with your visitors. This directs you to the Smartsupp account, and it’s ready to go.

Insert Smartsupp code manually

You can also choose to insert the code manually. However, this is a little bit harder, so it’s good to ask a developer for help if you have no coding experience.

Log in to Smartsupp, go to Settings, and select Chat box to copy the code_._ Then, to insert the code, click on Appearance ➡️ Editor ➡️ Theme Header ➡️ insert the code ➡️ Update File. The Smartsupp window will now be visible on your webpage and you can change the design to match your website.

Advanced custom changes

If you don’t want to use a plugin or insert the code manually, you can use advanced custom changes. By using a plugin or by inserting the code, a live chat window will be visible on all pages by default, whereas custom changes allow you to select only certain pages.

Click here for detailed step-by-step instructions on modifying advanced custom settings.

Conclusion

We hope that it will now be easier for you to look for the best WordPress live chat solution according to your needs and budget. In case you are still hesitant, Smartsupp is an excellent choice. It combines handy features and can be easily implemented thanks to the WordPress plugin.

Smartsupp offers three paid plans and a free one for those on limited budgets. No matter the size of your company, everyone from individuals, through mid-sized businesses, to big companies will find this solution useful.

There’s no time to waste, so click here to start a 14-day free trial of your chosen plan to provide the best possible customer support via live chat on your WordPress website.