Take a look at your site’s support system. Chances are you can be quite content with how it works. Your ticket system runs well, your forum gets vibrant discussions everyday and your contact form is beyond encouraging. But the thing is you might miss visitors who are in hurry, who have no time for submitting a ticket or searching through your document system. This is when live chat systems come in handy. That is exactly what a bypasser or potential customer look for when browsing your site: A real-time or instant conversation experience.
Your existing customers may wait several hours or a day for your solution feedback from forum or ticketing system. Yet any visitor can opt out anytime if they can not find what they are searching for after just a few minutes. Imaging how many leads you may lose just because your online salesperson or the direct line of contact is not right there to provide prompt and accurate answers. It’s time you seriously consider using a proper live chat tool.
Much to some argument may claim that running a live chat system is resources consuming, it’s totally worthwhile and much less costly than maintaining a whole call center. Your visitors can have quick access to their desired content or timely solution tailored to their specific case. Meanwhile, your salesperson would have higher chances to close the sales and increase conversion rates along the way. Not to mention the good impression you may give when visitors are well taken care of at their very first visit to your site.
In today’s blog, we are going to look at some highly recommended WordPress chat plugins that would be your great support tool.
#1 Zopim Live Chat (Free & Premium)
Zopim is one of the popular web-based chat applications that was featured in Asia’s top 10 web apps in 2010. It supports multiple web platforms as WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal and Blogger with nearly 150,000 site users across almost 150 countries. 3 affordable packages to choose from: Lite (free), Basic, Advanced with more pro features added in the two premium plans.
What makes Zopim so popular is the strong feature set it offers. You can preset and automatically send out personalized chat invitations to visitors based on their activity history as well as process simultaneous chatting with different visitors. User analytics is provided in the dashboard regarding their webpath, country, web-browser, repeat visits, time on site, chat content, etc. You can also hide the chat widget from banned visitors based on their IP address.
Zopim Live Chat is well integrated with renowned CRM and ticket systems as Zoho, Zendesk, Jira, etc so that exporting chat conversion transcripts and user data to or from Zopim is just a breeze. If you are an on-the-go operator, this tool supports receiving messages on cell phone through a mobile app (available on both Android and iOS) and collecting messages when you are offline.
It’s easy to integrate Zopim chat box into your site, simply use and embed Zopim widget into your site’s HTML source code. However, for more convenience, Zopim provides Zopim Live Chat plugin for WordPress.
This WordPress chat plugin is also widely used for its multi-language support (40 languages) and easy customization using Javascript APIs. More on Zopim Live Chat plugin:
#2 Chat from Wpmudev (Free & Premium)
Chat WordPress plugin is developed by WPMU DEV team and compatible with the latest WordPress 3.9.1. There are two versions for this plugin: free version Chat Lite which can be downloaded for free from WordPress plugins directory and Chat Pro premium version which can be purchased and downloaded from Wpmudev. Unlike Zopim Live Chat, this plugin offers self hosted live chat for more control over your communicating solution.
There are 4 chat types supported:
- Corner chat (the chat bar placed at the bottom of your site)
- In page/in post chat (insert chat room into any page or post using a WYSIWYG chat button)
- Chat widget (the chat boxes placed in any sidebar on your site)
- BuddyPress Group Chat and WPMU Dev Friend (available for Chat Pro version only)
Basically, Chat Lite is fully functional and provide you a good live chat tool for you site. However, if you wish to have more features and control over the plugin then Chat Pro is your choice. With Chat Pro, you will have more cool features like: BuddyPress Group Chat integration, social networking accounts login, Private chat and so on.
Both versions are easy to work on and configure, you also can customize its style and colors to match your site.
More on Chat plugin:
Visit Chat Lite version Visit Chat Pro version
#3 Quick chat (Free)
Quick chat is a free live chat WordPress plugin created by Marko Martinović at TechyTalk with over 200,000 downloads on WordPress plugin directory. This self hosted chat tool allows embedding chat box in a post using shortcode as well as placing it on sidebar using sidebar widget. It supports multiple concurrent one-on-one chats and group chats with a nice set of smileys to jazz up your conversations. There are three things that I find interesting in this plugin:
Caching plugin support
Quick chat supports caching WordPress plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache so that it can automatically clears cache when necessary. Should you use other caching plugins, you need to clear cache manually when modifying shortcode, changing chat options and so on.
Avoid CSS customization lost after update
Quick chat deems to load its own CSS file before loading the quick-chat.css file inside your current theme directory so that none of your CSS customizations are lost after upgrading the plugin.
Admin dashboard widget included
Site Admin can chat with each other from the site backend using the admin dashboard widget.
More on Quick chat plugin:
#4 AVChat (Free & Premium)
AVChat video chat plugin is AVChat’s flagship product serving as a video chatting solution for any WordPress site. It supports both private and public chat room and features text chat, video chat, emoticons, file uploads, YouTube sharing and notifications. AVChat transfers real-time video, audio and text between chat participants using your media server or other media server hosting like Red5, AMS Pro and Wowza. The standard version can be downloaded for free from WordPress plugins directory.
You are free to choose the chat display mode to be pop up or embedded into your page. Visitors can log in using their Facebook or Twitter accountsand you can limit chat access or some of the chat features to specific member levels in order to encourage new sign up or upgrade.
AVChat also features Multisite support for any super admin to easily activate the plugin for all or some of the websites in their multisite network. Auto mobile/tablet detection is another of AVChat’s unique feature where mobile users are detected to be served with the mobile version.
More on AVChat Video Chat plugin:
Visit Free version Visit Pro version
#5 ClickDesk Live Support – Live Chat – Help Desk Plugin (Free & Premium)
ClickDesk is an all-in-one plugin that would satisfy your picky demand for an all-sided support system. Be it live chat, voice chat, video chat, social toolbar or help desk system, ClickDesk got you all covered.
With ClickDesk combo features, you can create a chat box at the bottom of your site so that visitors can send instant text messages and voice call or video call the operator directly from Skype, Gtalk or phone number. Help desk integration will help you access email, offline chat and answers to your customers. Besides, Social toolbar integration allows your customers to follow you on Twitter and Facebook as well as receive latest information or tweets right on the live chat.
Details on ClickDesk’s various packages can be found at its pricing page.
More on ClickDesk plugin:
I hope the article has given you an overview on some of the popular live chat plugins for WordPress and their significant features. Have you had any plan on using any of these plugins or other ones? Which one do you like most? We would love to hear your thoughts on this.
