Hey, y'all, my name's Kori Ashton.
Happy WordPress Wednesday, I hope you're having a great one.
Today I wanna walk you through three different options
to include a live chat feature inside of
your WordPress website.
It's gonna be easy, let's go take a look.
(music)
The question actually came in on my YouTube channel,
on a video from Pradeesh Ravi.
Sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly,
but I so appreciate you just taking a minute
to give kind feedback or a question, it's really cool.
And he's asking me here, "Your videos have been very useful
in maintaining my website.
Do you have any suggestion as to which plugin to use
in order to enable live chat on my website?
This way I could reach out to the customer
the moment they visit them."
So I love this question.
I know a lot of you probably want to engage your customers
as they're visiting your website, in real-time conversation.
How do you do that efficiently, how do you do that
budget-consciously, what do you use?
What tools do you use?
I'm happy to report that there are three that I have vetted,
I know the reviews on, and I can tell you right now,
we've got some options in the budget of free.
The first one I am most familiar with is Zendesk Chat.
It used to be called Zopim.
That's when I was using it for most of my clients.
This is a really great, great resource for you,
especially if you only need one operator
communicating with your customers.
It has really good analytics, super ridiculously
easy to install, you can customize it
to match the colors on your website,
really really easy, and again, it's in that budget
of free option.
So what you would do is come over here to the actual plugin,
or you'd go to your dashboard and go to plugins
and click add new.
And you're able to just come install the plugin
that they created that Zendesk has, for WordPress.
And it plugs right into your website.
Again, there's a free option, so we love that,
that's always in the budget.
And it's free for the life of the use of the tool,
as long as you meet the requirements of,
I think it's one user, so you wanna have
just one operator speaking back and forth.
And then you only get to keep a 14-day chat history.
So you have to just kind of be aware
of how you're using this tool.
Of course they have upgrade options.
If you have a budget in the range of 20 dollars,
you're really gonna be able to have a lot more options
open up for you.
The second one we can look at has great reviews as well.
It's called LiveChat, and they also have a plugin
that you can use, and just drop
right into your WordPress website.
So you see here that it has 20 plus active installs,
it's been updated recently, and you wanna just be sure
that it's been tested with your most recent version
of WordPress.
So currently it's been tested up with the famous 5.0.
They do have an option for you to do a free trial,
but it is a fully paid system moving forward.
Here's what I want you to do, though.
Look at the different features and try to understand
what it is that you might be needing.
And if you say, "Well I've never had a live chat
"feature before, I don't know what I need,"
then start with a budget of free, and see if that
meets your needs.
I would suggest again, trying out Zendesk Chat,
just to see if that meets your needs.
If you want more robust data, if you want the ability
to have more operators on your team,
if you wanna be able to keep the chat history longer,
whatever that looks like.
You'll start to know that over time.
And what you won't do is waste your budget.
So be sure to look at both of these,
LiveChat and Zendesk Chat, and the third one
that I've looked at is WP Live Chat Support.
Now this one has over 60,000 installs,
has great reviews, and it has been tested again
with Gutenberg 5.0, so that's exciting
to see that they're already that up to date
and current with their code.
Very exciting stuff, and really, really good
for you to use.
Also, it has unlimited live chat agents.
So very, very cool options here.
These are the three I'll suggest to you,
and of course, I will always put all the links
in the description box below,
so that you can easily access these three.
You just go into your WordPress dashboard,
go to plugins, and click add new.
That's where you're gonna find all of these living,
because they already have plugins
specifically for WordPress.
Remember you need to be on the self-hosted
version of WordPress in order to do this.
Something you absolutely wanna keep in mind
is that you can improve your sales,
you can increase your sales, they say up to
about 30 percent more, if you're able to watch
when a visitor lands on your website,
and engage with them as soon as possible,
answering their questions quickly,
confirming that you are the professional service
or product that they're looking for.
It's very exciting to see how you can utilize live chat.
The other great thing about it is,
a lot of times, if you're away from your desk,
and you need to access that conversation,
you can just get a notification on your phone,
and you'll be able to sit right there
and chat with the customer while you're out and about.
This is a great, great resource for small
to medium sized businesses that don't have a large team
to monitor this, and just to sit at your computer
all day long.
Hope this helps, y'all, and thanks again
for sending in the question.
It's very kind of you to give great feedback,
it's very much an encouragement to me.
I will see y'all next WordPress Wednesday.
Bye everyone.