Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume. – American Management Association It’s 2015 and no matter what products you peddle or where you do it, you probably have a website to reach out to your customers and get in touch with them.
On WordPress, integrating live chat with your site is as easy as installing a plugin. From a mass of hundreds of plugins for this exact purpose, we bring you the 10 choicest live chat plugins for WordPress.
1. WP Live Chat Support
Plans: Free (1 site), Pro (1 site – $39), Pro (3sites – $79), Developer (Unlimited sites – $149) WP Live Chat support calls itself ‘the most cost effective plugin’. You can check that for yourself after taking a look at the features’ list. You get a support agent, desktop notifications, chat initiation, translations, chat box location (page type/ on page) choices, and IP blocking for free. Add to those features like unlimited support agents inclusion, animations, missed chat retrieval, offline messages, encryption, automated responses (of your choice), monitoring, simultaneous handling, customization, and more for all paid Plans.
You can host it yourself or get it hosted on the wp-livechat server.
Plans: Lite – free, Full – $19/m You’ll love the looks (and features) of this one. You can add chat buttons to any post/page through the editor. The Lite version allows you to customize the chat box appearance, so you can make it work with your site’s theme. Pro version gives you all the features (some of which really are amazing) like graphics (avatar, gravatar, emoticons), Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ Logins, BuddyPress support and integration, censors, one-to-one and group chats, and just so much customization.
To be fair, there have been issues with sites on shared-servers as the host deactivated the plugin (spike loads from repeated Ajax calls). I suggest you check with their support staff (and your hosting-provider) before you put your money on it.
Plans: Lite – free, Full – $19/m Plans: Free, Starter – $15/m (3 users), Business – $45/m (10 users), Growth – $99/m (25 users) This plugin looks elegant and works well. It lets you completely customize the chat box (and it will host it for you too, if you want), has the Schedule (availability) feature, converts missed chats’ boxes to lead forms (sneaky!), has multiple and one-on-one chat options, SSL security, transcripts, and more. Pure Chat itself has a very active, very nice support team, so you don’t have to worry about wasting a pretty penny on … ungrateful service providers. You’ll have to sign up to download the plugin. It’s free, so it’s okay, and for no-payment you get 15chats/month. Also note that the charges for plans are mentioned for annual payment. If you pay monthly, you’ll have to add $5/m to all plan costs.
Other than that, it’s lovely.
Plans: Basic – free, Pro – $10/operator monthly Tidio is sweet and simple. It’s also made for mobile. If you think all those previous chat plugins had far too many features, then you need to try Tidio. You’ll also like it for specialized apps for live chat support on Android, iOS, Windows, OS X, and Chrome(available only with Pro version). It’s sophisticated in appearance, integrates quickly and easily with existing sites, has Multilanguage support, and automated responses.
It’s lightweight and nifty.
Plans: Free Trial – 30days, Basic – €9/m, Premium – €29/m, Enterprise – €44/m, Annual payment per agent. Oh, now we’re talking! Casengo looks and feels great and has all the features you could ever want (and more) from a chat plugin. It gives you mailboxes, FAQs (with custom layout for Enterprise), Helpdesk ticketing system, mobile support (oh yeah, dedicated apps for those), and more. Did we mention the multi-channel management? This feature packs a punch with the collective power of email, live chat, and social media behind it. Enterprise users also get multi-brand support and a custom FAQ layout, whereas Basic ones start with 100 conversations, a mailbox, and 10 FAQs.
You really don’t need anything else.
Plans: Lite – free, Basic – $14/m, Advanced – $25/m, Premium – $55/m. Per agent, with saving offers on annual payments. If a cool three hundred thousand websites using this service won’t convince you, then nothing will. This plugin is mobile-optimized, cross-browser compatible, cross-platform compatible, integrates seamlessly with UserVoice, Salesforce, Highrise, and others, has a Blackberry app, lets you initiate chats (has triggers), and more. It also integrates with Zendesk to give multi-channel support (includes mail, chat, and social media). It has truly stunning customizations which somehow won’t look out-of place on your website.
The service can be used on other e-commerce (and just regular) platforms. It’s lovely.
Plans: Free, Plus – $5/m, Corp – $10/m. Per agent. Fresco or FlexyTalk is frisky. You’ll love it. This plugin is absolutely loaded: all three plans have persistent chatbox, offline mode, and mobile/desktop apps. That’s just for starters. Paid plans have working hours, departments, trigger rules, queues, translator/localizer, GEO IP localization, user blocking, social media integration (with special app for Facebook), a really awesome (customizable) picture that appears on top of your chat box, and more.
There’s nothing this plugin won’t do.
Plans: Free Trial – 14 days, Wow – $4.9/m, Pro – $9.9/m, Jumbo – $19.9/m, Ultra – $49.9/m. 19% and 33% discount for 6 months and annual payment. Chat by Flyzoo is “Eye catching, powerful, and affordable”. We’re inclined to agree. This plugin has all the makings of a good live chat support service. All plans have responsive widgets, and you get other features like email support, single sign on, customization, secure connection, group chats and more. You get up to 600 concurrent users and 50 moderators, along with file sharing, real-time monitoring, white label, and multi-domain (up to 5) license for advanced plans. And if you’re somehow still looking for more, you can get Enterprise plan (Small, Medium, Big) for more moderators and up to unlimited group chats.
It’s easy and efficient. We like how it looks and works like a social media messenger. You should check the number of visits for each plan before putting your money on it.
Plans: Standard – Free, Premium Solo – $11.99/m, Premium – $24.99/m (3 agents). More agents for $9.99/m. Discounts on annual payments. This one is no-nonsense in look and feel. For premium plans, you get unlimited number of extremely customizable chat widgets and parallel live chats, apps for iOS/Android for customer support on the go, visitor monitoring, language support, white label, email forms, help desk (that can get user info like OS, browser, screen res, version history, etc), chat queues and transcripts, email export and templates, reports, and more.
It’s perfect if you’re selling digital services; or anything else, really. It’s not fussy.
Plans: Free, Starter – $15/m, Basic – $29/m, Corporate – $59/m, Enterprise – $99/m This is one of the most exhaustive live support plugins out there. While the interface looks a bit… old-school, the plugin itself (both free and premium Plans) are loaded with features. You’ll need to sign up (for free, which is awesome), and install the plugin. Checkout the free version, which has most of the premium features (which is pretty damn generous, many plugins hound their best features for premium Plans only) like proactive chat, canned responses, unlimited departments/ domains/ chats, visitor monitoring, SSL certificate, and more. Seriously, the only things you don’t get for free are white label and email reports.
Quite a robust solution for live chat, this plugin.
Author Bio:
Lucy Barret is a WordPress Developer and a Blogger. She is an expert of converting HTML to WordPress theme and WordPress customization at HireWPGeeks Ltd. She is fond of writing WordPress related tutorials and always on the look-out for sharing her knowledge with the large community of WordPress.