Gone are the days when customers used to contact you via the Contact US form and wait for you to get back to them.

In case you are running an online store or you provide a service, it’s really important that you provide quality customer support as well.

To deal with all the customer queries you need to have a system that will help you solve customer questions instantly and efficiently.

This is where a live support system can become really handy.

Why do you need to use Live Chat support for your WordPress website?

In today’s world, customer support is really important and to communicate with your clients smoothly and efficiently you need to employ an online chat system that can work in real time to help your customers have their problems solved right away.

The benefits of using an online chat system are really huge:

• With the use of live chat, you can provide answers to the support requests from the user pretty quickly.
• In case you are offering a service, any client of yours might have some queries and it’s really important to solve with professional expertise. Live chat gives you just that extra touch of professionalism.
• Putting up a support ticket or sending an email might seem like a lot of work to some people. If you can give them an opportunity to chat online, it will be easy for them to discuss their issues.
• Conversing over an email or support ticket is really difficult and your customers need to wait for long. A live chat can surely enhance the quality and speed of conversation significantly.
• You can keep a log of your conversation to use the chat history at a later part of the conversation or for promotional purposes.

How you can Add Live Chat to WordPress

If you search online for live chat plugins for WordPress, you are sure to find multiple plugins that you can use.

Using any one of them will certainly do the trick for you, but before that you will need to know how you can configure them and how you can choose the one that will help you work fast and efficiently.

Step 1: Configuring your WordPress Plugin

If you have been using WordPress for long, finding and installing a live chat plugin should not be an issue for you.

Even if you are a newbie, it does not take a lot of time or technical knowledge to do so.

Once you logon to your dashboard, find Add New tab under Plugins option. Now you can search for the plugin you are looking for.

Once found, click Install and it should be automatically installed on your website.

Before doing so, remember that once installed and activated chat will be available to your users so, you need to install it but keep it deactivated until you are done with the configuration process.

To do you will need to go to Settings tab of the plugin and disable the Chat option. Once you are done with the configuration, you can enable it right away.

Now you can concentrate on setting up the plugin. Go to the settings and start configuring the required field before a user can chat.

Asking a customer’s name, email id is pretty much normal and might come handy at a later stage for following up as well.

You can also check with the default settings as well. In case you think no changes are required for now, you can leave them as it is.

Also, every Live Chat has a default message that every user gets to see when they first click on the chat box.

Normally, most of the Live Chat systems these days come with an option to configure the chat system for mobile users as well.

In case you have chosen a system that supports mobile platform as well, you will have to configure your chat system for the mobile traffic as well.

Some of the plugins also allow you to send chat transcripts to the user email as well which can be really useful at a later stage of your conversation or may be to solve future problems.

In case you think the conversation you are going to have with your client can be sensitive, sending a transcript might be risky.

Once done, you can now think about the color preferences and all, so that it can match your website theme.

Choosing a proper color combination is really necessary, so as to fit it with your website completely.

Once done with the tweaking, do save your changes and if you think you are ready for a live chat session, you can certainly enable the plugin from the settings for the users to have the facility.

Step 2: Testing your Live Chat

Once you enable the Live Chat System, your customers will be able to see it and use it to contact you.

In case you are online on you dashboard, you will receive a notification and you can send answer to their question by clicking the Live Chat Tab.

Normally, you will see a list of chats those are active. So, you will need to accept a particular chat to carry on with the conversation.

Once the chat is complete you can end the particular conversation and your user will not have the active chat tab any more.

You will also be able to view all the chat history under the History tab that will allow you to see your past conversations.

With that you can contact your customers for a better offer, or for further assistance even for contacting them for a promotional coupon as well.

So, now that you know how to configure a Live Chat plugin on WordPress, it’s time for you to get on you dashboard, find a suitable Live Chat plugin that will suit your requirement and you should be able to get going.

Make sure to configure the plugin before you can put it LIVE and also make sure to design your plugin so that it suits your website design or theme as well.