Remember the last time you called a customer support line. Let me guess, one of the following occurred:

• The customer support agent sounded like they were reading from a script.
• You were placed on hold for a while and got told that you call is important.
• The customer support agent was hard to understand due to background noise, a bad connection or a language barrier.
• Or you were on the phone for a long time.

Phone support personalises the customer assistance experience, but it’s hard to implement and the cost to get great people on a support team.

Many big companies just simply outsource, which makes a terrible experience for nearly all customers. Small businesses are normally better with phone support, but again, it is difficult for companies to maintain such a high level of success.

One way to satisfy a large part of your customers base, while also decreasing the number of calls you receive is looking at finding a live chat plugin to install into your WordPress site to provide quick online chats for your customers.

Benefits of Having a Live Chat Plugin

• Options – Customers want options. If they pay for a product or service, they assume that part of that payment goes to your customer service department. So if you only provide a forum or email support, that’s not giving your customer many choices. Some people like to talk on the phone, while others rather bring up a live chat module. Some people love email support or researching throughout forums and blog posts. Giving the customer every type of preference can make everyone happy.
• Instant service – A big problem you’ll notice with online commerce is that consumers can’t just talk to a salesperson, your users are usually left to fend for themselves or hunt through the internet for answers to their questions. Having a live chatbox serves as your instant form of communication for the customer. It’s for those quick questions directly before a sale. It is for following up with customers right after a sale. You will have trouble converting and keeping customers if you expect people to just wait around for an email or a phone call.
• Quality branding – The next time someone thinks about buying any type of product, they’ll wonder where the best place to purchase from. They may have other companies in mind, but yours comes to the lead as the customer had a great experience with a live chat rep.
• Log feedback and customer interactions – Some of these live chat plugins allow you to log what customers have done on your site and what was been said to the customer rep. This helps with target marketing in the future. Moreover, customer interactions can usually be logged in customer relationship management tools.
• Professionalism – Having a live chat module on your site makes it look like you fine-tune your business. You have studied what customers want and realise that your industry is filled with people interested in live chat.

1. Live Chat by Formilla

Live Chat by Formilla has good looking chat boxes, which makes it ideal for companies such as law or engineering firms. This plugin is one of the best chat systems if you are looking for great support. It is more of a premium plugin than anything, but it does provide a free plan for one customer support agent. That also only includes one concurrent chat, making the free plan somewhat ineffective for the average business.

The premium plans charge on a recurring basis, its pricing started at $15.99 per month and that’s only for one agent. Every agent after that gets a discount. Although the pricing isn’t perfect, Formilla backs it up with real-time visitor monitoring, mobile apps for you to chat with customers on the go, custom languages, custom appearance, support for WordPress multi-site and more.

2. Tidio Live Chat

Tidio Live Chat is another popular live chat plugin for WordPress, and it provides dedicated apps for nearly every device such as iOS, Android, Windows, OS X and Chrome. Tidio has many free features that you can’t find in other live chat tools. Example, Tidio allows you to contact your customers first, while other plugins often make you pay for that. So, with Tidio, you are not stuck waiting for the customers to send you messages.

Tidio also has a paid version starting at $18 per month but the free plugin version is free for a lifetime, and it supports up to three users with live chat, email integration, Messenger integration, unlimited tracking and more that is a good deal, particularly good for small businesses.

3. YITH Live Chat

This plugin is lesser-known than some of the other WordPress live chat plugins, but the YITH Live Chat certainly has its place in the market as it’s super basic.

The plugin documentation is rather extensive, yet the majority of people will be able to figure it out themselves. YITH Live Chat is a free, open-source option, but there’s a premium version as well.

Price: Free

4. Userlike

Userlike is one of the newer plugins on the block, but they are doing some great stuff when it comes to live-chat for your site. With this plugin, you can message your customers in real-time via your website, Facebook Messenger or Telegram.

Userlike has a free version that is perfect for those just wanting to try it out, this free plan includes 1 operator, 1 chat widget, and unlimited chats. If you need additional integrations and or users, the premium plans start at $29.00 per month.

5. LiveChat

LiveChat is a well-established chat software provider, they offer a premium chat solution that can be fully customised to fit your website in the smallest detail. Also, it easily integrates well over 100 different products which make more flexible.

The LiveChat application has a set of internal tools for chat agents, including apps for iOS and Android that make their work a lot easier. This is important if you don’t have a support team dedicated to your business. Furthermore, if you are looking for advanced analytics for your support department, you will appreciate the reporting capabilities offered in LiveChat.

6. Intercom

Intercom Live Chat takes live chat a step further by allowing you to create and publish help articles that you can share in your live chats. Targeted messages are also a part of the program, along with the standard lead generation tools in the live chatbox.

With this plugin pricing, you can get live chat by itself starting around $39.00 per month. All of the Intercom products are packaged into a more expensive deal, so only go with that if you’d like things for customer engagement, customer support and more. We have used Intercom since day one here at Kinsta and it has worked very well for us.