Businesses often need to add live helpdesk system on their official blogs to answer queries of their existing as well as potential customers. This not only helps them directly interact with the audience but is also a powerful medium to get immediate feedback about their products and services. Adding live chat support system to a WordPress blog is not that hard, provided you have the right plugin in hand. Almost each of these plugins requires very little customization or configuration and they work out-of-the-box. Some of these plugins deploy chat support in the form of a toolbar while others give you a full-fledged chat window in the sidebar. Depending on your requirement, you can tweak them to completely gel with your blog. All the plugins mentioned here have been thoroughly tested both on a production as well as on a test blog.
Live Chat - This easy-to-use live chat plugin instantly add a chat window to your WordPress blog. Once activated, both registered and unregistered visitors can use it to do live chatting with you. It uses all the modern features to present a stunning chat option to your visitors and is also lightweight. This plugin requires no complex configuration and is one of the simplest live chat plugin available for WordPress bloggers. After activation, within few minutes your site is ready to cater site visitors who want to live chat with your support department.
Conversion Support Live Chat - This flexible live chat plugin has tons of useful features to host a robust live helpdesk system on your blog. This plugin lets you completely add your branding to the chat system so that it integrates seamlessly with your existing layout. It also provides archiving of chat transcripts to maintain the customer interaction history. You can also use saved drafts to quickly answer common queries. Instant notifications let you keep up with new chat threads so that you can respond to them in a timely manner to get high conversions.
FlexyTalk Live Chat - This unique plugin not only adds live chat support to your WordPress blog but that too in different ways. Apart from regular direct chat, you can also chat with your Facebook page fans, Google Talk contacts and with your mobile phone contacts right on your blog. This gives you enough flexibility to remain in touch with your customers and prospects in different ways. This plugin supports lifetime unlimited chat accounts that give you enough freedom to engage with multiple visitors at a given time. Its setup and configuration are also very easy.
Zopim Live Chat - This is one of the best toolbar-based chat plugins that docks its chat widget within the bar at the bottom of your blog. This plugin also includes a powerful visitor tracking system that lets you see what a particular visitor is doing on your site so that you can engage with him with the most relevant information. Apart from regular live chat, you can also send offline messages to the visitors. This also includes support for direct messaging from popular IM clients. This is one of the few chat plugins that supports over 3 dozen languages and is ideal for multilingual blogs.
HTML5 Online CHAT Widget - If you want to integrate Facebook and Twitter chat on your blog, then this plugin is made just for you. It has an extensive collection of themes that can be used for customizing the visual appearance of your chat support system. Through this plugin, visitors can also do private chat on your blog. Advanced users can also design their own themes to match it with their brand and default layout. It also has a strong spam filtering system so that you can control trolls in an easy way. You can also save chat history and can also assign moderator role to multiple team members.
Simple Ajax Chat - This is a zero-configuration, Ajax-powered chat plugin that can be easily embedded anywhere on your blog through a handy shortcode or through a template tag. Power users can also use custom CSS with this plugin to get a custom chat box at the desired position. You can also customize the fade-in duration of new messages as well as the associated colors with each new message. It also has a strong blocking mechanism based on keywords to keep your chat system free of junk and spammers. It also has built-in support for all standard chat smileys.
Hipmob - This live chat plugin works seamlessly both on desktop as well as on mobile browsers without any hiccups. It helps you chat with your visitors in real-time raising the bar of your engagement level. You can set custom greeting messages for all the new visitors who initiate the chat. Similarly, you can create a collection of canned messages to save your time during a conversation. It also offers integration of popular web analytics system like Google analytics so that you can track the visitors who're engaging with you through the live chat system.
Chat - This plugin gives you much more than a simple live chat system. You get a complete social network within your WordPress-powered website that also includes chat rooms and live chat facility as one of the features. It works perfectly with mobiles and tablets too. Administrators can also utilize its flexible customization abilities to give a unique design to chat rooms and panels. It also has a handy notification bar to alert you about new chat threads so that you can respond to them instantly. It has tons of other features that make it a fairly powerful plugin.
AVChat Video Chat - If you're planning to add a video chat support option to your blog, you can use this intuitive plugin that is quite flexible and helps you increase the engagement rate significantly. Since it uses HTML5 for video rendering, your visitors accessing the blog on tablets and smartphones can also initiate the video chat without any problem. It is completely compatible with BuddyPress and also provides Facebook integration for maximum engagement. The URL structure of each video chat window can also be customized to match with your existing SEO friendly permalink structure.
Chat Room - If you're running a premium membership site and want to add chat room support for the registered members, then this plugin is an ideal solution for you. All the chat rooms can be easily created by the administrator directly from within the dashboard through a user-friendly interface. Each registered member gets a unique URL for his chat room through which he can interact with other users. You must use this plugin on web servers having suPHP extension since it directly accesses the PHP file system. If the aforesaid extension is not available on your web server, you may ask the customer support to install it for you.
