LiveChat Review (2023): A Tool to Revolutionize Customer Support

Want to offer live chat to visitors on your WordPress site? If so, what better service to use than a company that is literally named LiveChat? In this Livechat review, we’ll be taking a look at LiveChat from the perspective of a WordPress site owner. While LiveChat is technically a standalone SaaS, they have their own WordPress plugin that makes it super simple to set your WordPress site up with LiveChat.

To that end, we’ll be going over two things:

• The actual LiveChat service
• How easy it is to get LiveChat up and running on WordPress

If you want to know more about an in-depth review of this plugin, please keep on reading. Here is how you can easily add Live Chat to your WordPress site. 

LiveChat Overview

Softwares for communication such as live chat is one of the most leading mediums, per se. Methods such as phone, email, and social media are great. But having a live chat means getting the information needed ASAP. This indeed is a life-saver for users and site visitors as well. LiveChat is perfect when building a business on your WordPress site. If you want to get one for your site, we recommend Live Chat. As the name says it all, it is a plugin that is designed for your marketing and live support needs. LiveChat has an online chat, help desk, and is capable of web analytics. Site visitors can now easily get in touch with support agents in an instant. 

If you want to try the plugin before purchasing, LiveChat has a free 14-day trial featuring the Team 

Plan. You can see for yourself whether it is fitting to your needs. If you wish to get started now, here are the following price plans they offer:

• Starter – $16/month per agent. Billed annually
• Team – $33/month per agent. Billed annually
• Business – $50/month per agent. Billed annually
• Enterprise – it is an individual contract with annual billing. For more information, you can request a call. 

LiveChat Key Features

As LiveChat is a standalone SaaS rather than a WordPress plugin, it boasts an impressive feature list. Here are the highlights:

• Custom chat window designs
• Automatic personalized greetings
• Ticket form in case your live chat is unavailable when someone sends a message
• Canned responses to save time
• Chat transfer if you’re using multiple agents
• Web, mobile and desktop apps so you can chat with visitors no matter where you are
• Detailed statistics and a real-time dashboard overview
• Plenty of helpful features for teams
• Post-chat ratings and surveys to see how effective your support is

And if you want, you can even go further and track your visitors to gather additional customer data.

Pros

• Best for eCommerce websites
• Supports 48 different languages
• Design was well-thought

Cons

• Unfortunately, the mobile version is very limited
• It can be quite expensive

LiveChat Installation & Setup

Our first port of call is to install the LiveChat plugin and see what happens. After activating it, you can get an option to create a new LiveChat account directly from my WordPress dashboard. It’s nice to have it since it will save us a couple of clicks.

Next is to Sign in to the Web Application

By clicking that, it takes us to LiveChat’s website. Going to the website means that is where you can actually configure your live chatbox.

At this point, your live chat is actually already up and running on the front-end of your site:

That literally couldn’t be simpler. LiveChat even pulled in my gravatar to add an image. The above screenshot is exactly how the test site looks after just creating an account.  As far as ease of use goes, the integration really couldn’t have been any simpler.

Configuring The LiveChat Box

As mentioned, you’ll configure all of your chat box’s settings at LiveChat’s website, not inside your WordPress dashboard. To access those settings, you can use the same credentials you used to create your LiveChat account when you signed up inside your WordPress dashboard. Then, you head to the settings tab and you can choose your:

• Theme
• Language
• Pre-chat survey (if any)
• Post-chat survey (if any)
• Queue message
• Ticket form

For Theme, you can change the layout and colors, as well as add custom CSS if you’d like:

In Language, you can choose your overall language as well as customize the various prompts:

In the Pre-chat survey, you can set up an optional pre-chat questionnaire that visitors will have to fill out before chatting with you:

The post-chat survey, as you might expect, lets you do the same thing for after your chat session:

The Queued visitors tab lets you customize the message that appears when all of your agents are busy:

And finally, the Ticket form tab lets you decide whether or not to allow visitors to leave a message if they use your live chat window during off-hours. If you enable this option, you can also customize the form that visitors will fill out in that situation:

All in all, it’s pretty dang simple. And the nice thing is that any changes you make here will get automatically pushed to your WordPress site. You don’t need to redo the integration or anything.

Agent Tools for More Productivity

Another nice thing you can configure is your Agent Tools. These make you more productive by allowing you to add:

• Canned responses
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Tags

For example, you could create a canned response and assign that canned response to a shortcut so that you can use it in the live chat by just pressing using #shortcut:

Responding to Live Chat Messages

Configuring your live chat window is pretty dang simple. But how can you actually respond to messages once they start rolling in?

You have three options:

• The LiveChat website
• A desktop app
• A mobile app

Here’s how simple it is to use the website interface. Just head to the Chats tab. Then, whenever a new chat comes in, it will immediately pop up on the website. No need to refresh or anything. LiveChat even plays a voice message to alert you of the new chat (in case you’re in a different tab):

You can even see more information about the person who you’re chatting with like:

• Where they’re located
• Which page they’re on
• How long they’ve been on both that page and your website as a whole

And if you get multiple chat messages, you can see an overview of all your different chats:

If you need more functionality, you can click on the More tab to be able to:

• End the chat
• Transfer the chat
• Create a ticket from the chat
• Upload files
• Ban the visitor (in case of abuse)

Viewing Chat Analytics

Last thing I’ll show you for now! LiveChat also includes this nifty Reports tab that lets you view how you’ve done recently. You can quickly see:

• Number of queued visitors
• Achieved goals
• Satisfaction (from post-chat surveys)
• Lots of other pertinent data

You can even view these data points in real-time on a big dashboard:

If you’re running a team, this will be super useful to see how you’re doing. Even if you’re just solo, you can still get valuable data from the regular Reports tab.

Verdict

LiveChat integrates seamlessly with WordPress. Seriously – there’s nothing to configure. Just install the plugin, create an account, and go. Configuring things in the LiveChat is intuitive and well-designed. They include plenty of helpful onboarding tips to get started.

As for the actual live chat system, we liked the canned responses and shortcuts. The actual interface for dealing with chats is pleasant. We didn’t try the desktop or mobile apps. But if they’re similar to the cloud interface, we imagine they’re well-designed as well.

We’ve only personally used a couple of live chat services (Zopim and Olark being the others). But of those that we’ve tried, LiveChat is the nicest (though it is also a tiny bit more expensive than those alternatives).

So if you’re in the market for a live chat tool that integrates easily with WordPress, give LiveChat a look. It’s easy to set up and a 30-day free trial means you won’t have any time or money for giving it a go.

Try LiveChat Today