The concept of automatic responses, chatbots and lead generation using pre-programmed text messages has taken the world of advertisement and customer support by the storm. So today we bring you an easy to understand guide on using WordPress Chatbot for your automated WordPress support chat.
A chatbot is an automated response and message system is built to respond to specific statements, questionnaires as well as provide timed messages to any viewer on your website. These bots can be programmed for advertisement purposes, lead generation, support response, automated Q&A and more.
These chatbots work on the basis of a large set of pre-determined rules and use AI to adapt to your requirements. You can easily manipulate the behavior of your chatbots, their replies, and messages as well as their functioning structure in a matter of minutes. This makes them a great support system for a lot of websites, especially ones with a large focus on lead conversion and customer responses.
Why use WordPress Chatbot
There is a large number of uses for WordPress chatbots but many of them configured to work as a WordPress support chat where viewers can simply ask any question and be answered with appropriate responses. This drops the burden of the support group workers on any website as all the simple issues and queries can be easily solved by the bot itself.
Using a WordPress chatbot also lets you enable a 24/7 live support system without actually using a human resource for the purpose. While it is not as effective as a personal support system; simple solutions and fixes, bugfix announcements and many other impromptu messages can be configured to all your website viewers efficiently.
Furthermore, you can use a WordPress chatbot to enable a support chat to also collect data from your readers. From feedback and responses, product ads, email subscriptions and more can easily be configured without any difficulty.
Installing a WordPress Support Chat
Now in order to enable a chatbot on your WordPress website, we can simply use a WordPress plugin. There are many WordPress chatbots available on the market, many of which are forks of already existing popular Chatbot systems. Some of them are highly advanced AIs with a wide range of behavioral configuration settings while some of them let you create your chatbot in a few minutes with ease.
Here’s a list of dedicated WordPress support chat plugins and chatbots we personally recommend:
Collect chat
Collect chat is a comprehensive system that has been providing chatbot services to various websites around the world for quite some time. This extremely simple plugin requires zero coding understanding and works by simply letting you insert what text, responses, buttons, links, and conversation commands a bot provides to the respondent.
Easily enable a fully automated, 24/7 support chat with zero hassle whatsoever. The plugin has a wide range of options with its drag and drop tool to enable them. The best part? it’s all for free and you don’t have to worry at all about
Key features:
- Highly impressive user-oriented UI and UX.
- Provides a wide range of services to increase your website’s lead generation and conversion.
- Easily records chat data and provides them to the admin for further improvement
- Easy to configure and install
- Drag and Drop builder for chatbot responses and behavior management.
- My chatbot
My Chatbot
This highly responsive chatbot is powered by Dialogflow, an engaging text and voiced based support system built on Google’s machine learning algorithms as well as its infrastructure. Thus in ways, it tries to emulate Google assistant, perhaps one of the most powerful chatbot/mobile assistant in the world. The plugin allows you to enable rich message content on its messenger bot as well as enable quick replies and image replies.
The overlay and the UI is easily modifiable and you can choose what pages and posts the bot is enabled on. From text fonts and background colors to chat opacity, easily change these settings from the plugin’s settings. The bot is also highly optimized and was built with speed and responsiveness in mind.
Key features:
- Enable a personally branded chatbot, complete with rich content messaging and quick replies.
- Insert hyperlinks in responses and messages easily for interlinking content
- Enable the chatbot using both widgets and shortcodes for individual posts and pages.
- Extremely lightweight and references the Diagflow API for natural language processing.
- Provides an inbuilt template system for flexibility
IBM Watson Assistant
IBM Watson assistant is a complete solution pack for enabling conversation and support system for your customers and website viewers. The plugin and its bot was created with Lead generation in mind and can be trained for easily providing help and directives to viewers on your website. Easily customize the appearance of the chatbox so it suits your theme better to keep your customers engaged as well.
The bot also includes a VOIP call system for calling an actual support personnel if required. Furthermore, the bot can be fully controlled straight through its plugins settings, saving you from a lot of needless effort and wasted time.
Key features:
- Beginner friendly chatbot and configuration options controlled straight through the admin dashboard
- The bot can store data and learn from interactions and further rule specification to improve over time.
- Includes a VOIP call system to message administrators if needed.
- Chat can be disabled on specified posts and pages
- Can be easily configured to suit better with your website’s design
WP-Chatbot
If you want to integrate a Facebook Messenger chatbot into your site then you should definitely check out WP-Chatbot. Created with ease of use in mind, this fantastic plugin is super intuitive to set up and use. You will be ready to start connecting with your visitors in just minutes. While lightweight and fast, this plugin is not lacking in features. You can hide the messenger based on post type, post id, category, or device. It also gives you the option to enable or disable Facebook Analytics.
To make things even more convenient, WP-Chatbot allows you to set separate greeting messages for logged in and logged out users. It also comes with a neat color picker that you can use to reinforce your brand. Furthermore, it has also been tested to be compatible with WooCommerce.
Key Features:
- User-friendly and intuitive to install and use
- Customizable messenger language and theme color
- Enable/disable Facebook Analytics
- Custom greetings message for logged in and logged out users
- WooCommerce Compatible
Using the plugin:
In order to activate our WordPress Chatbot, we have decided to use Collect Chat’s bot service. We came to choose this plugin because of its extreme ease in installation and its highly intuitive drag and drop customization settings.
If you want you are free to choose any other plugins as well to fit your demands. These plugins work on a similar basis and you can easily use this post as a reference as well as its own documentation if required.
So, in order to start, go ahead and install the plugin. If you are not aware of how to do so, consider checking out this article on Installing WordPress plugins. Furthermore, for an extra step, you need to sign up for Collect Chat’s service as well as the bot management is done straight through its website.
Regardless of if you already own an account or not, we’re going to need you to login into your account for this procedure. So, go ahead and open Collect Chat’s website and click on Login at the top right. If you already have an account here, sign in with it, if not you can simply create a new account by clicking on “New user” button on the bottom.
Once you’re logged, use the website’s Dashboard to start a configure the behaviour of your WordPress chatbot. You can work on the current untitled bot you have made or you can create a new bot by clicking on the Top left button. From here you can create a new bot or a use a template for it if you want to save some time.
Modifying Appearance of the WordPress Chatbot
But for this demo, we’re creating a new bot so let’s go back to the previous window. First, choose the Widget position. There are 3 options provided for the position: bottom left, bottom middle-right and bottom right. Furthermore, you can also select between a modern or a classic design for your chat button.
Next, you need to choose the Widget button text. This text will be what your chatbot will be named as. Furthermore, you can choose a fitting color theme for your website using the color option. The avatar option lets you select an avatar or image for your chatbot, this can be any premade avatars the website provides or any images you upload as well.
Modifying Behavior of the WordPress Chatbot
Now the second step involves modifying your bot’s behavior and choosing what kind of messages and replies your bot can send. Click on Script on the top progress bar to start this step.
We are given a wide range of types of messages the bot can send on the box on the left. This can be a statement or email requests and more. Let’s look at how we set up how the bot greets the user, asks for an email and provides a contact for our demonstration. We’ll be in a broad manner, looking at how to add new messages, change previously existing messages and changing the pattern of the messages.
Changing a chatbot message
First, click on the initial message to change how the bot greets a user. Here you can enter any text you want and even images by direct uploads and gifs through hotlinking. Similarly, you can click on any other possible message to change what it says and how it operates.
For example, we can change a question’s content, its options and more by simply clicking on it.
Adding a message:
In order to add a new message, you need to use the option box given on the left. Click on any appropriate type of message you want to insert and it will be inserted in the bottom of the chat window. Then simply click on the message to modify it accordingly.
For example, let’s make the bot request the user’s email address. For this, we click on the Email button and then scroll down to find our email request message. Click on it again to modify it as well. For now, let’s rephrase the email request and enter an alert message.
Moving and deleting message:
You can also change when a message is sent and the correct pattern for your bot’s conversation. For this, hover over any message and a set of tools will appear on the far right. Click on the move button(the second icon) and hold and drag it to whichever you want the message to move to.
Similarly, deleting a message requires you to hover over any message and click on the delete button or the 4th icon. Once you click on the icon, a window will appear asking you to confirm the deletion. Click on the Delete button to finally get rid of any unwanted messages.
Inserting the Chatbot in your website
Once you’ve modified and manipulated your bot’s messages and behavior, click on the Publish button on the progress bar.
A wide range of installation options will be provided but we’ll be using the option specified for WordPress.
Click on ‘Install the widget on WordPress website.’ You will now receive a code snippet which is your bot script. Save this, preferably on a text file and then open your WordPress dashboard.
Hover over settings and click on the Collect chat listing to open the plugin’s page. Then, insert the code snippet onto the script box is given on the page. Then click on Save changes to save the code snippet.
Next, you can choose whether you want to enable the bot on All posts, All pages, and the Home page. Click on the checkbox next to the option to enable it on the corresponding option. Click on save changes to enable your chatbox on your website.
Once enabled, our demo WordPress chatbot should be previewed on our website as:
Video Tutorial:
If you want a more detailed video tutorial then, please check the video below.
Concluding:
Thus with the conjunction of chatbots and dedicated plugins you can embed an amazing WordPress chatbot for your website. These chatbots can function as an amazing support system or as a more interactive alternative to support and contact forms. Similarly, if you want to learn how to make your website more interactive for your readers, we recommend you check out some of our other articles such as: