As a business owner who has to interact with customers quite often, live chat support is the best plausible option. However, the results amplify if you integrate your support methods with applications frequently used by the customers- in this case, I am talking about Shopify, WordPress, and Webflow. But before we begin, it is important to know what is live chat and why is it important for businesses?

Live chat is a customer relations tool businesses use in interacting with their customers. It is a type of technical support usually added to a website or social account that enables companies and customers to interact in real-time.

Importance of Integrating a Live Chat To Your Website

Live chat offers so many benefits if utilized properly. Here are a few advantages of integrating a live chat into your website.

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Low Cost for Support

Live chat offers so much value with little or no extra cost to a business. Integrating a live chat in your business is cheaper than setting up traditional call centers that require call agents to answer emails and calls.

Keeps the User Engaged on Your Website

While customers await replies to their messages, they can use this time to go through your website and see what you’re working on in your business. Make sure to put up interesting blogs, testimonials, or case studies on your website. This is helpful because the more visitors spend time on your website, the more Google Analytics recommends you. A very wonderful SEO benefit.

Better Customer Service

With the live chat feature on your website, support agents don’t need to worry about the language difference of customers. Answering multiple customers while keeping track of all their requests becomes a breeze here. This helps support agents stay on their game, and in situations customers experience similar issues, support agents can log these issues and refer to the solution easily to fix them even faster in the future.

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Does Live Chat Help with Conversions and Retention?

Whether you’re starting as a small business or you are already the owner of a well-established company, live chat can help to convert visitors into loyal customers. A recent study by the American marketing association found out that customers who use the live chat are 3x more likely to make a purchase, therefore adding live chat to your company's website would lead to an increased conversion rate of 20%.

In this fast-paced world today, where social media is highly adopted and used by many individuals, customers tend to require immediate support or instant reply to their queries or issues. You can leverage this trend by adding a live chat which will boost your conversion rate as you interact with your customers and provide them with additional value.

Also, a larger percentage of customers will stop using a product if a brand is slow to respond in the online chat. Given that live chat responses are typically fast, you will be boosting retention rates greatly.

Now you completely understand how much value live chat adds to your business, let’s learn about the tools you can use to add this live chat to your WordPress, Shopify, or Webflow websites.

Best Tools for Integrating Live Chat

If you Google live chat, you’ll notice that there are quite a large number of CRM tools you can use to integrate live chat into your website. CRM stands for customer relationship management, which shows the strategy, principles, or guidelines businesses use to organize and manage customers. I have listed down some of the top CRM tools that have caught my attention for a while:

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I recently started using Chatwoot for customer engagement needs and would be using the tool today to integrate live chat support with other websites. Unlike other mentioned software for integrating a live chat, Chatwoot stands out as an open source non-proprietary solution with tons of tweakable features. You can read more about that here. If you are an open source enthusiast, you can also look forward to contribute to Chatwoot on GitHub.

Want to add the live chat to your website? Read on as I walk you through the required steps.

Create your Chatwoot Account

To create an account, visit this link: https://chatwoot.com to get started. The registration is very straightforward. Create an account and then verify your email.

Add User Details

After creating an account, you’ll see a conversations dashboard. On the bottom left, click (Profile icon > Profile Settings) which will take you to an account settings page.

Under the account settings, fill in the boxes with your necessary details.

Add a profile photo and a display name. Once you’re done, hit Update Profile.

Now we’re done filling in our details, we can proceed to the next step.

Add an Inbox

On the sidebar to the left, click inboxes and select add a new inbox. You’ll be presented with a new screen that asks you to choose a channel you want to integrate the live chat in.

Choose your preferred channel, in this case, website.
Fill in the boxes with your website information.
Add your website domain name into the website domain box. (E.g www.mywebsite.com) PS: Omit the https:// protocol.

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This is to make sure the live chat widget matches the style of your business website and the user experience is consistent.

Pick an Agent for Your Live Chat Needs

The next step is to pick a default agent for the live chat. Add Yourself as the primary agent. But If you want to add a new support agent, click the Agents tab on the left to do that.

Now a code will be generated after picking an agent. This code is how we will add the live chat to our website. The next step is to customize the widget even further, you can skip this step and proceed to integrate the live chat widget on your website if you want, but I highly recommend you don’t skip it to avoid your chat widget from being too generic.

Customize Your Widget

To customize the widget even further, click More Settings below the code.
First, add a logo for the chat widget, and then choose a name and your widget color.

There are more settings available to customize your chat widget even further, you can add more features like

Welcome greeting message
Welcome tagline
A message when the visitor starts typing
An email field to collect visitors’ email addresses.
Automatic assignment of chat agents, and many more features.

Figure out how you want the live widget to be like and then customize it to fit that description. You can refer to Chatwoot docs to learn more.

How to Integrate Live Chat into your Shopify Website?

Now we have completely set up our chatwoot account and added an inbox, we can proceed to add it to our Shopify website.

Once you’re done customizing the widget, click update and select the configurations tab to see the code.

Copy the code and go to your Shopify website.

Click edit code and navigate to theme.liquid and then paste the code inside the body tag and hit save.
The next step is to test the chat widget, refresh the website page and now you should see the widget.
You can try typing a message on the chatbox to test it out.
Here’s a preview of the live chat on our Shopify website.

How to Integrate Live Chat to Your Webflow Website?

The process is practically similar since we already created and set up our Chatwoot account, all we have to do is add a new inbox for our Webflow widget. Follow through the same steps as mentioned above, add your Webflow website domain, customize your profile to match the live widget, and then copy the code. Paste the code into the body tag and save it. Refresh your Webflow website to see the changes.

How to Integrate Live Chat to Your WordPress Website?

There are different ways through which we can add live chat to a WordPress site, the simplest way is to add the code in the PHP file.

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To do this, (after generating our WordPress website code) go to your project dashboard, and navigate to Appearance > Theme Editor.
Open the Theme Footer (footer.php) file and paste the code inside the tag.

Once you’ve pasted the code, click Update File and go to your website, and refresh the page. You should see the live chat widget now.
Here’s a preview of the live chat in action.

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The Future of Live Chats

Live chat has become the preferred method for consumers to engage with companies. Answering questions and responding to issues quickly and efficiently will make your customers feel valued, leading to increased sales and retention. Consider adding a live chat to your business website today and see how it transforms visitors into lifelong customers.

However, there’s a note of caution here as well. Despite how much value live chat adds to a company’s website, it’ll be ineffective if visitors can’t find your chat widget or it is positioned in a distracting manner. Here are a few tips and tricks to place your live chat widget for maximum impact.

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When choosing the color of the live chat widget, use colors that can be easily distinguished from the background of the website.
Try not to use a dark-colored widget on a dark-colored background and vice versa, to avoid your visitors missing the live chat widget.
Avoid adding the chat widget in places that don’t require it, for e.g a checkout page in an eCommerce store.
Add a notification alert.
Add a company logo to personalize the chat widget. This helps to make your widget more welcoming to visitors and not generic.

Aviyel is partnering with Chatwoot to scale, build and incentivize open source communities. To stay updated, follow the discussions here. Join Aviyel’s Twitter space at AviyelHQ.

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TL; DR

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Integrating Live Chat to Your Wordpress, Shopify or Webflow Site Has Never Been this Easy!