Let’s Talk about Bots, WordPress Chatbots

WordPress chatbots

Chatbots…you’ve seen them before. But how can you implement a WordPress chatbot?

Well, I’m gonna tell you in a sec.

First I want you to understand that on a site we can have both live chat and chatbots, often provided by the same service provider. Live chat allows for human interaction, while chatbots use automation and certain triggers, and scripts. At one point you can move a user from chatbot interaction to a real chat with customer support or sales. 

With live chat, you might see people’s faces in the conversation window but when you interact with a bot, you might see some bot faces or avatars.

So, in the case of CXL, you can interact easily with real customer support folks, as long as they’re online. You can spot their faces below.CXL live chat example

The folks at Intercom make it clear that you’re interacting with a bot.

Intercom website chatbot

Secondly, I have an advice for you, don’t replace human interaction with bot interaction. You need them both, and WE need them both. Human connections won’t be replaced anytime soon…or so I hope, for our mental health’s sake.

Now, the main benefits of using chatbots on a website are:

  • Speeding up sales;
  • Moving leads further down in the customer journey;
  • Providing instant responses to customers’ inquiries even outside working hours;

So, in this article we’re gonna talk about:

  1. How chatbots integrate into the sales, marketing, and customer support mix;
  2. How to use WordPress chatbots
  3. Chatbots inspiration from real websites

 

Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support Scenarios for Chatbots

chatbots scenarios

Chatbots are a great way to engage with website visitors, prospects, and customers. They’re a tool used by marketing, sales, and customers support teams alike. 

 

How website chatbots impact sales teams

Chatbots are starting to replace some of the website forms. In the older sales process, someone would fill in a form, wait for an email response, then book a meeting. With chatbots, you can schedule a meeting directly in the sales rep’s (aka SDR) calendar, or even talk to the SDR live, depending on some qualifying questions. 

This means that chatbots can relieve SDRs’ from answering common questions or asking qualifying questions (eg: what’s your company size, what industry are you in). They can now focus on closing warmer prospects.

This way you can increase sales pipeline velocity.

 

How website chatbots impact marketing teams

Chatbots can be automated across a website based on certain triggers and user behavior. You can even contextualize them. Let’s say someone is reading a blog article. The marketing folks cold trigger a chatbot to promote a content upgrade (eg. ebook) or a webinar invite on the same topic. If they are reading a case study, you can invite them to a product demo. If they are reading your knowledge base, you could use a chatbot to invite them to your Facebook group to discuss product-related stuff.

This way marketing teams can move a user from a funnel step to the next one with ease.

 

How website chatbots impact customer support teams

Not everyone can afford 24/7 customer support. Your live chat support staff needs sleep, but your website chatbot doesn’t.

So, chatbots can become part of your customer success team. They can handle repetitive questions or tasks so that your customer support people can handle more urgent matters. A chatbot doesn’t have to simulate a perfect human conversation but to meet the customer’s needs. 

You can use chatbots to answer simple questions, direct users to the right knowledgebase resource, or as a ticketing system.

 

How to Use WordPress Chat plugins

As you might have already guessed, we’ll dive a bit into some of the most popular WordPress chatbot plugins out there.

Usually, these chatbots have few free features. You’ll probably need to open an account and buy a plan that suits your needs. Next, you’ll need to install and activate a WordPress chatbot plugin. We have a  video tutorial for this:

Now, let’s take a look at those WordPress chatbot plugins.

 

Drift

Drift WordPress chatbot

50,000+ businesses use Drift for live or offline chat purposes. Among their clients, we can recognize Github, AddRoll, InVision, Marketo, or Gong.

Main features of Drift chat

  • Real-time Slack integration to alert your team so they can respond asap;
  • Offline mode;
  • Capture email addresses;
  • Rules for targeting and triggering so that you can engage people in various scenarios.

 

How to work with the Drift WordPress chatbot

  1. After the plugin activation, find the Drift icon at the top of the WordPress dashboard.Drift chatbot icon in WordPress
  2. Go to your Drift account and copy the Drift widget code from the WordPress install section.
  3. Paste your code in the window shown below.Drift and WordPress integration

Now, this action will make sure that the Drift chatbot will show up on your WordPress website.

The actual bots will be built inside your Drift account.

 

LiveChat

LiveChat WordPress plugin

LiveChat is mostly used by customer support teams for…live chat, as you might have guessed.

LiveChat comes with a built-in ticketing system to provide customer support 24/7.

It is a tool used by 33.000+ companies worldwide and boasts with clients such as McDonald’s, Adobe, PayPal, and many more.

 

Its features can go beyond plain chat, you can:

  • Show off your goods in elegant product cards and make more sales while chatting;
  • Qualify leads with custom forms and AI chatbot automation;
  • Track sales and goals automatically to see precisely how chats boost revenue;
  • Automatically segment visitors based on what they do on your site.
  • The LiveChat WordPress plugin works well with any WordPress theme or WordPress template;
  • It integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce.

The WordPress LiveChat Plugin is free, but you need to be a LiveChat customer. 

 

Hubspot

Hubspot WordPress chatbotHubspot is a customer relationship management tool (CRM) that comes jam-packed with marketing and sales automation. They provide live chat in the free plan and customizable chatbots in paid plans, based on all sorts of triggers.

Hubspot is a good fit for medium B2B companies.

 

Tidio

Tidio chatbot for WordPress

Tidio is a powerful AI chatbot tool allowing one to deliver an excellent customer experience. Adding Tidio to a website can be done in 5 minutes, and no coding is required. One can easily customize the chatbot and the widget will blend in with the look of any website. 

 

Main features of Tidio: 

  • Integrations with the most popular selling platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Woocommerce, and more.
  • Easy use with CRMs, email marketing platforms, and social media.
  • IOS + Android applications.
  • Viewed pages feature to explore what a visitor has already viewed on the website to tailor the responses better.
  • Visitor lists to see who is viewing a website in real-time.
  • No-coding design and customization.

Tidio pricing:

  • Freemium version;
  • Paid upgrades start from $39 monthly.

 

WP-Chatbot for Messenger

WP Chatbot Most of us have used Facebook Messenger before. Some of you might have even noticed the Messenger icon on certain websites, to the bottom-right of a website, tempting visitors to chat.

Yes, you can build bots with Facebook Messenger as well. And Mobile Monkey, the business founded by Larry Kim took this to a whole new level. It became the official Messenger Partner.

Its WordPress plugin is called WP-ChatBot and it can work outside of Facebook as well.

Let’s check some of its features:

  • Live chat with visitors 24/7;
  • Single inbox for all incoming messages;
  • Seamlessly integrated Facebook Messenger and native webchat conversations
  • Access to users data (when they engage with you) while logged in with Facebook;
  • 100% integration with your Facebook Business Page and Facebook Messenger;
  • Create custom dialogue flows or menus to help users navigate and get the information they need;
  • Create a chatbot dialogue or use natural language processing (NLP).

 

WooCommerce ChatbotFacebook Woo chat

Online store managers can automate customer support with the Facebook Chatbot Plugin for WooCommerce by providing pre-programmed options that bring customers to their Facebook business pages. With this plugin, customers can interact with the store and receive answers to their common inquiries. Upon not finding an appropriate answer or reply under the set constraint, the chatbot sends a customizable default message.

Main features of WooCommerce Chatbot:

• Provide automated customer support with Chat
• Chat replies are in text, URL, or postback format
• Set conditional questions as auto-replies
• Product, category, or post search is enabled in chat.
• The chat bubble can be displayed on shop, home, all pages, or on a single product.
• Easily connect stores Facebook business page with a store’s site
• Give customers the option of using Facebook Messenger as a guest user or as their profile user

 

 

Chatbots inspiration from real websites

Let’s take a look at some bot examples, shall we?

  1. When customers come back to your site, or even when anonymous visitors return, you can greet them differently, like in this example from HelpCrunch.Bot greeting example
  2. When you read blog articles on the NewBreedRevenue website, you’ll be greeted by a bot inviting you to sign in to a newsletter. I love the copy: it gives you the benefits from subscribing but also sets up expectations in terms of frequency. NewBreedRevenue website chatbot
  3. The folks at Gong have a funny approach. I almost wanted to say humane approach, but it’s a…doggy one :)). It manages to draw users’ attention and encouraging them to engage. They ask a question with 4 possible answers, each answer will lead to a different type of conversation.Gong welcome chatbot
  4. Gong chatbot
  5. The folks at Planable are giving you more options when opening up the chat window, from live chat to sales conversations for enterprise-only, to providing resources for those in search of know-how.Planable website chatbot
  6. Salesforce is using ABM chat playbooks (this is the official name of the chat scenario you can develop). ABM stands for account-based marketing. This means that you have a database of contacts that you want to transform into prospects, then customers. The moment that contact (company/person) comes back to your website, you can greet them by name and personalize your conversation based on previous encounters. Salesforce chatbot example
  7. The folks at Narvar are using the chatbot to schedule a product demo. I like the fact that they use social proof to increase their chances for a conversion rate. They mention that they have 800+ retailers as their clients. That means that you’d be in good company.Narvar book a meeting botNarvar chatbot example
  8. The folks at SmartRecruiters are using chatbots even for hiring purposes. They are a platform that connects job seekers and companies looking to hire, so it makes sense. 

But, as a strategy, you could use a specific chatbot on your career page, for example.Smartrecruiters chatbot for recruitment

 

Want more chatbot inspiration?

I’ve got two huuuge tips for you:

  • Check out this website by Drift with tons of Drift bots.
  • Go to similartech.com and type in Drift or Hubspot to uncover the websites that use these tools. Similartech is not 100% accurate, but it will definitely help.Uncover websites that sue chatbots using SimilarTech

Next, go ahead to these websites and play with their bots. Check where they are placed, how they are triggered, etc.

 

Wrapping it all up

In a survey done back in 2019, the folks at Helpshift analyzed 75 million customer service tickets and 71 million bot-sent messages across 6 months.

30% of respondents reported that they would knowingly engage with a customer support chatbot because “chatbots are very helpful.” This is a 100% increase compared to 2018. There is also a drop of 19% year-over-year in the number of consumers who found chatbots annoying. 

What does this mean for you? Customer support is no longer a thing for humans, you can use chatbots to solve customer problems, but also to incorporate them into your marketing and sales strategies.

For this you will need to create an account with a chatbot provider, then integrate it in your WordPress website via a WordPress chatbot plugin, or via inserting tiny bits of Javascript code.

If you liked this article, and you want to learn more about how to design a WordPress website, make sure to subscribe to Colibri’s Youtube channel and follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

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Alina is a digital marketer with a passion for web design. When she's not strategizing she's doing photography, listening to podcasts on history and psychology, and playing with her 2 dogs and cat.

 

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