Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone
Jophiel Silvestrone has written 326 posts in the Tech Blog.
Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12. He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. The first business, a janitorial and carpet cleaning company, founded in 2005, has employed over 50 locals. Moving on to the media industry, Jophiel and several partners founded Green Directory Montana in the spring of 2007. Green Directory's sustainability ranking software awarded points based on sustainable or "green" actions. These points counted towards a business's total "Green Score," which in turn ranked them against other businesses in their category and throughout the entire site. It also featured a limited edition print version distributed annually. A business acquisition allowed Jophiel to focus on new projects, and a few close business colleagues and Jophiel started Rocky Mountain Mr. & Ms. Magazine, a lifestyle publication for men and women in the Magic City. After a year and a half at the helm of RM3 Magazine, the business was purchased. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios and fathers his son Jaoquin, who plays football, basketball, soccer, and is learning snowboarding from his dad. Recently, has expanded to locations in Havasu, Arizona & Vegas. SkyPoint Studios is a market leader in both Billings & Havasu and Jophiel is working on building that same level of market dominance in Vegas. Specialties: Extensive experience in online and offline business. Especially savvy at WordPress, and operate several sites, one example is the blog: skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com/tech-blog. Check out skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com for the latest projects from SkyPoint Studios.
Live Chat Customer Support
Recently, I had a customer request for a live chat customer support to be deployed on their WordPress website. I haven’t messed with live chats in a while, and the last time I looked into live chat customer support plugins they weren’t very reliable, so I was interested to see what the latest technology would have as far as functionality / cost & time.
So after I’ve accomplished and completed the task I decided to put down the notes and the tools here in a blog post so maybe the readers can also get the knowledge from it. I decided to use WP Live Chat Support plugin by 3CX Live Chat is the easiest to use website live chat plugin.
It was just a simple install and the customer form for chatting was up and available on the website.
They do have a pro version at a one-time cost of $39.99 for one website. It’s probably worth it if you plan on having a lot of traffic on the website or using the chat form often.
For any small business who just wants to offer chat on occasion, the free version of this plugin will work sufficiently. The only real downside, is you have to be logged in in order to operate the chat feature. If you’re not logged into the back end of the website, you won’t be able to capture the visitor on website and respond to them and the visitor will get a message that nobody is available to chat.
Luckily there is a WordPress app available in both markets that will allow you to be logged into the backend of your website and to operate the plug-in from there. So if you’re looking to add live chat customer support to your website, I found that this is the best way to do it.
This plug-in seems to have lots of support and is highly rated by the community. Of course these things can change anytime and we all know how relying on plugins is risky, especially if they’re not updated regularly. Offering customer live chat support will probably be best done with a custom written script if there’s enough traffic and revenue to justify the programming expense.
But we all know that for small business owners with the typical website this type of option will be the easiest for their developer to deploy and the most cost-efficient way to get live chat customer support up and running quickly. Even if only investing the $39.99 and paying your developer a couple hours to install this it’s totally worth it to have live chat customer support available to your customers in my opinion.
What do you think about this live chat plugin, have you been able to use it?
If it works well sound off in the comments and let me know what you like about it. Or, if you found a better plugin, also sound off in the comments and let me know about what a better plugin is to use.
Thanks for reading and I look forward to joining you on my next post!