Boost Your Customer Service: Best WordPress Tools to Boost Your Online Store’s Customer Support

In today's fiercely competitive business landscape, providing exceptional customer experience has become essential for WordPress-based companies.

With over 2 billion websites on the internet, practically every company has a website.

Satisfied customers not only contribute to brand loyalty but also serve as powerful advocates, attracting new customers and driving growth. So customer loyalty is super important and there are many customer loyalty software out there.

While traditional customer service methods have their place, it's the out-of-the-box strategies that truly set WordPress brands apart and leave a lasting impression on their clientele.

However, running a website isn't enough to reach your potential customers online and turn website visitors into customers; it's also important to take care of your customers and therefore improve customer service on your website.

In the competitive realm of WordPress, improving customer experience is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Let's delve into the significance of enhancing customer satisfaction.

The digital world offers a wealth of opportunities. However, you're not the only one to take advantage of these. You'll face stiff competition for every customer dollar. 

You can differentiate yourself through innovation. However, the advantage a new product gives is usually short-lived. When other companies realize you're onto a winning formula, they're bound to come up with their own version.  

The one way you can truly differentiate yourself is by offering stellar service. If you create a seamless and pleasant experience, you'll win fans and develop a loyal customer base. 

One way to do this is through ecommerce customer service outsourcing. You can hire experts who'll deal with your clients efficiently and professionally, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

You can follow through by making your website as user-friendly as possible. With this in mind, we've compiled a list of the top 10 WordPress plugins to boost your online store's customer support.

WordPress Tools to Boost Your Online Store's Customer Support

LiveChat

Most clients want a quick and easy way to engage with you. They might be viewing your site on their phone and need a quick answer. LiveChat offers a solution in the form of a plugin. 

The software provides a clean, customizable chat window. You can make it fit your branding perfectly and offer:

• Canned responses to give clients instant answers
• File sharing to supplement your knowledge base as necessary
• The capability for customers to interact with live service agents

It integrates with most major CRM, email marketing, and help desk tools, streamlining your customer service processes.

Zendesk for WordPress

Zendesk has a lot of support because it's a capable and efficient tool. It manages customer inquiries, tracks issues, and resolves tickets directly from your dashboard. It creates a central hub for various support channels like email, chat, and social media. 

Your customers can easily submit support tickets. Zendesk automatically acknowledges receipt and directs the query accordingly. It automates several functions to reduce the strain on your support team. It also provides customizable reporting and analytics so you can tweak service delivery.

WooCommerce Support Ticket System

Does your store run on WooCommerce? If so, it makes sense to use the company's support ticket system. This allows clients to submit a query from your dashboard. They can then easily locate it again for updates. 

However, the system does automatically notify the customer when there's activity on their issue. It sends out emails to employees and your clients every step of the way.

The system allows you to categorize and prioritize tickets. This makes it easier for your support team to manage requests. It also includes features like:

• Email notifications
• Ticket status updates
• Detailed ticket tracking

Help Scout

This customer service platform focuses on personalized service. Help Scout gives you access to both email and chat. It also provides access to a self-service knowledge base. The plugin allows you to manage customer communications and tickets directly through your WordPress dashboard. 

This software's strength is that it makes it easy to create help articles and FAQs. Your customers are, therefore, better able to find the answers they need without contacting you. It integrates with WooCommerce and other eCommerce plugins.

WPForms

This plugin is primarily for building forms, but we've added it to this list because it's so useful. You can use it to create:

• Custom contact forms
• Feedback forms
• Support request forms.

They're great when you need more info from your clients. The upside with this software is that it's so easy to use. Simply drag and drop the information in. The plugin works with most CRMS, making it easy to collect your customer queries. You can then funnel them into your support workflows. You can also use conditional logic to create dynamic forms. 

Tawk.to Live Chat

This free plugin makes it easy to provide your customers with real-time support. You can use the product for free, as long as you're okay with the “Powered by Tawk.to” message. It's customizable, so it looks fully branded. It also includes:

• Real-time monitoring
• Ticket creation
• Detailed analytics

Unfortunately, it only provides live chat, so you'll need something else for emails. 

Knowledge Base for Documentation and FAQs

This plugin helps you create a functional help center on your site. This makes it easy for customers to find the answers they need. The plugin is customizable and makes it easy to create high-quality, searchable articles.

As a standalone tool, this is a useful option because it reduces the number of support tickets. 

Awesome Support

This plugin allows you to create a customized help desk. It has a great tracking feature and allows you to customize your ticket fields. It also includes a satisfaction survey tool and integrates with WooCommerce. This makes it easier to provide targeted assistance because you can link through to specific orders. 

Gravity Forms

This is another form-building plugin that you can use to enhance service. It has an extensive range of features that allow you to create many types of forms. 

What's particularly useful is that it allows for:

• Conditional logic, which adjusts the forms based on the customer's responses
• File uploads to gather the ideal amount of information
• Multi-page forms so you can get as much information as you need. 
• Third-party integrations with CRM or help desk systems. 

Fluent Support

This dedicated WordPress plugin provides a simple interface from your WordPress dashboard. It provides a ticketing system directly on your site. This enables your support team to respond to tickets, manage priorities, and track ticket history.

You can also integrate it with WooCommerce, meaning you can connect tickets to orders or products. This makes it easier for your support team. The software also allows you to create a range of reports to monitor your service delivery.

Why does it matter?

Your website is your virtual homebase. It’s your calling card. And, in most cases, your first point of contact with (potential) customers. Delighted WordPress customers are more likely to become brand loyalty, and brand advocates, spreading positive word-of-mouth about their experiences.

Not only is ecommerce more prevalent than ever, statistics show that even when there’s a physical location nearby, 76% of customers still check a business website out before they visit. 

Most importantly, your website is also your central portal for communicating with your customers. Efficient, friction-free communication is a crucial basis for customer satisfaction. By adapting your website to guarantee a great communication experience, you can build trust, increase conversions, and boost your overall business success. 

Over 85% of people do online research before choosing a company and many of them may have questions about your company and its products, so the demand for customer service has grown.

Around 96% of U.S. customers agree that having good customer service is important to them and 78% claim that it's fundamental to gaining their loyalty.

This means the growing importance of online customer service.

Still, 73% of consumers believe that companies pay more attention to increasing sales across all of their multiple channels than they do to providing integrated customer service across those channels.

Not only do big companies run websites, but also 64% of small businesses have a website which means the competition is getting higher. Since customers are selfish and they bother about their needs and wants, improving outstanding customer service on your website is a great way to stay ahead of your competitors that don't invest in providing customer service.

Since customer service expectations have grown in the last few years, improving customer service on your website is a must.

How to do it?

I’m going to tell you 6 innovative ways for you to explore and dramatically improve your customer satisfaction. Let’s get to it then.

Personalized Customer Interactions

FullSession behavioural analytic software provides you with all the data you need to improve your customer experience and solve inquiries. Imagine being able to record each step of a potential customer's journey on your website, see their feedback for your website, and gather insight on what they like/dislike about certain aspects of it.

You can also leverage a white-label client portal solution like Clinked, which allows you to offer personalized portals for clients.

With this versatile tool, you can provide your customers with a customized, all-in-one solution for secure file sharing and facilitate seamless collaboration, all within a single, unified platform tailored to their specific needs.

Wow your customers by giving them a chance to share their feedback with you. Add customer feedback surveys powered by WordPress survey plugin and collect the needed information from them. After getting the real-time feedback you will be able to use them for improving your product and making it perfect for your customers.

If you have a more advanced, modern business phone system, incorporating TCPA compliance, you can also add more sophisticated options.

Gamify the Customer Experience

Incorporate game-like elements, such as challenges, rewards, and progress tracking, into the WordPress customer experience strategy using gamification software. Align these elements with your brand's values and keep them relevant to maintain customer engagement.

Embrace Omnichannel Support

If you provide customer service on your website, that's great. But if you constantly invest time and effort into improving customer service on your website, whether you experiment with support channels like a business phone system like ULTATEL, train your customer support team, or collect and implement customer feedback, it can bring your business to the next level.

Adopt an omnichannel support strategy to ensure a seamless customer experience across all WordPress touchpoints. Integrate data and interactions across channels to provide a consistent and cohesive journey for customers.

Pro-Tip: Implement a robust customer support ticketing system to centralize interactions for seamless omnichannel support.

Enhance customer experience by leveraging Generative AI-powered chatbots to provide instant and accurate responses.

Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to make chatbots more conversational and human-like, improving customer engagement.

Some chatbot builder tools you can use include Botsify, Mobile Monkey, Chat Fuel and Flow XO.

However, I still recommend you have online human interactions to ensure personalized support to the users and having that unique ‘human touch’ which is what everyone is after nowadays.

Having an online chat feature through which your customer service staff can answer any queries your online visitors may have can set you apart from your competitors.

Plus, live chat has all the advantages of personal and immediate contact without bringing on the call anxiety that younger people often struggle with. 

Another advantage of having a live chat option integrated into your site is that it makes it a breeze to automate parts of it. You can easily add a chatbot to handle routine queries and lighten the load on your human team members, or to respond to queries outside business hours.

You can use tools like Zendesk chat, Proprofs Chat, Desku, Tidio Live Chat, or Pure Chat to be able to chat with multiple online customers simultaneously.

Invest in employee training to enhance the communication and problem-solving skills of WordPress employees.

Customer Self Help Content

While chatbots and live chat can be great for customer service, there’s nothing better than empowering customers to help themselves.

That’s where content can play a big role and is already revolutionizing the way customer service is done.

By creating engaging, insightful and educational content on topics that your customers need help with, you can empower them to help themselves and hire call center services for more complex inquries.

They could just visit your website, download an eBook, PDF or whitepaper and resolve their problem themselves rather than going through the outreach process.

What’s great about content is that it’s very versatile in how you can use it.

It’s not just a tool for customer service, but also a medium to entertain, educate, and engage your online customers.

Regularly publishing content that’s meaningful to your customers will help you build an ‘online audience’ and a list of email subscribers who truly want to hear from your business.

Here are several customer self-service options to enhance your business website:

• Create a FAQ page
• Include a knowledge base
• Feature a self-care ebook
• Upload explainer videos

Link Your Socials and use social proof on your website

In 2023, customers have come to expect businesses to have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and the like. 

On your website’s contact page, you need to include links to all your social profiles. That way, visitors will be able to follow you instantly if they want to. 

To go further, you can also include links to your social media in the footer of your website. That way, anyone who scrolls to the bottom of your page will get a visual cue to follow you.

Not all of your website visitors want to contact your customer service team to get their inquiries solved.

Some of your visitors are potential customers who have doubts whether your product or service is right for them, so they seek recommendations from previous customers.

Simply put, your website visitors want to see endorsements from existing customers that add credibility and therefore they pay attention to social proof on your website.

Social proof comes in different forms: customer testimonials, expert endorsements, client reviews, user-generated content, earned media, etc. To show the popularity (and effectiveness) of your product among previous customers, it's a good idea to use social proof tools on your website.

These tools can help organize and display these elements effectively; increasing their impact.

Design a Great User Experience

If you really want to impress your users, you should become conscious and creative about your user experience online.

This is where design thinking plays a super vital role.

By empathizing with your customers, building customer personas to understand them at a deeper level, and then creating a user experience they love, you can make your customers trust your business and become a loyal, returning customer.

By using a combination of great UI elements, customer reviews, and a highly simple checkout process, Airbnb has become one of the most popular and loved mobile applications for the global travel community.

More importantly, make sure you factor in the latest online technologies to design an experience that’s up to date with all tech trends.

With the growing popularity of voice tech, for example, using voice as part of your customer experience can be a smart move.

Users will be happiest with applications that are up-to-date and match current trends.

Today, many businesses neglect to ensure that their websites are mobile responsive. That’s a serious mistake. Especially since statistics show that 59% of all global web traffic now comes from cell phones and tablets. 

An important aspect of a good user experience is the speed of your website. Studies have shown that conversion rates are 3 times higher for websites that load in under one second.

Conclusion 

Your website is not just a place to market your products or services. It has become the main communication channel for customers who want to get help.

With rising customer service expectations, brands of all sizes and niches have to improve customer service on their websites to make sure that customers get their questions answered and therefore become happier.

You need to provide outstanding customer support online whether you're running an ecommerce store or not. Using the right tools can help you streamline your processes, improve response times, and deliver a better overall customer experience. 

We've given you a place to start with this top ten list. Have a look at what these companies offer and see which options suit your brand best. Then dive right in and give them a try.

By following the guide above, you’ll be able to ensure that anyone who visits your site will find a frustration-free, fast, and effective way to reach out.

From providing various contact options to implementing customer feedback, there are many actionable ways to improve customer service on your website, but it's important to experiment and find out what works best for your company.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is customer experience and why is it important for WordPress websites in 2023?

Customer experience refers to the impression customers have when interacting with a website. It's important for WordPress websites in 2023 because it affects retention, loyalty, and reputation.

How can I improve customer experience on my WordPress website?

Improve customer experience on your WordPress website by optimizing speed, mobile responsiveness, navigation, and content. Use personalized recommendations, provide excellent support, and gather user feedback.

What are some key elements of a positive customer experience on WordPress websites?

Positive customer experience on WordPress includes smooth navigation, fast loading, attractive design, clear content, personalized interactions, responsive support, and user-friendly checkout.

Are there any specific plugins or tools that can help enhance customer experience on WordPress?

Plugins like “WordPress Personalization” and tools like “LiveChat” or “Zendesk” can help you enhance customer experience on your WordPress website.

How can personalized content and recommendations improve customer experience on WordPress websites?

Personalized content and recommendations improve customer experience by tailoring information and offers based on user preferences. Plugins like “WooCommerce Personalized Product Recommendations” can help implement this on WordPress.