In today's fast-paced world, customers expect fast, reliable service. With so much competition out there, failing to do so can result in decreased brand loyalty.

In the online world, live chat is often the most effective channel of communication. According to eConsultancy:

Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.

In this article, we will explain how you can add live chat to a WordPress site.

Choosing a live chat service to add to WordPress

There are many options out there. Choosing the right one depends on your individual use case.

If you are part of a small/medium team that is looking to collaborate around live chat, email, and other communication channels, then Missive is the way to go.

Missive Live Chat is powered by Twilio. Right off the bat, it is free, and you can have up to 200 active chats per month. After that, you will pay a low fee, starting at $0.03 for each additional one.

There appears to be no reliable live chat options for WordPress that are free. So using Missive Live Chat is a high-quality, affordable investment.

Setting up Missive Live Chat

Once you have created your Missive account. Go to your Settings and click Accounts then Add account.

Select the Missive Live Chat option.

As we stated before, Missive Live Chat uses Twilio's Conversations API, so you must first sign up to Twilio. Monthly fees (after the 200 active chats per month) will be charged to your Twilio account.

Once you've signed up, you will have access to the dashboard, where you will be able to see two important pieces of information: your Account SID and Auth Token.

Back in Missive you can continue the process.

Missive is, above all, a tool to collaborate around different channels. You will be asked to choose whether you want the chats shared with teammates or not.

We suggest you choose the first option and share it in a Team Inbox. This will lead all incoming chats into a shared inbox where many teammates can assign cases to each other and work more efficiently.

After that, you will need to enter the Account SID and Auth Token from your Twilio account as well as a Chat service name.

Your chat is almost ready to be plugged into WordPress.

Setting up Missive Live Chat in WordPress

It's quite easy to install Missive Live Chat in WordPress. We have developed a simple plugin for this purpose.Go to your WordPress Admin, click Plugins, search for Missive Live Chat, install it and activate it.

Upon installation, click on Missive in your WordPress dashboard sidebar, and follow these steps:

1. Enable Missive live chat by selecting the Yes option
2. Copy the account id from the code snippet in Missive. It looks like this number:
   2846475-c2324-232344-235-dsfds34ffdf233

1. Paste the id in the Chat Account id field back in WordPress.

1. Save changes

Congratulations! You now have a live chat on your website. But it's not in sync with the site's branding. Yet.

NoteYou can also add the code snippet directly to the WordPress theme's header.php file, although it will get deleted each time you update or change the theme. That's why we recommend using the Missive Live Chat for WordPress plugin.

Customizing the live chat window

Inside the Missive Live Chat for WordPress plugin settings you can:

• Change the main color
• Customize various messages such as welcome, help, error, title, etc.

For other settings, open your Missive app and go to the Setup tab in the Chat account and click Configure. Among other things, you can:

• Change the position of the bubble
• Show online status
• Show avatars
• Show names
• Ask for name and/or email
• Require name and/or email
• Change the bubble messages
• Change the User Interface messages
• Identify and verify users
• And more

The widget is highly customizable. For all options, see the documentation.

Here's the final version of our chat bubble. It looks great, right?

Managing the live chat

Missive Live Chat is the perfect way to interact with visitors and users from your website without creating additional silos of communication.

Whenever someone sends a message through the live chat on your website, it will instantly appear in your Missive app, and like all other channels (email, SMS, social media messages), you decide where these messages land. You may choose for them to arrive in a Team Inbox or everyone's Inbox.

Missive Live Chat offers you fantastic features:

• Identify visitors & authenticate users
• One-to-many interactions
• Customizable widget
• Schedules
• File exchange
• Automation
• Read status
• Attach and display meta data
• Emojis

Go here to learn more about each feature.

We hope this article helped you add a live chat to your WordPress site!