7 Top AI WordPress Chatbots for Sales and Support
Adding an intelligent chatbot to your WordPress site is an innovative way to improve your customer engagement — and easier than ever before.
WordPress offers a variety of plugins for easily integrating a chatbot on your website. Chatbot plugins allow businesses to automate their customer support and boost customer engagement with product suggestions or coupon codes.
In this post, we will share the benefits of using chatbots on your WordPress website, how to choose the right chatbot provider and tips for setting up your chatbot.
Whether you're a small business owner or a digital marketer, this post will explain how chatbots can enhance your customer experience and streamline your online communication.
- What is a WordPress chatbot?
- How to add a chatbot to your WordPress site
- 7 best WordPress chatbot providers
- Create your WordPress chatbot with Userlike
What is a WordPress chatbot?
A WordPress chatbot is a digital assistant designed to interact with visitors on a WordPress website. The advanced chatbot plug-ins use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to simulate human conversations with visitors, answer their questions and navigate them through your site.
Benefits of using a WordPress chatbot:
- Improves customer engagement. A chatbot makes instant connections with customers directly on your website, and keeps them interested. In the first precious moments that a new visitor lands on your site, a chatbot can proactively welcome them, share interesting deals and offer to answer questions or make recommendations.
- Personalizes the customer’s experience. Natural language understanding helps a chatbot understand the customer’s request and provide tailored responses. It can also make the customer feel valued by using their name, referring to past conversations and using integrations to access details from their account.
- Collects data and interesting leads. Chatbots are a friendly way to ask for a customer’s contact details and build a profile. It can also ask lead qualifying questions in the chat and route the customer to a sales agent if they’re a hot lead.
- Keeps your site selling outside of business hours. A WordPress chatbot never rests. Use it during evenings and weekends to provide your customers 24/7 support. You can target weekend and night shoppers with personal, interactive help.
- Cost-effective compared to hiring new agents. On average, a business saves $0.50-70 per chatbot conversation and increases operational efficiency by 25%. A WordPress chatbot frees up time for your existing agents so you don’t need to expand your team.
- Userlike
- DialogFlow
- Botsify
- IBM Watson
- Acobot
- Snatchbot
- TARS
- Live translations: Break barriers and reach customers in their target language.
- Chat routing: Forward chats to agents with special skills or expertise.
- Canned messages: Quickly answer FAQs that make it past your chatbot.
- Proactive chat: Let customers know you’re available to chat, either with your bot or agents.
- Integrations: Userlike supports popular integrations such as Slack, Trello, Jira, MailChimp and more.
How to add a chatbot to your WordPress site
Here are the general steps you can take to add a chatbot to your WordPress site. Be aware that these steps will vary depending on the provider you choose. But don’t skip this part if you are interested in valuable tips for creating a chatbot.
Choose a WordPress chatbot provider.
You need to choose a chatbot provider that integrates with WordPress through a plugin. There are various providers, so look out for one that offers an AI bot, not just a basic decision tree bot.
We also recommend choosing an AI chatbot that is directly integrated with live chat software. This allows your bot to handover unanswered queries to a human support team member. We list a variety of recommendations for the best WordPress chatbot plugins below!
Create your AI chatbot.
Give your chatbot a catchy name and choose an eye-catching (and brand/audience appropriate) avatar. If you’re using it in combination with your live chat software, like Userlike, choose when and where you want your chatbot to handle chats. For example, as a first line of support on your homepage or outside of business hours.
Integrate your AI chatbot via plugin.
Some chatbot providers have their own custom WordPress plugin you can add in your Dashboard. You can also add a plugin that supports custom HTML, CS and JS code. Providers outline the steps you need to take, so use their documentation to get set up.
Test and launch your AI chatbot.
Some providers let you test your chatbot within their software without adding it to your website. Other providers can be tested via a soft launch on one of your WordPress website pages. Make sure to test it from a technical and user perspective.
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Download for free7 best WordPress chatbot providers
Here’s an overview of our choice of AI chatbots for WordPress. We excluded free plugins because they are too limited in their capabilities and lack the professional AI features customers expect.
A modern AI chatbot that supports unlimited messages typically starts at $100 to $500 per month.
| Userlike | DialogFlow | Botsify | IBM Watson | Acobot | Snatchbot | TARS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI chatbot | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Integrated live chat | ✅ | 🆇 | 🆇 | 🆇 | 🆇 | ✅ | ✅ |
| Bot-human handover | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Live translations | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | 🆇 | Requires plugin | 🆇 |
| Smart FAQ page | ✅ | 🆇 | 🆇 | 🆇 | 🆇 | 🆇 | 🆇 |
| Compatible messaging apps | Website, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Threema, SMS | WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Threema, SMS | WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Threema, SMS | Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS | Website | Facebook Messenger, Viber, Slack, email | Website, WhatsApp |
| Price | Starts at €200 for 250 monthly AI chatbot and Smart FAQ conversations | Standard plan: $0.002 for 1,000+ inquiries. Enterprise plan: must inquire | $49 for limited plan, $149 for unlimited users + $25 a/month per additional chatbot | $140 starting cost, $14 for every 100 additional monthly users | $99 for 5k leads, $0.02 charge for each additional lead. $1k pricing cap per month | $199 for 75k messages and advanced features (excl. custom integrations) | $83.25 for 5 chatbots, 1k chats, $10 per 100 additional chats |
Userlike offers a rare combination of sophisticated AI features and customer messaging software. There’s no need to integrate it with outside live chat software — everything you need is built into one application.
Our AI chatbot uses natural language processing and understanding to interact with users and is easily controllable via your live chat dashboard — you can monitor your chatbots conversations just like the ones from your human support agents.
Users can restart conversations from where they left off, and the chatbot can display button options and carousels to help customers quickly find what they’re looking for.
In-chat media also makes it easy for your bot to send important documents - such as insurance applications and invoices - or a catalog of your products.
Userlike has its own WordPress plugin, and the chatbot (plus Smart FAQ ) can be added via javascript code.
Google’s chatbot builder, DialogFlow, lets you create custom intents and integrates with your social media and other tools. Their conversational AI chatbot uses Google’s machine learning technology to understand and interpret customer inquiries.
To get started, create a DialogFlow account, build your chatbot and add it to your WordPress account via plugin, such as Social Intent’s Live Chat plugin.
With your Botsify account, you can create an AI chatbot without code, similar to Userlike. Instead, you use “stories” to add bot responses and media blocks. When you’re done building your bot, you can test it directly in the software before starting the installation process.
Botsify has their own WordPress plugin, which you can use to input the API key they provide.
You can create a WordPress chatbot with IBM Watson’s Workspace. You’ll create intents, entities and dialog to train Watson to understand different types of requests. These are often short, easily digestible questions and answers.
It’s a customizable NLP/NLU solution that you can build in minutes. IBM provides its own WordPress plugin and supports other integrations like voice calls, live chat and more.
This self-sufficient bot teaches itself so companies don't need a developer to get started. Once the chatbot is integrated, it scans and learns your WordPress site. Whenever you make an update, it relearns your data.
You can also use Acobot for assisted shopping and share discount codes. After the chat, it automatically sends follow-up emails to the customer. It has its own WordPress plugin, so getting set up is quick.
With Snatchbot, you can build your AI chatbot from scratch or use one of their premade templates. These range from job to industry-specific and come with clever features, such as arithmetic for calculating loans and more.
You add your Snatchbot code as a custom HTML under “Widgets.” Here, you can choose where it'll be placed on your website. You can even add your chatbot on multiple pages of your WordPress site.
Chatbot builder TARS is an omnichannel solution for WordPress websites. You can reach customers outside of your website to re-engage them from campaigns and more.
TARS allows you to build your chatbot from scratch or use one of their hundreds of templates, which are ideal for teams with less technical experience. It even has its own plugin so getting set up is simple.
Create your WordPress chatbot with Userlike
With Userlike, an AI WordPress chatbot is just one of many intelligent automation tools we offer as part of our software. The beauty of our solution is that you only need to edit your central knowledge base to be able to provide consistently accurate information via your AI chatbot and Smart FAQ page.
With our Smart FAQ feature, the AI predicts customer’s questions as they’re typing them into the search bar. This is helpful if customers don’t quite know how to phrase their inquiry and to give them quick answers without needing to contact your agents.
Over time, the knowledge base, and subsequently your AI chatbot and Smart FAQ, will grow and improve its accuracy on its own.
Our AI features are offered in combination with Userlike website chat, which also has nifty features that save your agents time and effort:
Sign up for Userlike to test our live chat on your WordPress website for free. You’ll get all the benefits of our Team plan for two weeks before your account automatically switches to the free version.
If you want to learn more about the long-term benefits of using a combination of automation and live chat support, talk to our team on our website to learn more about our WordPress chatbot options! 🤖
