Since WordPress is a very versatile platform, you may have readers or users that wish to get in contact with you, either to discuss a topic or possibly to complete a business transaction they are having issues with.
Regardless of the purpose of contact, it’s extremely important to make sure they have an easy way to get a hold of you.

The safest way to let readers contact you with ease, is using contact related plugins (as opposed to publishing your email address or phone number as an individual).
Here’s a list of some easy contact plugins I find effective:

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a really simple contact form without bells and whistles. If you’re looking for an easy plugin that doesn’t have much to manage, then this is it. You can manage multiple forms as well as design the forms themselves. It also supports AJAX, akismet filtering and has a CAPTCHA for added security. Here’s a quick video if you’re interested.

Support Tickets

Support Tickets is a plugin that allows you to have a ticket system (for customer service on your website). This way the users can send you a ticket with the issues that they are having, helping you avoid situations when you cannot keep track of requests and questions through tons of emails that may get sent to your spam folder. This was actually based on Contact Form 7 made by the same developer. It also has multilingual support for customers/users that may be located in various areas of the world.

WATS Going On

WATS (also known as WordPress Advanced Ticket System) is another plugin with ticket submission that turns your WordPress site into its own little CRM. In the backend, there’s an administration panel which has the ticket submission module, and the front end has associated pages creation. A little more advanced than the “Support Tickets” plugin if you are looked for extra ‘oomph’…I guess you would say.

WordPress-to-lead

WordPress-to-lead integrates with the Salesforce CRM. It eliminates the need to physically put your contact leads into a CRM yourself. When you use WordPress-to-lead, it will automatically take the user data and link it into the Salesforce CRM…never to be eaten alive by your spam folder again! Combine with the CRM, in addition to syncing easily with various email systems (Outlook, Gmail etc), it also keeps track of your interactions and conversions. Yoast has a more in-depth explanation because there’s simply too much to list here.

Live Chat for WordPress

Last, but certainly not least, is the Live Chat software plugin.
This plugin provides direct chat abilities with your users and readers whenever you’re logged on. It helps you to increase conversions (because some people will leave if they can’t make contact to ask a question) and also kills the need to put your phone number on your website if you’re an individual business. For larger companies, this will allow your sales people to be in contact with users throughout the day.
There’s also a traffic monitoring system as well as analytics and reporting- so you can both track users in real time and look back into the number of chat sessions, invitations and time spent interacting with the customer.

Most of these plugins can be used simultaneously (except the 2 ticket system plugins) and can give your users/readers a pleasant experience on their end. Of course, with all of these added, you also won’t have an excuse to ‘ignore’ an unpleasant or unsatisfied customer. Use with caution :)

PG

Selena Narayanasamy An avid lover of all things caffeine, Selena Narayanasamy currently does SEO and is a social media marketer/analyst as well as a writer. She has multiple degrees in business, marketing and finance. Along with all this, she also writes for Search Engine Journal and is growing Esvienne, her own personal social media and tech blog. @esvienne

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