HelpCrunch – Live Chat, Chatbot & Knowledge Base for Customer Service vs LobbyChat

Take your customer support to the next level with the HelpCrunch WordPress plugin. Do you think it’s a tough nut to crack? Not at all! Thanks to our full-house solution, you can: Deliver second-to-none customer service Chat with website visitors in real time Automate routine tasks with chatbot Manage conversations from Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, or Viber by integrating them with HelpCrunch Catch valuable leads’ attention Encourage customer self-service with a multilingual knowledge base But that’s just scratching the surface. Let’s take a deeper look at HelpCrunch’s advanced toolset. 💬 LIVE CHAT Being the platform’s flagship feature, live chat helps you solve customers’ queries like a pro, acquire more clients and process requests in the nick of time. Auto messages for reaching out to clients proactively based on their behavior, e.g. exit intent time, time on page, last visit, etc. In-app messages for targeting users and educating them about your product or service, for instance during onboarding, upselling, feedback gathering, etc. Canned messages for streamlining service reps’ workflow. Create answers for FAQs beforehand and use them in live chat or chatbot conversations any time you need to be more productive. Knowledge base integration for making clients’ lives easier. They can search for the information without waiting for a rep’s reply, or you can send them a knowledge base article right from the live chat window. Live chat widget customization for sticking to your brand’s identity. Tweak the live chat button, choose its color scheme, add agent avatars, and do so much more. Reports for tracking team’s performance, customer satisfaction rate, first resolution time, and other metrics. Assignment rules for automating and assigning chats or tags for easier workflow. Round-robin chat assignment for distributing new chats between your team members equally. Live chat transcripts for sending the entire conversation to clients so that they have everything at their fingertips. LIVE CHAT INSTALLATION PROCESS You don’t have to be a mastermind to add the HelpCrunch live chat on your WordPress-powered website. Just follow this step-by-step instruction: STEP 1. Log into your WordPress account. STEP 2. Find the Plugins section and press Add new. STEP 3. In the Search box, type in HelpCrunch. STEP 4. Hit Install and Activate. STEP 5. Log in to your HelpCrunch account in a separate browser tab. STEP 6. Go to Settings → Channels → Website Widgets and choose the widget you’d like to install on your WordPress website. STEP 7. You will be redirected to the Installation page. Select WordPress installation guide and copy the code snippet from the HTML box. STEP 8. Go back to your WordPress account and find the HelpCrunch live chat widget under installed plugins. Open plugin Settings. STEP 9. Paste the copied HelpCrunch code snippet into the HelpCrunch Code field and save changes. Now our live chat widget is displayed in the bottom right corner of your website. If you have any problems with the setup, please check the installation guide. If you have any questions, just log in to your HelpCrunch account and chat with us. We’ll help you with everything 🤗 📱 MESSENGERS INTEGRATION Your customer service can be a great differentiator and help you stand out from the competition. Delighting your customers should be a top priority, and one of the best ways to achieve this is by communicating with them in the most convenient way possible. Luckily, HelpCrunch integrates with a range of popular messaging applications, such as: Facebook Messenger Instagram Telegram Viber WhatsApp (coming soon) Such integration can help you provide a seamless customer experience. No matter which channels your customers are using to interact with your business, you will be providing the best possible customer service. Furthermore, HelpCrunch can help your team save a lot of time and effort. Our shared inbox provides an intuitive interface for managing all customer requests from multiple channels in one place, without having to switch between different tools. 🤖 CHATBOT The new feature will ease the burden of your groovy tasks. Our chatbot is called HelpBot and has the power to support users 24/7, catch and qualify valuable leads, and encourage customer self-service. Do all chatbots have a seamless installation process? The one from HelpCrunch does! Our chatbot builder is completely code-free, so you can set it up on your website in minutes. Thanks to the pre-made templates, you can decide on the goal your bot will pursue: Collect contact details Qualify leads Offer a special discount Collect details about issues upfront Route new chats to the dedicated team Or create your own template from scratch! HelpCrunch’s chatbot is really cool because it works not only in the live chat widget, but also in popular messengers such as Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and Viber. You might think that chatbots are a tricky feature to install. Check out our article where we shared all the ins and outs of creating your first flow. Trust us: implementing chatbots has never been that easy! 📚 KNOWLEDGE BASE Knowledge base software from HelpCrunch allows you to build a resource hub of your dreams without much hassle. Not only is it SEO-optimized but also feature-rich and multilanguage. With just a few clicks, you can create a well-oiled information hierarchy with a user-friendly WYSIWYG editor: draft new articles, add categories, and develop sections in your knowledge base. All articles are marked as “Draft” by default at the editing stage, so you can decide when it goes public. A “Preview” option is also available here: check your article first and post it! 📨 EMAIL AUTOMATION Whether you have a newsletter coming up or a one-time offer – take advantage of email marketing feature from HelpCrunch: Share company news and product announcements with your clients via perfectly built emails. Automate your marketing campaigns with email auto messages, engage existing users, and re-engage inactive ones. Create your own custom email templates or leverage ours. Monitor campaign performance with in-depth analytics. Set up email notifications not to miss a single letter when your team is offline. Send manual or auto follow-ups every time your message is unseen. Set up email forwarding to put an end to unread messages once and for all. 💁🏻‍♂️ SHARED INBOX Multi-channel customer support is now becoming a reality with the HelpCrunch shared inbox solution. No matter the size of your team, you can ease its life with a shared inbox. Owing to this helpful feature, everything is gathered under the same roof. Have your staff manage incoming conversations from live chat, social media, chatbots, and email together, leave dialogue private notes for each other, and more. Detailed customer profiles won’t let you forget a single detail about a client because such data as phone number, location, or device is safely kept. With our shared inbox, one customer service agent can handle up to 5 chats simultaneously thanks to such powerful options as tagging, rich customer data, private notes, snoozing chats for later, or assigning conversations (both manually and automatically). Live reports & analytics let you gauge your team’s productivity at a glance. Just choose a period of time and see where you need to improve your strategy. By the way, to always keep your finger on the pulse, use conversation rating to assess customer experience after closing a live chat. 🖼 POPUPS Do you want to catch your website visitors’ attention in a smarter way though have no clue how? HelpCrunch has! With our popup builder, you can be sure that no information will slip through the cracks. It offers everything you have ever wished for a perfect engagement action plan: Full customization including the opportunity to change popup appearance (popup templates, texts, animations, color schemes, and more) so that your popup is more noticeable. Popup display options: there are rules to choose from, such as browser language, current URL, number of page views, etc. Set them up and shoot a popup at the right time for the right audience to get maximum results. Live reports for optimizing popup real-time performance as people click on it. 🔗 OTHER INTEGRATIONS There is also a massive integration list to integrate HelpCrunch with your favorite tools (more integrations are on their way, so stay tuned!): Zapier Slack Google Tag Manager Google Analytics Shopify Squarespace Jimdo 3DCart Big Cartel SOUNDS INTRIGUING? BOOK A DEMO TO DISCUSS THE DETAILS AND START YOUR JOURNEY WITH HELPCRUNCH! CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS ABOUT HELPCRUNCH – THE ONE-STOP PLATFORM FOR BUILDING STRONG RELATIONSHIPS WITH CLIENTS “HelpCrunch enabled us to manage our customer support and email automation via one platform which led to improving customer support performance by 40%.” — Valery Kurilov, CEO @ SE Ranking “We had a call info line we wanted to get rid of and have everything online in the live chat. So, that was the reason why we switched to HelpCrunch.” — Jan Střecha, Marketing Manager @ Rekola “Once we started using HelpCrunch software, we were able to return €14.8 euros on each €1 paid for HelpCrunch.” — Fitlap “Nobody’s doing the GDPR preparations the right way. We wanted to make sure we’re ready for it, so it was crucial for us to choose a compliant tool and not to worry about legal complications afterward.” — Max Bondarenko, CMO @ Revenue Grid

LobbyChat is a lightweight live-chat shoutbox you can drop into any WordPress page or sidebar with a single shortcode. Built for communities — fan sites, forums, fandoms, classrooms, internal teams — where you want a casual, always-on group chat without bolting on Slack or Discord. What you get Live chat feed with auto-refresh (configurable polling interval — no WebSocket server required) Guest posting — visitors can chat with just a display name, no signup wall Emoji reactions on every message — 👍 ❤️ 😂 🔥 🎉 Link previews for YouTube and any URL with Open Graph tags @mention highlighting — @username gets visually picked out Pinned messages — moderators can pin one important message above the feed Online presence — live count of members, guests, and search-engine bots in the room Moderator role — add a “LobbyChat Moderator” role to any user for pin/delete powers Reporting + auto-hide — 5 reports on a message and it’s hidden automatically Word blocklist for basic profanity filtering Rate limiting built in — separate cooldowns for guests vs members Fullscreen mode + collapse toggle Sound notification for new messages (toggleable per-visitor) Mobile responsive Optional: AI Chat Companion LobbyChat ships with an optional AI bot you can drop into your chat. The bot uses your own API keys — you bring your own Google Gemini key (the free tier works) or OpenAI key. The plugin does not route requests through any third-party server. Bring-your-own-key — Gemini (free tier) or OpenAI (paid) Configurable persona — name, system prompt, custom personality Smart triggers — replies to @mentions always; questions usually; random messages occasionally (all configurable) Hard rate limits — daily and hourly caps protect against runaway API costs Active-hours window — bot only chats during the hours you specify One-click test in the admin to verify the bot can post Privacy & data LobbyChat does not call any third-party server by default. The only network calls are: Fetching link previews when a user shares a URL (request goes from your server to that URL) Calling Google Gemini or OpenAI only if you explicitly enable the AI bot and provide an API key No telemetry, no analytics, no “phone home.” All data lives in your own wp_lobbychat* tables. Try it live See LobbyChat running in production at bejaunty.com/plugins/lobbychat. Roadmap LobbyChat is the free, standalone version. Premium add-ons with gaming-community features — looking-for-group buttons, platform tags, profile-card integration, and richer moderation tools — are in development. Updates and announcements at bejaunty.com. Support development LobbyChat is free and developed in spare time. If it helps your community, you can support development at wise.com/pay/me/asadk372. Every bit is appreciated. ♥ Usage After activating, drop this shortcode into any page, post, or text widget: [lobbychat] Then visit Settings → LobbyChat to configure rate limits, blocklist, and other options. For the AI bot, see Settings → LobbyChat AI Bot. Developer hooks LobbyChat exposes several filters and actions for theme/plugin developers: lobbychat_after_send — action, fires after a message is saved. do_action('lobbychat_after_send', $user_id, $message_id, $row) — the third arg is the database row object. lobbychat_profile_url — filter, override the URL linked from a username (default: WP author archive) lobbychat_allowed_reactions — filter, override the array of allowed reaction emoji lobbychat_report_threshold — filter, change the auto-hide report threshold (default: 5) lobbychat_emoji_set — filter, customize the array of emoji shown in the picker External services This plugin does not connect to any external service by default. Two optional features may, only when explicitly enabled by the site administrator, contact third-party services: 1. Link previews When the link-sharing feature is enabled (Settings → LobbyChat → “Allow link sharing”, which is on by default), and a logged-in user shares a URL in chat, the plugin’s server fetches that URL once to extract Open Graph / Twitter / metadata for a preview card. What is sent: The HTTP request from your server to the URL the user pasted. The request user-agent identifies as LobbyChatBot/1.0 and includes a link back to your site. When: Only at the moment a user posts a message containing a URL. What is received and stored: Title, description, and image URL extracted from the page’s metadata. Stored in the chat message row in your database. Special handling for YouTube URLs: YouTube URLs are first sent to YouTube’s public oEmbed endpoint (https://www.youtube.com/oembed) to retrieve title and author info. YouTube’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy apply. This feature can be fully disabled by un-checking “Allow link sharing” in plugin settings. 2. Optional AI chat companion When the AI bot is explicitly enabled by the administrator (Settings → LobbyChat AI Bot → “Enable bot”, which is off by default) and the administrator has provided their own API key for one or both of the providers below, chat messages are sent to that provider for the bot to generate replies. Google Gemini API (https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/) * What it is: Google’s generative AI service, used here to produce conversational chat replies. * What is sent: Up to 6 most recent chat messages (sender display name + message text), the bot’s system prompt, and the administrator’s Gemini API key. * When: Only when the administrator has enabled the bot AND a chat message satisfies the bot’s reply-trigger rules (mention, question, or random chance — all configurable). * Terms and privacy: Google APIs Terms of Service, Gemini API Additional Terms, Google Privacy Policy. OpenAI API (https://api.openai.com/) * What it is: OpenAI’s chat completions API, used here as a fallback when Gemini fails or as the primary if only an OpenAI key is configured. * What is sent: Same as Gemini above (recent messages + system prompt + administrator’s OpenAI API key). * When: Same conditions as Gemini above. * Terms and privacy: OpenAI Terms of Use, OpenAI API Data Usage Policies, OpenAI Privacy Policy. The AI bot is disabled by default and will not contact any external service unless the administrator explicitly enables it and provides an API key. 3. Optional Cloudflare Turnstile spam protection When Turnstile is explicitly enabled by the administrator (Settings → LobbyChat → Spam protection, off by default) and a site key and secret key are provided, the plugin uses Cloudflare’s Turnstile service to verify that the person posting is not a bot. Cloudflare Turnstile (https://challenges.cloudflare.com/) * What it is: Cloudflare’s privacy-focused CAPTCHA alternative, used here to block automated spam before a message is posted. * What is sent: When a user submits a message, the Turnstile token generated in their browser plus the user’s IP address are sent from your server to Cloudflare’s siteverify endpoint, along with your secret key, to confirm the token is valid. The browser-side widget also loads Cloudflare’s api.js script from challenges.cloudflare.com. * When: Only when Turnstile is enabled and a user attempts to post a message (optionally limited to guests only). * Terms and privacy: Cloudflare Website Terms of Use, Cloudflare Privacy Policy. Turnstile is disabled by default and will not contact any external service unless the administrator explicitly enables it and provides their own keys.