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

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

Team Messenger is a WordPress plugin that adds secure, real-time messaging for logged-in users. It includes one-to-one chats, group rooms, optional end-to-end encryption for private threads, media uploads with administrator-controlled policies, presence, notification badges, pinned messages, and dedicated interfaces on both the public site and in wp-admin. Technical details and changelog notes may be published on the plugin support page or in the documentation as they are updated. English — Numbered feature list Real-time direct messaging between logged-in WordPress users over the REST API (team_messenger/v1), including pagination for message history. Optional end-to-end encryption (E2E) for direct messages: clients can exchange messages flagged as encrypted, and public keys are stored per user through dedicated REST endpoints (/keys). Group chats remain readable on the server (plaintext on the server side). Full group-chat lifecycle: create, read, update, and delete groups; set a name, description, and group avatar; list members; add or remove members; and promote or demote roles with a PATCH request on members. Rich media in chats: image, video, and audio attachments, plus optional voice messages recorded in the browser (MediaRecorder, typically WebM/WebA) with server-side MIME handling for reliable uploads. Two upload contexts on /media/upload: chat for conversation attachments and avatar for group profile images. Each context has independent size and format rules, which the server enforces. Administrator-configurable media policy: separate maximum file sizes for chat (0.1–100 MB) and group avatars (0.1–50 MB); toggles for allowed chat categories (image / video / audio) and allowed avatar formats (for example JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP). Limits are sent to the client as hints; the server performs the final validation. Flexible storage for uploaded files: attachments can live in the WordPress Media Library or in a plugin-protected directory (.htaccess where applicable). Private-path files are downloaded through an authenticated /media/download/{file} request. “Saved messages” (self-chat): a personal notebook thread in which the current user is both sides, for notes and files. Recent conversations: when no search query is sent, the user list prioritizes people you have messaged recently and does not expose the entire user directory. Privacy-conscious user search: at least three characters are required, and the number of results is capped. Presence (online / last seen): clients send a throttled heartbeat to POST /presence. The last_seen and is_online fields appear in user lists only when the viewer has shared direct-message history with that user or shares a group (privacy-preserving). Notifications: GET /notifications/counts returns separate counts and text previews for new personal and group activity since the last acknowledgment. POST /notifications/ack accepts a scope of all, personal, or group. WordPress admin bar integration: when the toolbar is visible, separate nodes show personal and group chat badges. Dropdowns load preview snippets (periodic polling) and allow clearing notifications by scope. Non-administrators link to the site home; users with manage_options can open the full messenger screen. Dashboard widgets (administrators): two WordPress Dashboard widgets—personal (1:1) and group—provide inline chat with the same REST capabilities as the main messenger (including pins and upload limits). They are visible only to users with manage_options who have not disabled admin chat. Pinned messages: one pin per direct thread (stored in team_messenger_direct_pins) and one per group (pinned_message_id). You can pin or unpin from the floating widget, [team_messenger_web_chat], the admin messenger, and the dashboard widgets. A pinned strip shows a snippet and scrolls to the message. Pins are cleared if the underlying message is deleted. Read state: opening a direct thread marks incoming messages from the partner as read (is_read). For groups, per-user last-read timestamps sync when the thread is opened. Your own outgoing group messages can show read receipts (“sent” vs “read”) when all other members have caught up. Message lifecycle: edit or soft-delete your own messages in direct and group threads (the API supports edit and delete on owned messages). Data retention: a daily scheduled event permanently removes soft-deleted direct and group messages whose deleted_at is older than 30 days (GDPR-oriented housekeeping). Multiple surfaces: a floating chat widget on the front end; a full-page [team_messenger_web_chat] shortcode with configurable HTML fallback for guests; a dedicated admin “Messenger” screen; an optional floating FAB on all wp-admin screens (toggle in settings, respects the per-user “hide admin chat” setting); admin bar badges; and two dashboard widgets for administrators. Customization in settings: primary accent color, widget corner placement, welcome text, shortcode guest content (visual/HTML editor), and a site-wide “show messenger on all wp-admin screens” option. Per-user preferences on the user profile: optionally hide front-end chat (widget and shortcode UI) and/or all wp-admin chat (floating messenger, full messenger page, admin bar nodes, and dashboard widgets). Shortcode pages show a short notice if frontend chat is disabled for that user. Abuse protection: rate limiting on sending messages and on creating groups, to reduce spam and overload. Internationalization: text domain team-messenger. Persian (fa_IR) and other translations can ship in the languages folder. English is the source language. فارسی — فهرست شماره‌دار امکانات ۱. پیام‌رسانی مستقیم (یک‌به‌یک) بین کاربران واردشدهٔ وردپرس از طریق REST API با فضای نام team_messenger/v1 و صفحه‌بندی تاریخچهٔ پیام. ۲. رمزنگاری سرتاسری اختیاری برای گفتگوی خصوصی: می‌توان پیام را با پرچم رمزشده ذخیره کرد؛ کلیدهای عمومی از طریق endpointهای /keys ذخیره و بازیابی می‌شوند. در گفتگوی گروهی، متن روی سرور به‌صورت متن عادی قابل پردازش است. ۳. چرخهٔ کامل مدیریت چت گروهی: ایجاد، ویرایش و حذف گروه؛ تنظیم نام، توضیحات و آواتار گروه؛ فهرست اعضا؛ افزودن یا حذف عضو؛ و تغییر نقش با PATCH روی عضو. ۴. رسانهٔ غنی در گفتگو: تصویر، ویدیو و صوت؛ پیام صوتی با ضبط در مرورگر (معمولاً WebM/WebA) و نرمال‌سازی MIME در سمت سرور. ۵. دو زمینهٔ آپلود در /media/upload: chat برای پیوست گفتگو و avatar برای تصویر پروفایل گروه؛ هر کدام سقف حجم و فرمت مستقل دارند و اعتبارسنجی نهایی در سرور انجام می‌شود. ۶. سیاست رسانه از پنل مدیر: حداکثر حجم جداگانه برای چت (۰٫۱ تا ۱۰۰ مگابایت) و آواتار گروه (۰٫۱ تا ۵۰ مگابایت)؛ امکان روشن یا خاموش کردن دسته‌های مجاز چت و فرمت‌های مجاز آواتار. اعداد به‌صورت راهنما به کلاینت ارسال می‌شوند و تصمیم نهایی با سرور است. ۷. ذخیره‌سازی انعطاف‌پذیر: فایل‌ها می‌توانند در کتابخانهٔ رسانهٔ وردپرس یا در پوشهٔ محافظت‌شدهٔ افزونه (با .htaccess در صورت امکان) قرار بگیرند. برای مسیر اختصاصی، دانلود فقط از طریق /media/download/{file} و برای کاربر احراز هویت‌شده انجام می‌شود. ۸. «پیام‌های ذخیره‌شده» (چت با خود): فضای شخصی برای یادداشت و فایل که کاربر فعلی هر دو طرف گفتگو است. ۹. گفتگوهای اخیر: وقتی جستجویی ارسال نشده باشد، فهرست کاربران کسانی را در اولویت قرار می‌دهد که اخیراً با آن‌ها پیام رد و بدل کرده‌اید و کل دایرکتوری کاربران را نمایش نمی‌دهد. ۱۰. جستجوی کاربر با رعایت حریم خصوصی: حداقل سه کاراکتر لازم است و تعداد نتایج محدود است. ۱۱. حضور (آنلاین / آخرین فعالیت): کلاینت ضربان کنترل‌شده (throttled) به POST /presence می‌فرستد. فیلدهای last_seen و is_online فقط وقتی در فهرست کاربران دیده می‌شوند که بیننده سابقهٔ پیام خصوصی مشترک یا عضویت در یک گروه مشترک با آن کاربر داشته باشد. ۱۲. اعلان‌ها: GET /notifications/counts شمارنده و پیش‌نمایش متن فعالیت شخصی و گروهی را از زمان آخرین تأیید برمی‌گرداند. POST /notifications/ack محدودهٔ all، personal یا group را می‌پذیرد. ۱۳. یکپارچگی با نوار ابزار وردپرس: وقتی نوار ابزار نمایان است، دو گره جدا شمارندهٔ چت شخصی و گروهی را نشان می‌دهند. منوهای کشویی پیش‌نمایش را با polling دوره‌ای بارگذاری می‌کنند و امکان پاک‌سازی اعلان‌ها بر اساس محدوده را دارند. کاربران غیرمدیر به صفحهٔ خانه لینک می‌شوند؛ کاربران دارای manage_options می‌توانند به صفحهٔ کامل پیام‌رسان بروند. ۱۴. ویجت‌های پیشخوان (مدیران): دو ویجت جداگانه در پیشخوان وردپرس—گفتگوی شخصی (یک‌به‌یک) و گروهی—همان قابلیت‌های REST پیام‌رسان اصلی را دارند (از جمله پین و محدودیت آپلود). فقط برای کاربران دارای manage_options که چت مدیریت را غیرفعال نکرده‌اند نمایش داده می‌شوند. ۱۵. پیام پین‌شده: یک پین برای هر گفتگوی دونفره و یک پین برای هر گروه. پین و برداشتن پین از ویجت شناور، شورت‌کد [team_messenger_web_chat]، پیام‌رسان مدیریت و ویجت‌های پیشخوان امکان‌پذیر است. نوار پین تکه‌ای از متن را نشان می‌دهد و به پیام اسکرول می‌کند. اگر پیام اصلی حذف شود، پین نیز برداشته می‌شود. ۱۶. وضعیت خوانده‌شدن: با باز کردن گفتگوی خصوصی، پیام‌های ورودی طرف مقابل به‌صورت is_read علامت می‌خورند. در گروه، مهر زمانی آخرین بازدید هر کاربر همگام می‌شود. برای پیام‌های خروجی خودتان می‌توان رسید «همه خواندند» را وقتی سایر اعضا همگام شده‌اند نشان داد. ۱۷. چرخهٔ پیام: ویرایش یا حذف نرم پیام‌های خودتان در گفتگوی خصوصی و گروهی از طریق API. ۱۸. نگهداری داده: یک رویداد زمان‌بندی‌شدهٔ روزانه پیام‌های حذف‌شدهٔ نرم مستقیم و گروهی را که deleted_at آن‌ها قدیمی‌تر از ۳۰ روز است برای همیشه پاک می‌کند (خانه‌تکانی با رویکرد GDPR). ۱۹. چندین رابط: ویجت شناور در سایت؛ شورت‌کد تمام‌صفحهٔ [team_messenger_web_chat] با محتوای HTML قابل تنظیم برای مهمان؛ صفحهٔ اختصاصی «پیام‌رسان» در مدیریت؛ دکمهٔ شناور اختیاری در تمام صفحات wp-admin (تنظیم سراسری و احترام به خاموش بودن چت مدیریت برای هر کاربر)؛ نشان‌های نوار ابزار؛ و دو ویجت پیشخوان برای مدیران. ۲۰. شخصی‌سازی در تنظیمات: رنگ اصلی تأکید، محل گوشهٔ ویجت، متن خوش‌آمدگویی، محتوای مهمان شورت‌کد (ویرایشگر دیداری/HTML)، و گزینهٔ سراسری «نمایش پیام‌رسان در تمام صفحات wp-admin». ۲۱. ترجیحات هر کاربر در پروفایل: امکان پنهان کردن چت سایت (ویجت و رابط شورت‌کد) و/یا همهٔ چت wp-admin (پیام‌رسان شناور، صفحهٔ کامل پیام‌رسان، گره‌های نوار ابزار و ویجت‌های پیشخوان). اگر چت فرانت‌اند برای آن کاربر خاموش باشد، صفحهٔ شورت‌کد یک اعلان کوتاه نشان می‌دهد. ۲۲. محافظت در برابر سوءاستفاده: محدودیت نرخ ارسال پیام و ایجاد گروه برای کاهش هرزنامه و بار اضافی. ۲۳. چندزبانه: دامنهٔ متن team-messenger؛ ترجمه‌های فارسی (fa_IR) و سایر زبان‌ها می‌توانند از پوشهٔ languages عرضه شوند؛ زبان مبدأ متن‌ها انگلیسی است.