An Introduction to Paldesk: Simplifying Your Customer Communication Process

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It’s hard to overstate the importance of effective, prompt, and friendly customer service. The way you interact with both potential and existing customers will do a lot to determine how much they trust you, and whether they decide to covert. Therefore, it’s an aspect of your business that you’ll want to take very seriously.

At the same time, providing customer service both well and efficiently can be a challenge. That’s especially true once your company starts to grow, and if you offer multiple communication channels. Fortunately, a tool like Paldesk can help you manage all of your communication needs more easily. This live chat and help desk software offers numerous benefits to you and your customers.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at Paldesk and what it can do. Before that, let’s chat briefly about why you might need a solution like this in the first place!

The Need for a Better Customer Service Solution

It’s easy to say that customer service matters – but just how vital is it? To answer that question, let’s look at a few numbers:

It costs about 6-7x more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.
Companies that offer a thorough and well-designed customer service program have a 92% retention rate.
75% of customers are expecting a consistent experience, no matter where they reach out to you.

People are looking for more than just answers to their questions. They want an easy, seamless customer service experience that gets them what they need quickly. Offering this is an investment well worth making, as it will help you keep buyers around long after that first purchase.

It’s also smart to provide multiple channels for customer communication. The more places where you’re available, the simpler it will be for each individual to get in touch via their favorite method. For you, however, keeping up with all those channels and providing a consistent experience can be hard. Fortunately, there are tools that can help alleviate that problem significantly.

An Introduction to Paldesk

Paldesk is a powerful live chat and help desk platform:

The Paldesk website's home page.

The goal of this software is to provide a way for businesses to offer top-notch customer service, in as many places as possible. It does this by enabling you to connect all of your communication channels to a single dashboard, and manage them simultaneously.

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This solution comes with many key features. It:

Provides a dashboard where you can see, respond to, and manage all of your customers’ messages
Works with web chat, various mobile apps, email, Facebook, Twitter, Viber, Slack, and more
Includes a fully-functional ticketing system
Lets you easily set up business hours, and create custom ‘away’ and ‘offline’ messages
Enables you to set up predefined responses to specific questions, saving time for your support team
Offers statistics, filters, conversation histories, weekly summaries, and other functionality to help you track and improve your service
Makes it simple to customize the look of the front-facing interface customers will see

For you, Paldesk can save a lot of time, and ensure that you know about each customer query the moment it’s received. For your customers, it helps you provide a more streamlined and consistent experience, regardless of the channels they use.

You can even try out this software without risking a thing. There’s a free plan that allows for multiple channels and unlimited agents, and includes most of the platform’s core features. If you want a few more perks, such as multi-widget support and advanced integrations, you’ll just have to spend $12 per agent, per month. You can also get a custom solution that’s configured to your exact needs.

Best of all, Paldesk integrates with many other popular platforms. This includes Hubspot, MailChimp, Zapier – and most importantly, WordPress.

How to Use Paldesk on Your WordPress Site

If you have a WordPress site, you probably use it as the central hub for running your business. This is easy, since WordPress integrates with a wide range of helpful tools. As we’ve mentioned, that includes Paldesk.

To integrate Paldesk with WordPress, you’ll first need to sign up for one of the plans described above. Then, you can download and install the free Paldesk plugin:

The plugin to integrate Paldesk with WordPress.

After activating the plugin, you’ll find a new Paldesk tab in your dashboard, where you’ll be prompted to connect your account:

The Paldesk plugin's options.

Follow the instructions on this page to find and paste in your unique API key. Then save your changes. Now, if you check out your site on the front end, you’ll find the Paldesk chat widget in the bottom-right corner of each page:

Visitors to your site will be able to get in touch using this widget whenever they like. Their messages will appear in your Paldesk dashboard, and you can manage them alongside all of your other customer communication channels.

It’s also worth noting that you can return to the Paldesk tab in your dashboard and expand the Advanced Users section:

Customizing the Paldesk widget with CSS.

Here, you can make custom changes to your chat widget’s CSS. This will enable you (or your developer) to customize the front-end appearance of the chat window as much as you’d like.

Conclusion

Providing quality customer service is always going to require an investment of time and resources. However, you can minimize the effect this has on your business, by using the right tools to streamline and simplify the process.

That’s exactly what Paldesk can do for your company. It brings together all your customer communication in one convenient location, and lets you and your support agents respond to messages promptly. If you offer multiple support channels, this is a tool well worth checking out – and it even integrates with your WordPress website.

Have you tried Paldesk, and what did you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.