Provide live WordPress support? Who’s got the time? You’re a developer, so you focus on developing.

We hear you, but we also know what it takes to provide a healthy customer service experience, especially when it comes to a platform as dynamic as WordPress.

As a WordPress developer, your business could exponentially advance by providing live WordPress support to your customers. The bottom line benefits are unparalleled and you’ll likely be immediately distinguished from your less service-oriented competitors.

In this article, you’ll discover how to add value to the WordPress community while building trust in your theme and building customer loyalty.

What Do We Mean by Live WordPress Support?

First let’s define what we’re talking about when we say “live WordPress support.” Here we’re primarily referring to over-the-phone or online chat help that’s immediately available to answer both general WordPress questions and theme-specific issues.

Psst… a note on live chat support…

It’s been recently shown that “live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone. So, we’re obviously fans of providing live chat. But what’s most important is offering some form (any form!) of live WordPress support.

Source: econsultancy.com

Providing this level of personalized phone or WordPress chat support isn’t merely a way to provide WordPress help for beginners. It’s a way to discover, learn, and grow your business.

8 Reasons You Should Offer Live WordPress Support

Developer sites that deliver live WordPress support spark sales and engagement by giving your customer experience a positive boost. You win and so do your customers.

Sounds good, right? Here’s how it all goes down:

1. Find and fix problems with your theme faster.

Think your theme is invincible? Think again. When you’re open to hearing from your users, and provide them ways to directly engage with you, you open your work to consistent improvement.

• Get notified fast. Find problems the moment they’re discovered and drastically reduce lag time between finding a bug and fixing it.
• Prevent misplaced blame. Finding and fixing issues fast means you can save yourself from misplaced blame. Know and report right away on external issues and user errors. After all, you’ve got a rep to protect!
• Fix bugs and implement critical changes faster. If the error is your fault, get it fixed fast and call it a day. Speed counts when working to build consumer loyalty.

2. Establish your authority as a WordPress developer.

Help out and be a leader! Building industry authority is a great way to develop trust and be generally awesome.

You have far more experience than the majority of WordPress users. We suggest you use that knowledge to provide useful advice to WordPress beginners. Newbies, and even more advanced users, will begin to appreciate your knowledge as you become a more established thought-leader in the digital WordPress space. How do you do this?

• Answer frequently-asked WordPress questions.
• Answer specific questions about your theme and other themes.
• Build trust with your customers and they will likely advocate for you in digital forums, blog posts, and social media outlets.

Engage your customers by being present, listening, and responding to their needs.

3. Learn about your audience and find direction for future projects.

It’s easy to think we know our customers well. But unless we ask them what they want, we’re really only guessing.

By providing live WordPress support, you’ll directly connect with your customers in a more authentic way. This can be extremely beneficial as you begin to anticipate customer needs and challenges.

Pay attention to what’s needed or missing, and learn which features matter most. Track trends to get your finger on the pulse of what solutions are truly necessary as you collect feedback and insight to guide future projects.

4. Provide added product value.

Providing a gorgeous theme, loaded with incredible features, is a pretty big deal. But when you top that off by offering live WordPress support, you rise above and beyond your competition.

Live support is a featured selling point and should be treated as such. Add value to your theme and assure new customers by letting them know you’ve got their back, should they run into any potential issues.

Remember: 86% of paying customers will pay even more for a better customer service experience, so use this WordPress support feature for what it is — a key selling point.

Source: American Express

5. Add an additional (and more direct) marketing channel.

Email, social media, and other methods of digital marketing are key components of any developer’s sales process. Live chat and support are often bucketed in their own category and overlooked as a potential marketing channel.

The reality, however, is that live chat directly engages the customer and provides a prime opportunity to suggest better products. Live WordPress support grants you the perfect opportunity to more directly explain the benefits of these products and how they may help your customers.

6. Encourage people to learn WordPress.

Do something good and teach the masses (and be rewarded for it)! Help users learn WordPress and, in turn, eventually rely on you and your WordPress themes.

As you develop your messaging and build popularity through thought-leadership, people will continue to use your products and share them.

7. Help people find the right tools to accomplish their goals.

Consider positioning yourself and your brand in a way that lets users know you’re available to deliver expert advice and gentle guidance.

Point people to the themes that best match their unique ideas. Help them find the features they need. It may be useful for you as a developer to think of every website made with your theme as a portfolio of your work and products.

Each of these individual websites may be viewed as a marketing tool for self-promotion, so it’s in your best interest to help people use best practices to, in a way, display your work. Plus, the better the end result, the more likely users are to advocate for you and for your themes.

8. How Do You Scale It?

As you first kick off your live WordPress support efforts, you may be able to manage the inquiries as they begin to trickle in. But if you’re doing it right, your customer connections will grow at an exponential rate.

The good news is that if you’re concerned about scaling, your business is growing.

You have a few options when it comes to managing your live WordPress support:

1. Do-it-yourself.
2. Hire a full-time team member or freelancer.
3. Promote WP Live.

DIY

Combined, here’s a list of various ways you and your team may choose to deliver live WordPress support:

• Offer WordPress chat
• Create a WordPress support hotline
• Provide WordPress help for beginners
• Include a WordPress support phone number on your website
• Consider offering paid WordPress support
• Host and facilitate a WordPress forum
• Engage or offer your own blogger support

Of course you can pick and choose where to start, but to continue to grow your business, you definitely want to consider this entire list.

If you think you really can do-it-yourself, go for it! This is always the least expensive option, but you may need to re-evaluate this responsibility as it begins to suck up more time and affect the quality of your customer service.

You may find that your time is better served working on development. Developers and customer service professionals may not always have the same skill sets, so it’s important to consider bringing someone on board who knows the drill.

Hire a full-time team member or freelancer.

Bringing someone on board full-time is always an option, but obvious cost-benefits need to be calculated first. Having a dedicated live support person in place is a wise move for both consistency and building ongoing customer relationships.

An outsourced freelancer may accomplish this as well, but without proper guidance this person may not be as aligned with your company work ethic, policies, and day-to-day activities.

Engage WP Live.

WP Live is an already assembled team of WordPress support experts at your service. Guess what? If you’re selling with MOJO Marketplace, you get access to WP Live as a HUGE perk!

Our experts are standing by to assist with all of the frequently-asked WordPress questions, and we can direct specific theme issues to you. This way you can personalize your responses and promote your products when you want, the way you want. With a focus on providing WordPress chat support, WP Live gives you (and your customers) immediate access to an experienced and knowledgeable team of cost-effective WordPress subject matter experts.

On top of that, if you promote WP Live as a service through your website, you have a win-win-win situation.

• First, you can provide excellent support to your customers without spending money or stealing developer time.
• Second, you won’t need to address common user issues with WordPress. You’ll be able to focus on issues specific to your themes.
• And finally, you can earn extra money as a MOJO affiliate by hosting links or ads for WP Live on your site.

To become a MOJO Marketplace affiliate and earn money promoting WP Live while providing unparalleled support to your customers, sign up here.

Be the Trusted Thought-Leader You Always Wanted to Be!

How you do it is up to you, as long as you do it. If you’re not providing some form of live WordPress support, you’re missing out on countless ways to add value to the WordPress community and improve your products.

Let’s recap the benefits of including live WordPress support:

• Blow away your competition.
• Boost your bottom line.
• Build your customer base and outreach.
• Improve your digital portfolio.
• Gain insights directly from the source to improve and guide your development skills and business growth.

And if nothing else, just help some people out.