In eCommerce, being available around the clock to answer any questions of users, customers, and visitors isn’t just a good service. This is what keeps the business alive. A study conducted by HubSpot in 2023 found that 90% of customers love to have an immediate response, while 60% of them define immediate as within 10 minutes.
However, customers have no fixed time. They can send you messages anytime, whether it's early morning or midnight. They may even come from different time zones. But it may not be possible for you to stay active always. So, you might be wondering if there is any way to offer 24/7 customer support!
If your site is built on WordPress, using the weDocs plugin could be a great solution. weDocs is actually a knowledge base plugin. It has numerous useful options by which you can create a chatbot that will provide instant replies to the customers, no matter when they ask.
In this article, we'll cover a comprehensive guide and discussion on how to use weDocs for 24/7 eCommerce customer support.
Challenges of 24/7 Customer Support in eCommerce: Why It Matters
Running an eCommerce business means customers may come to shop your products at any time, even at midnight. If it's a dropshipping store and selling products worldwide, customers may visit your site from various time zones. Someone may message you for information while you are enjoying a pleasant time with your family.
Besides, there are many challenges involved with providing real-time customer service on eCommerce websites. Take a look at them below:
- High volume of support tickets during peak hours
- Time zone differences that create support gaps
- Limited in-house staff to cover all hours
- Costly subscription fees for live chat tools
- Dependence on external call centers with inconsistent quality
- Difficulty maintaining fast, helpful responses at all times
As a result, it may not be possible for you to respond to their questions immediately, which can lead you to lose many valuable customers. According to a report from Econsultancy, 79% of shoppers abandon their carts because their questions go unanswered.
This is where weDocs could be a practical solution. With this plugin, you can set up a self-service knowledge base. Once the knowledge base is set up, customers will be able to instantly find answers to their queries themselves through various easy-to-search options.
So, live agents aren't required for 24/7. We'll discuss more about weDocs in the following sections.
What Is weDocs? Some of Its Stand-Out Features
weDocs is a WordPress plugin that helps you build a knowledge base or help center right inside your website. This can give customers a way to find answers on their own, without needing to open a support ticket. Whether you sell physical products through WooCommerce, you can create and organize helpful content so it can be easily found with the weDocs plugin.
You can start with the free version initially and upgrade to the Pro version for more advanced tools and features, depending on what you need.
- Drag-and-Drop Interface: You can add and organize content in different sections using the drag-and-drop interface of the plugin.
- AI Chatbot (Pro): Using the ChatGPT technology, it pulls answers from your documentation based on users' queries and presents them instantly.
- Assistant Widget: Based on queries, it pulls and presents the relevant post to the users.
- Inline Form: The chat box has a contact form where you can send the site owners your detailed requirements so they can reply with quotations later.
- Knowledge Base Search Bar: This search bar can instantly find suitable knowledge base posts based on your keywords.
- Multilingual Support: Works with Weglot to serve content in over 100 languages. So, you can serve audiences globally with the plugin.
- Custom Design: Style your knowledge base to match your site’s look and feel.
weDocs has been developed and maintained by weDevs and is trusted by thousands of users. So, you don't have to worry about its support and reliability issues. In the following section, we'll discuss the above-mentioned features in detail.
Why weDocs Excels for 24/7 eCommerce Support
weDocs has been designed and developed to overcome customer support-related challenges involved with various business types, including eCommerce. Let's take a look at how the above-mentioned makes weDocs a considerable customer support plugin. Keep reading!
1. Created Detailed Knowledge Base
You don’t need any technical knowledge to create and manage support content with the weDocs plugin. As already said, the plugin has a drag-and-drop interface. You can organize your knowledge base content in a three-level nested hierarchy to keep everything well-structured and easy to navigate.
So, whether you want to write how-to guides, FAQ pages, product setup instructions, refund policies, or troubleshooting steps, you can present all your information clearly with the plugin. You can also format content using headings, bullet points, and images to make articles easier to read.
Some types of content/posts you can add to the knowledge base of your eCommerce site are:
- Shipping & Delivery FAQs: Address common questions like delivery timelines, shipping zones, and tracking orders.
- Return & Refund Policies: Outline step-by-step return processes, eligibility criteria, and refund timeframes.
- Product Guides & Tutorials: Help customers use your products correctly with detailed instructions and visuals.
- Account Management Help: Explain how users can update their details, change passwords, or manage subscriptions.
- Troubleshooting Articles: Provide fixes for common technical or product-related issues to reduce support tickets.
- Store Policies & Terms: Centralize your privacy policies, terms of service, and warranties in one place.
Whenever needed, you can easily update any content by opening the respective knowledge base posts. In addition to this content, you can add more posts and content to your knowledge as mentioned below.
| Pre-Sale Support Pages | Ongoing Sale Support Pages | After-Sale Support Pages |
| 1. How to Place an Order 2. Product Features 3. Applying Coupons & Discounts 4. Accepted Payment Methods 5. Shipping Options 6. Pricing & Taxes Explained 7. Bulk Orders & B2B Sales 8. Sales Events & Promotions 9. Warranty Coverage | 1. Changing or Editing an Order 2. Shipping Delays or Issues 3. Contacting the Sales Team 4. Gifting Options & Gift Cards | 1. Return & Refund Policy 2. How to Initiate a Return 3. Refund Eligibility 4. Exchange Policy 5. Order Cancellation Guide 6. Late or Missing Refunds 7. Non-Returnable Items 8. Damaged or Defective Items |
2. AI-Powered Chatbot
With the Pro version of weDocs, you’ll have access to the AI-powered chatbot built on ChatGPT. We have already talked about it a bit above. It works around the clock, providing instant answers to customer queries by pulling information directly from your published documentation.
So instead of waiting for a support agent, customers can get quick and reliable help anytime, whether it’s day or night. The chatbot is designed to understand context and improve over time. As you update or expand your knowledge base, it becomes more accurate in its responses.
It’s especially useful for common questions about shipping, returns, product details, or store policies.
3. Assistant Widget
This feature is available in the free version, which comes with the chatbox. It offers an Ajax-powered live search box where users can type and submit their desired queries. Based on these, the widget immediately showcases the relevant posts available in the knowledge base.
This proactive support approach helps guide users to the answers even if they’re not sure what to search for. This feature can really enhance the browsing experience of your potential customers. Because in today's AI-dominated world, where finding anything is much easier, if users have to spend a long time searching for necessary content after coming to your website, then it’s truly disappointing.
4. Floating Contact Form
The floating contact form appears within the chat box and next to the assistant widget section. It offers a simple way for customers to reach out when they can't find what they need through self-service. The form is easily accessible and allows customers to submit questions directly from any page, without having to open any contact page.
What makes it more useful is the ability to upload file attachments. Customers can share order confirmations, error screenshots, or any other relevant documents to help your team understand and resolve the issue faster.
If the live search or chatbot doesn’t fully resolve a question, customers can switch to the contact form so they can receive customized support.
5. Customizable Layout & SEO-Optimized
weDocs lets you customize the look and feel of your knowledge base so you can naturally align its design and vibe with the branding of your eCommerce site. You can customize its layouts, colors, fonts, and even choose from different template styles. This helps build a consistent user experience that feels professional and trustworthy.
In addition to appearance, weDocs has been built with SEO in mind. Each article is indexable by search engines like Google. This means that customers search for products or your business information will be displayed on the search engine result pages.
6. Role-Based Permissions
weDocs gives you control over who can access, edit, or manage your documentation by letting you assign roles like Admin, Editor, and Viewer. Often, it happens that an eCommerce business is maintained by multiple people, as partners or workers. By the role-based permission management feature, you can handle who will have access to modify the documentation posts.
You can also allow access to particular documentation posts by categories to prevent unauthorized edits and protect sensitive content, like return policies or legal terms. This ensures that your documentation stays accurate and consistent, even as your team grows or changes.
How to Set Up weDocs for 24/7 Customer Support: Step-by-Step Guide
In this section, we'll show you how to set up weDocs to enable 24/7 customer support with a step-by-step guide. After exploring the tutorial, you won't need a technical person to do that. Keep reading!
Step 01: Install and Activate weDocs
Log in to your WordPress dashboard. Navigate to Plugins > Add Plugin. Type weDocs in the search box. Once you see it, install and activate the plugin.
Step 02: Create a Knowledge Base
After the plugin is installed, it's time to create a knowledge base. By clicking the + New doc buttons on the interface, you can create new sections and knowledge base posts. Click any of these two buttons.
Step 03: Create Knowledge Base Categories
Write a title for the category in the box as you can see in the image below. You may instantly publish the section or keep it as a draft. Do as you want.
The category will be added. Now, you can add several sections to a category and then assign articles to the sections.
Step 04: Create a Section
Click the Add section option, as you can see in the picture above. It will open up a popup again where you can type a name you want to set for the section. Then draft or publish it. We'll draft it for the tutorial.
Step 05: Start Creating Posts
Now, it's time to create and add articles to the knowledge base. Click the Add button in the bottom-right corner of the category you have just created. Then, hit the Add Article button.
A pop-up will open again. Write a name for the article and assign it to the section. Then, publish/draft it.
You can see that we have written a name for the article and assigned it to the section we created just a while ago. Then, publish/draft it.
Click the Articles option on the knowledge base category.
Once you come to the article section, open it by clicking on it.
The article will open up on the Gutenberg editor. Now, add your desired content to the article. It could be texts, images, or anything. Save or publish the article in the end.
Step 06: Add More Articles to the Knowledge Base Section
Come to the articles section again. By clicking the + Add article button, you can add more and more articles to the section of the knowledge base category.
You can see that we have added some more articles to the knowledge base section.
In this way, add more and more sections and categories to the knowledge base.
Step 07: Enable the Customer Support Features (Assistant Widget, Chatbot, and Form)
Once your knowledge base is ready, it's time to enable the customer support features. As we said above, the plugin features three super-cool features for customer support. They are AI Chatbot, Assistant Widget, and Inline Messaging options.
To enable them, navigate to weDocs > Settings > Assistant Widget.
Expand the Assistant Widget option. You'll get all the necessary options here.
Here, we have covered complete step-by-step guides regarding these features. Explore them by clicking the links attached below.
For any further guidance, explore the knowledge base of weDocs.
weDocs vs weDocs Pro: Why Upgrade
The Free version of weDocs offers a solid foundation only for users who want to create a basic version of the knowledge base. You'll need the pro version of the plugin to offer 24/7 customer support. Here's a comparison between the free and pro versions of the weDocs plugin.
| Features | Free | Pro |
| Knowledge Base | ✅ | ✅ |
| Live Search | ✅ | ✅ |
| Role-Based Permission | ❌ | ✅ |
| AI Chatbot | ❌ | ✅ |
| Floating Inline Form | ❌ | ✅ |
| Assistant Widget | ❌ | ✅ |
| Analytics | ❌ | ✅ |
| Advanced Customization | ❌ | ✅ |
The premium version of the plugin for a single license charges $53/year. However, one point to mention is that if you want to enable the AI Chatbot feature, you have to pay an additional $7 per month. This means the total cost for one year will be $137.
Even after that, the cost of a two-person team for customer support can be significantly reduced by using this tool.
Closing Up!
Customers may come to your online shop and want to purchase at any time. So, your customer support should be available as well to serve their queries. weDocs makes it possible with a powerful knowledge base, an AI chatbot, instant search, and a floating contact form.
It can automate up to a significant percentage of inquiries, which can save you time, cut costs, and keep customers happy. From reducing cart abandonment to expanding globally, the plugin can remarkably help you drive real business growth.
If you have any queries regarding the plugin and its customer support features, let us know through the comment box. We'll get back to you very soon with valid answers.