Surely you need marketing to reach your target demographics and a sales team to ensure you have consistent sales. But when your customers face problems, where should they go for their solution? What process do you have to use to tackle angry customers? Eventually, this will be a key factor in maintaining your business’s goodwill.

That’s where the customer support team works wonders. Customer support teams handle everything related to customer relations and keep customers’ happiness higher. Building an efficient customer support team is an obvious priority of any customer service strategy.

Building a customer support team from scratch needs a process to build the overall foundation of your customer service. Excellent customer service varies from business to business, and most companies fail to do so because of their lack of understanding of the customer support process.

In this article, we’ll cover why you need a customer support team, what makes a great support team, how to build a customer support team, what tools you should use, and how to optimize these tools for your business needs. Take it as a full-free course on building a customer support team from the beginning. You’ll learn the ins and outs of the process and what structure you should follow based on your business.

Download the full eBook guide on “How to build a customer support team”. This eBook has additional resources for further study.

The form can be filled in the actual website url.

If you already have a customer support team, you can still follow these solid steps to ensure your customer service strategy is on the right path. If you are new, let’s get started with why a customer support team is an essential part of your business.

Why should you build a support team?

A customer support team is a tribe of empathic people who dedicate their time and effort to solving customer problems and helping them achieve success.

Not all businesses need customer support, but it is essential for those whose marketing promise depends on excellent after-sales customer support. After-sales support is a great tool to build long-term customer relations. Even pre-sales support is widely popular among companies nowadays. Pre-sales support helps a customer make their purchase decision, create a seamless customer onboarding process, and help them use your products after payment immediately.

Both pre-sale and after-sale support can be run by one customer support team. Now, as a business, you should ask yourself, “Do I need a customer support team right now?”

It is important to answer this question because often business owners make this mistake, not considering making customer support a priority from the start. Then, when business gets bigger, customer inquiries flood in, and they get overwhelmed with little time to provide solutions to all customers.

No matter what industry you are in, always think ahead a few years. Ask yourself:

• How can a support agent save me time?
• How much time will be saved for me to do things I’m capable of?
• How many expected customer queries will my business get after the official launch?
• Do I need human agents, or are chatbots enough?
• Or do I need human agents in 6 months?
• Can I automate most customer inquiries? If yes, then how can I do it?
• Am I capable of handling these amounts of customer inquiries, or do I need to hire?

These are some initial questions you must ask yourself before launching your business. If you find most answers telling you that you need more hands in handling customers after-sales, it is inevitable that a customer support team is required for your business. Either you are an e-commerce store, agency, service provider, or consultancy, you should invest in customer support from day one.

Now that you know the benefits of investing in customer support, let’s help you define what excellent customer support is for your company.

Define “excellent customer support” for your business

Without a standard, it’s hard to measure success. Before building a customer support team, you need to set your standard for great customer support.

What do you mean by “great”? Or what does “excellent customer support” mean to you by definition?

Most companies provide customer support. But not all are the same. Some differentiate themselves by going the extra mile and going to great lengths for customer satisfaction.

Think outside the box about how you can differentiate your customer support from that of your competitors. What is one thing you are willing to do that your competitors are not thinking of doing?

Decide what type of service quality you are going to provide. And how are you going to ensure the results? Get your whole company behind the idea of your great customer support. It is important to ensure that your other teams understand the value of excellent customer support. It will help develop a company-wide customer-centric mindset and sophisticated team-wise collaboration.

When you clearly define excellent customer support, you can develop guidelines for your support team. You can select specific customer support metrics to measure their success.

We will discuss more guidelines and support metrics later in the structure and process steps. Now let’s dig into how you can make sure your customer support team conveys your brand and company value while interacting with customers every day.

Align your customer support with your brand and company values

We talked a lot about the tone of the brand’s voice in customer service previously. It means how you follow the same tone of voice in your copywriting, whether it’s your company’s website, brand brochure, other marketing materials, or customer service. Your brand tone of voice sets your brand personality. Your brand personality is essential to attracting your target audience.

Every company has values at its core. Values keep the business operations in check. Like when Google founders incorporated Google Inc., they came up with 10 main values Google will always follow. One is, “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.”

These company values helped Google set their overall business policy and shape their brand personality.

What are your company’s values? What is your brand’s tone of voice?

When you clarify those two, you can easily implement them into your customer support policies and strategies. If your company wants to be known as a customer-centric company, then your value should reflect that customers are your first priority.

This value should dictate your excellent customer support definition, and your team should deliver on that promise. Remember, a customer service team can only deliver great customer service when, as a company, you make it happen.

Make sure, as a company, all of your teams are onboard about customer service policies and strategies. Customer support should not be a standalone department; it should seamlessly interact with other teams like the marketing and sales teams to provide customers with fast, reliable, and quality solutions.

Consideration for building a support team

How your employees interact with your customers sets the overall perception of the customer. Customers’ perspectives may change in a single interaction, no matter what your team members’ intentions are. Your team members need to understand that from the beginning.

Your customer service team should reflect your brand, your values, and your tone of voice. It takes more than positive interaction to achieve this; companies should have their goals, vision, and mission align with their strategies. Then you can build your customer service team on top of it.

Find out where your customers are and which channels to focus on for customer support.

The best way to provide great support is to know where your customers hang out and be there. Get more data on your customer demographics; analyze what channels they use more and what they are using more to contact you.

Is this your official email address? Your helpdesk portal? Live chat? Or your social media channels?

Many companies make the mistake of providing support on every channel before scaling up their customer support team. Ask yourself first:

• Are you ready to provide customer support on every channel?
• Can your team handle that much pressure?
• Are your team members trained for every channel?
• Is that okay for your team members’ mental health?

The answers are important to ensure your customer support team’s operation and efficiency. Find out what your business and customers need for support. Answer these questions:

• What is the standard of communication for your industry?
• Does your industry need face-to-face, online, or technical support?
• What primary communication tool do your customers use?
• What social media channel is popular with your customer demographics?

If your business serves older demographics, they are more comfortable with phone communication and, often, emails.

Younger generations like live chats, social media like Twitter, or self-help tools like knowledge bases and communities. Young demographics are comfortable using search engines, answer tools like Quora, discussion forms, Facebook groups, and Reddit to find the solutions themselves. Their short attention span requires quick answers.

You can easily cater to them by creating in-depth tutorials, customer support videos, documentation, and knowledge bases. You can also provide help desk and email communication for further communication.

Find out your customer demographics using which social media platforms most, and then start providing support from one or two. Do not spread your customer service team too thin. It will only frighten them; as a result, your customer will get inconsistent support, and customer churn will happen.

Take market data and analyze it. What are your competitors using to serve their customers? It is the easiest way to make sure you are on the right path. Now do whatever it takes to offer better customer service from them. Match the strength of your support team members with their preferred channels to provide quality customer support.

Review legal restrictions and examine necessary requirements

Now that you have decided on your support channels and mediums, it’s time to review legal restrictions and examine the necessary requirements. You should find the answers to these questions:

• Which country does your business cover?
• What rules do they have about customer data collection and use of this data?
• How are you going to follow the country’s law with your terms and conditions?

For example, the European Union demands GDPR compliance for every business. Consult with a legal expert when writing your business’s terms and conditions, disclaimer, use of user data, and other legal documents. Be sure to clearly make any legal requirements visible while onboarding new customers, because you don’t want to leave your customer in the dark about any policy changes in your customer support terms.

Point out potential legal troubles before offering customer service on various mediums and create systems for team members to tackle those when necessary. You can brainstorm different customer service situations and pain points and come up with solutions in advance to train your support team members. So when the actual event happens, they will know what to do or can manage related types of situations on their own.

Hire right people and build your team with right roles

Hiring the right agent for your customer support team is the key to quality support. It is crucial to find the right customer support agents, because they are the only part of your business that has the ability to influence your customers through one-to-one interactions.

Wrong people in any customer service team are the reasons for bad customer experiences. When you build your support team, you will have to appoint the right type of person who is compatible with your company’s values.

What type of person is best for a customer service job? The answers are:

• Empathic
• Active listener
• Problem solver
• Quick learner
• Technically skilled

Your right candidate knows what to do with responsibility and freedom. Empathy is a must-have characteristic you should look for while building your customer service team. If your agents can’t feel them in customer shoes, they will never understand customer fraustations. An empathic agent will actively listen to the customer and provide an exact solution to fulfill their immediate needs. They also know how to say no to customers professionally without upsetting them.

You can appoint support agents in-house or choose virtual support assistants to run your team. It depends on your business size, customer base, and daily incoming customer queries. A small e-commerce store may need 2–3 support agents to handle customers. You can manage it with a few virtual agents covering all time zones. But this can’t be done for a big business with lots of inventory or services and a huge customer base.

Choose which path is right for you and how you can scale if you need more agents to handle future customers. If you choose to build an in-house support team, you’ll need to clarify which roles and responsibilities your customer service team will take on.

You’ll need some essential roles to run customer support or service teams:

Customer support engineers – They are also known as customer service engineers. They handle all technical problems, run tests, diagnose problems, and offer tech solutions for your customers. This role required technical skills, an engineering degree in related fields, and often expertise in the industry the business covers.

Customer support specialist – They are mid-level support staff who are not heavily skilled like support engineers but can handle immediate tech issues, how to solve problems, and help customers with product installations and use. They are more required to have soft skills like active listening, emotional intelligence, and great communicator. Empathy also plays a huge role for customer support specialists.

Customer service managers – Managers are important for big support or service teams. They help you keep your agents motivated. They run the day-to-day operations of support teams and set daily, weekly, or monthly targets. Most times, they take new recruits under their belt and train them to become sophisticated customer support specialists or engineers. A customer service manager may have all the qualities of a service engineer, but it is not necessary to have degrees or expertise in specific fields to fulfill the role. They must know how to handle teams, agents, and customers in difficult situations with highly emotional intelligence. This role needs organizational skills more than technical skills.

Customer success managers – Many service-based and subscription-based businesses are now relying more on this role to provide better customer satisfaction. Customer success manager helps new customers onboard, helps them with product education, provides support when they need it, and builds long-term relationships with personal connections. It is different from support specialists because success managers focus on a few customers rather than providing support to all. Their main target is to deliver proactive support rather than general support. They ensure customers are achieving success through regular product use and stay with the customers as long as they stay active.

Customer onboarding specialist – When a new customer first purchases your products, they will need guidance on how to use it or to complete the purchase properly. Customer onboarding specialists help your user onboard, educate them with the benefits of the features, and guide them to solve one problem at a time. Customer onboarding specialists help you retain customers and stop customer churn after a few weeks of sign-up.

Customer service representative – Most service representatives handle customers primary inquiries offline or online, offer answers to refunds, process changes, and take new orders. They take care of customers’ basic needs, so customers do not need to wait or submit a ticket for further assistance. They minimize customer support specialists workload. Oftentimes, small businesses or startups can operate their support teams with customer service representatives and scale the team when necessary. This role requires fast problem-solving skills and soft skills like resourceful communication, empathy, and ability to handle rude customers.

Customer experience managers – Great customer experiences are the foundation of customer loyalty. Customer experience managers’ job is to find areas to improve, build, and implement strategies to deliver an excellent customer experience. They work closely with customer service managers and customer support specialists to improve customer interactions. Their main focus is to improve efficiency at every customer touch point and increase customer engagement.

Chief Customer Officer (CCO) – This new role is taking the business world by storm. Chief Customer Officer role demands are growing in customer-centric businesses. They are more like a hybrid of customer success managers and customer experience managers. The slight difference between the other two is that CCO is an executive position. They help management create new policies keeping customers’ needs and customer experiences in mind. Their focus is to make the business more customer-centric, increase customer retention, and build long-term customer relations.

These are some of the most popular roles in the support industry. Pick one that suits your needs, and create your customer support team around them.

Train your people and build a foundation from start

It’s essential that you build a strong foundation for your customer service team from the beginning. Most businesses see customer support as a cost center and try to cut their budget. They go for cheap talents for the support team.

It’s a mistake—a dangerous mistake for a business that just invested in a new customer support team.

Go for professionals for certain roles, like customer success managers, customer service managers, or customer support engineers. They are the main part of any support team. You only want experienced people in the field. But don’t feel scared to recruit new people if they meet your criteria and match the soft skills that are needed to run a customer support team. You can always train them and make them efficient with proper education and processes.

Remember, your skilled customer service team can increase customer retention, customer referrals, and quarterly sales. Serving customers with the right people is the key.

Train your new agents to use your products and services. You can tell an agent’s ability by how fast they catch up on using it and learn to do regular use cases. New agents can tag along old representatives to learn day-to-day work. This is to educate them on how to handle customers and teach them about customers’ pain points.

You can create a sandbox to teach new agents different scenarios before putting them into handling new customers. This way, they will gain confidence and cut nervousness during their first customer interaction. Internal documentation or wikis are nice tools to help new agents learn on the go.

Create a solid structure and process for your support team

A solid structure and process can run your customer support operation smoothly. Have a process for training new agents so you can easily train them, manage them, and put them right to work. Consider having a customer service playbook for everyone. In this playbook, you can find a short but understandable explanation and information about:

• Policies,
• Operation process,
• How to contact other team members
• Whom to knock when in trouble?
• Reply with templates to use.
• Examples of common cases and solutions
• Links to troubleshooting guides

If your support agents have to follow certain rules or processes, clarify them in your playbook or training. The more freedom you can give to your support teams, the more efficient they will be in real-life customer interactions.

Most times, the process needs to evolve around the structure of your company. Your customer support department structure needs to be close to your business structure. What is your business structure?

• Is it a small business or a start-up?
• Is it a mid-size company with different products serving different demographics?
• Is it an enterprise-level company serving both B2B or B2C?

Now that you know your business size, find out what type of customer support role you need to fill up your company support department. Start by appointing the right people for these roles and building the team gradually.

Create a customer expectation checklist or customer service commitment to create a seamless process. These checklists or service commitments can be private or you can make them public to boost your brand reputation among your customer base.

Research your market, do a competitor analysis, and find the answers to these questions:

• What is the average handling time in your industry?
• What is your competitor’s customer response time?
• What level of service are your competitors offering?

Now that you have all the answers, think of how you can manage to exceed customer expectations with your definition of customer support, your team, and the process you developed. Explore possibilities, tweak, experiment with what works, and evolve the process.

Create your customer support standard based on the answers to these questions:

• How fast are you going to reply to your customers?
• How will your support team handle different types of customers?
• What will be your refund or return policy?
• When and how do you say no to customers professionally?
• What will your ethical approach be to asking for reviews from customers?
• What should you do when your team is unable to provide support? How do you handle customers in these circumstances?
• What extra mile can an agent go to provide a great customer experience? What will be the limit on spending?
• What customer service metrics will your team follow for daily operations?

When you have a support standard with a solid team structure and process, your customer support team will run on their own without you micromanaging every little aspect.

Remember, the goal is to build a self-sufficient customer support department. So you can focus on other areas of your business.

Now, what tools should you use to run a self-sufficient customer service department?

Invest in the right tools

Customer support tools help your team speed up their work. These tools help with repetitive tasks, automation, team collaboration, and storing customer data like customer conversations, purchases, and more. Customer relationship management tools, or live chats, also play a huge role in customer service operations.

Ask yourself these questions before investing in tools:

• What value do the tools offer? Does it fulfill my needs?
• How fast can my team learn to use these tools? Will it be easy for customers to use?
• Do I need to use extra tools to get the most value out of the tool? Does it support integrations with the right tools?
• Does it make things easier to streamline support agents daily workflow?
• What type of automation does it offer?
• How sophisticated is it in reporting, data presentation, and analytics? Does it offer individual agent reporting?
• Does it offer vanity customer service metrics like waiting time, average handling time, average resolution time, or first response time?
• Can I scale my customer support department with this tool?
• Do I need to upgrade the tools to meet my future expectations?

These questions will help you prioritize what tools you need for your support operations. There are different types of customer support tools:

Chatbots – AI chatbots are now widely popular support trends to serve repetitive questions and answers. This saves agents time. But sometimes you will still need human agents available when an AI bot is unable to answer complex questions. 

Example: Crisp, Live Chat, Messenger.

Knowledge Base tools – These types of tools help you build your documentation or detailed knowledge base. You can create step-by-step detailed answers to frequently asked questions with SEO focus. So when a customer searches for them on any search engine, your answers will come up first. 

Example: Betterdocs

Helpdesk – Helpdesk tools help you serve customer queries from one place; you can source them from different channels and share the same inbox with multiple agents. Helpdesk has automation to automate repetitive tasks and manage daily workflows. It also offers an internal knowledge base and team collaboration tools built within the core helpdesk. You can also integrate other tools easily with a robust helpdesk system.

Example: Fluent Support

CRM tools – Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are useful when you have huge customers and want to collect and store their information. They also track sales, manage marketing, and manage email for businesses.

Example: FluentCRM, Hubspot.

Other Tools – There are other types of tools that may also come in handy for support operations. Like time management tools (Hubstaff), project management or bug reports (FluentBoards, Trello, Asana), learning management systems (LMS) like Learndash and TutorLMS, and internal communication tools (Slack, Telegram, or Discord). You can select these tools depending on your team’s needs.

Many small businesses make the mistake of not prioritizing investing in customer service tools. It is vital to think of these tools when building customer support tools. Not investing in the right tools can damage a customer service team’s time and energy.

You can start your service operation using free tools. There are plenty of them, but most free tools are limited, slow, and unhelpful. Eventually, you’ll need to scale up your support operations, and these free customer service tools will fall short of meeting the standards.

Small improvements in speed can increase customer satisfaction. Feature-rich tools can improve your team’s efficiency and comfort. Better internal tools can speed up smooth collaboration, avoiding collisions and confusion between team members.

Building an efficient support team requires the correct combination of the right people and the proper tools. You have a solid structure, a seamless process, and support agents in place. Now think of what tools the customer service team really needs for their day-to-day work and what tools can help them create a great customer experience for your users.

SaaS vs. self-hosted: which to choose?

Decide which customer support tool you want to use. Does live chat do the work? Or helpdesk is the answer?

Live chats are often used when you wish to serve your customer 24×7. Mostly, this tool is used to smooth customer onboarding or pre-sale support. You can integrate chat bots to answer frequently asked questions, no matter what time it is.

On the other hand, helpdesk unifies your customer communications. It saves all types of conversations, helps you automate repeated tasks, and fosters fast internal communication and team collaboration. Most help desk tools work with knowledge base tools automatically, so you can easily suggest related questions and answers right when customers open a support ticket.

As there are different types of customer support tools, there are also different categories of support tools. These tools have two main categories:

• Saas – Software as a Service (Saas) provides software services over the internet without you installing or hosting them on your system. You only have to visit the service provider, sign up, and start using the service. You don’t need to maintain the hardware or hosting. Your data is hosted and maintained by the cloud service you use.
• Self-hosted – Self-hosted system are open-source apps or premium apps you can buy and download. You manage them on your hardware or in your hosting space. You have to install, maintain, and operate the software to run it for your use. You own the data because it sits on your system or hosting.

There are a few pros and cons to using both SaaS and self-hosted tools. If you have a relatively small, consistent team of 2-3 agents, then you can select SaaS support tools. Because most SaaS support companies price their plans based on how many agents you have, If you don’t mind paying per agent and don’t plan to scale your support operations, you can go for SaaS tools. Some most used SaaS support tools are:

• Zendesk
• FreshDesk
• Helpscout
• Helpcrunch

The disadvantage of using these services is that you don’t own the data. You can’t import or export your data as you wish. You’re at the mercy of your provider’s hand. There are also limitations on how many users, tickets, or agents you can serve or add, how many integrations you can use, and more. Sometimes you have to buy premium add-ons to use certain features. The cost builds up eventually. And if you ever decide to scale up your support team, add more agents, and serve more users, the cost will go up. For a small business, this may seem unjustifiable!

On the other hand, self-hosted apps offer more flexibility. You can expand open-source apps for your own needs and customize them freely. All the data is also accessible to you because it’s hosted by you. If your customers are sensitive about their data and privacy, self-hosted tools are the only answer. Some popular self-hosted tools are:

• Fluent Support
• Awesome Support
• Support Candy
• Chatwoot
• Live Helper Chat

These apps offer to host your customer support data on your own hosting. You can ensure your customers privacy by providing customer support using any of these apps. You can design your privacy policy based on where your business is. You can choose how to backup your data by following those policies. You can offer higher security to your customers to win their trust.

Self-hosting gives you the freedom not to share your data with third parties. Most SaaS tools come short in these situations because customer data protection is now a sensitive issue all over the world. You can scale your customer support department whenever you need to with self-hosted apps.

The best self-hosted customer support tools

Now that we proved self-hosted apps are more flexible than SaaS tools, it’s time to choose the best self-hosted customer support tools. We will compare the tools from the previous list.

Check out this comparison table between Fluent Support, Awesome Support, JS Helpdesk, and Support Candy:

You’ll clearly see that Fluent Support is winning in all categories. Here are some features that make Fluent Support the best self-hosted support tool:

• Fluent Support offers unlimited agents, users, and tickets. You don’t have to stress over limits; install the plugin and start using it. It only takes 5 minutes to set up Fluent Support.
• Fluent Support has a flexible pricing plan. It does not sell premium add-ons like others. All features are included in every pricing plan.
• Fluent Support offers 20+ integrations, including WooCommerce, Learndash, Easy Digital Downloads, Slack, and more.
• It has easy integration with Slack, Telegram, Discord, and Whatsapp. Your agents can attend to tickets and reply right from these messaging apps chatboxes.
• It has seamless integration with the email marketing tool FluentCRM, project management tool FluentBoards, and the custom form plugin Fluent Forms. You can create support forms with Fluent Forms and integrate them with Fluent Support’s backend. You can run email automation using the Fluent Support block inside FluentCRM.
• Fluent Support integrates effortlessly with LMS plugins like Learndash, LifterLMS, TutorLMS, and LearnPress. You can provide customer support to your course students without any hassle. Their purchase details are accessible right into their support tickets.
• It has a superior automation system that can help you automate most repetitive tasks and enable fast ticket replies. Fluent Support Automation helps you serve more customers faster than most of its competitors.
• Fluent Support allows for advanced filtering and sorting. This makes it easier to manage tickets and respond quickly.
• You can create separate inboxes for different businesses. This helps prevent confusion and lets you manage tickets based on products.
• The customizable and custom ticket portal lets you keep your website’s branding. This offers a smooth customer experience.
• Detailed customer profiles give easy access to important information.
• Collision detection alerts you when multiple agents enter the same ticket. This ensures that everyone knows who is handling the query.
• Email piping turns email queries into support tickets. This ensures that no customer query is missed and all are managed in one place.
• It has integration logs, and the activity logs track every action taken by agents in real-time. This provides a complete record of all activities within the support desk.

These are some of the most recognized features of Fluent Support that differentiate it from other self-hosted plugins. You can explore more features here.

Setup Fluent Support in 5 minutes!

Starting with Fluent Support is fairly simple.

If you are using WordPress to build your website, simply install the Fluent Support plugin and activate it. You can use a short code to put the customer support area on any page you want. You can build a custom page for the support-related staff, or you can use the default page provided by the plugin.

Don’t you use WordPress?

No problem; you can set up Fluent Support on your subdomain like WP Manage Ninja does. Their main domain is wpmanageninja.com, but their support portal is hosted in a different sub-domain, support.wpmanageninja.com.

After installation, activate the plugin and set up the settings. In the setting, you can set up two kinds of business inboxes:

• Web-based: You can only offer support through your website. Customers have to log in to submit tickets.
• Email-based: You can offer support using an email. Customers can send email to the email address, and your support agents can reply to the email from your support dashboard. Think of it like a shared inbox.

Research your customers behavior—how they wish to connect with you and what medium they most use to contact you.

Then you can easily choose which route is best for you—web or email?

You may use different platforms for your business, like Shopify, a custom CMS, or any other no-code tools to host your business, but you can use WordPress and Fluent Support to host your customer support department in your subdomain without any hassle.

Learn fluent support in an hour!

Follow this video to set up a web-based Fluent Support business inbox.

Want to offer email support? Set up an email-based customer support portal through email piping. Follow this video:

It showed how to add Gmail to your email inbox in this video. Fluent Support also offers other platforms.

Forward or redirect from an email provider or a host:

• Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite)
• Office 365 Outlook Web Access (OWA)
• Amazon WorkMail
• Zoho Mail
• Yahoo Mail

• Bluehost
• Namecheap
• cPanel
• GoDaddy
• Dreamhost

You can click and follow the individual documentation to start with the setup.

Fluent Support’s whole set of settings is centered in the “Global Settings.” Here is a video walkthrough on how you can set it up.

How do I automate support tasks with Fluent Support?

Automation is a big part of Fluent Support. It is also essential for any customer support operation.

Automation saves time, speeds up daily operations, and helps your customer support department with efficient team collaboration. Fluent support helps you do these using manual and ticket workflow automations.

You can run a manual workflow and set the following actions:

You can run these inside any support ticket manually. But what about repetitive tasks? Or if you want to add tags automatically to a ticket, Or do you want to assign agents to new tickets?

Automatic workflows do that seamlessly!

Use automatic automation to set tasks to be done automatically inside Fluent Support based on certain triggers and using certain actions.

There are 3 triggers: on ticket creation, on customer response, and on ticket closure.

Here are the actions that can be performed based on the triggers:

• Add Response
• Assign Agent
• Add Internal Note
• Close Ticket
• Add Tag(s)
• Remove Tag(s)
• Delete Ticket
• Block Ticket Submitter (Customer)
• Trigger Outgoing Webhook
• Add Bookmarks

Here are some live examples of automatic workflows. You can implement your own use cases based on your needs. Watch this video to get the idea!

Optimize your help desk based on your business needs.

Fluent Support is a flexible help desk. You can optimize it based on your business needs and integrate it with 20+ tools easily. Let’s look into some business categories and use cases for optimization.

E-commerce: Most WordPress e-commerce businesses run on the WooCommerce plugin. Fluent Support offers seamless WooCommerce integrations.

You don’t have to do anything if you have Fluent Support installed on your WooCommerce sites. It will show customers recent purchases right in their support tickets. Your agents don’t have to click anything or open a new window to access this information. This will save them time, and they can attend to more customer queries.

You can also offer custom fields in your support tickets related to your WooCommerce products. So customers can easily select the WooCommerce product related to the support inquiry.

You can set up different products or ticket tags in business settings. Then you can use these tags and products specifically in workflow automation to assign different agents to different product-related support tickets.

Fluent Support’s ‘Internal Notes’ are the best way to collaborate with other agents, and you can see which agents are working on which support tickets using agent collision detection.

Your agents can bookmark tickets while they are working and access them from their bookmarks later. Fluent supports easy integrations with tools like Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord. Your agents can receive and reply to support tickets from their Slack, Telegram, and WhatsApp chats. Only Discord integration offers ticket notifications for now. Your agents attend to customers wherever they are, even if they only have mobile and internet access! Fluent Support is fully mobile-responsive and can load support tickets in mobile browsers.

Entrepreneur – Are you an entrepreneur or a solopreneur? Running your business on your own?

Most solopreneurs depend on virtual assistance (VA) to cover their customer support. It is more hassle-free than hiring a full in-house team. Solopreneurs want to live headache-free. Most of their business runs on automation.

That’s why they need tools that can help them automate mostly anything and everything. Fluent Support comes in handy on this.

You can automate all types of customer queries with Fluent Support Workflow settings. You can automatically send repetitive questions answered with saved replies and use knowledge base integration to serve related questions answered right into the customer support forms. Fluent Support offers a shared inbox, so any solopreneurs can add their VA to the system. All you have to give them is access to support staff settings. You can set up customer support for multiple business emails with Fluent Support’s different business inboxes.

Your VAs can manage different products or different types of customers assigned to them from one dashboard. You can communicate with them using ‘Internal Notes’ and assign them tickets. Fluent Support can help you manage your multiple VA’s from one system without wasting time on different tools and emails.

Agency: Running an agency with multiple clients is a hectic operation. How can fluent support help you streamline your agency’s customer support?

Fluent Support offers a modest agency plan for agency owners. You can buy this to offer Fluent Support for multiple clients.

For your own customer support, you can create multiple business inboxes for your multiple clients and assign different agents to manage those business inboxes. If you use Slack for internal communication, you can easily connect it with Fluent Support to serve and manage tickets from Slack quickly!

Course sellers: – Selling courses from your website? Need to offer fast customer support for your buyers?

No worries. Fluent Support has seamless integrations with most LMS systems. It has integration support with LearnDash (10K+ users), TutorLMS (50K+ users), LifterLMS (10K+ users), and LearnPress (100K+ users).

Fluent Support shows your customers recent courses on their support tickets. You can also add custom fields related to your course on support forms. So customers can easily select the course title related to the support queries.

If your course site also has a membership system, Fluent Support offers integrations with the most popular membership systems, like Buddyboss, Paid Membership Pro, Wishlist Members, and Restrict Content Pro. Fluent Support shows your customers membership levels in their support tickets, along with other related information. You can add custom fields related to these membership systems, like the LMS systems.

Build self-service tools and community support.

There is a catchphrase popular in the support industry;

Customers don’t want to wait for solutions. They have the power to find the answers themselves. All you need to do is help them with self-service tools.

Most self-service tools are knowledge bases, AI chatbots, video tutorials, in-depth guides, and often community forums. These take time to build, but if you take the time to invest in them, it can help you tenfold. Self-service tools can reduce customers’ support tickets and save agents time. If you build these with SEO-focused intent, then your customers will find them easily with a search. It will also increase your brand awareness among customers. It can help your existing customers, but it can also reach new customers through the content itself.

Community forums can help you build customer loyalty, brand reputation, and unlimited customer-generated content. As a brand, you can offer a place for your existing customers online. They can hang out, ask questions, and help each other. Your agents can often answer complex questions and engage with customers regularly. Community forums can help you understand customers’ perspectives and generate feature ideas.

You can use the community to shape your brand’s reputation. A community can be a hub for cultivating loyal customers. You can offer rewards, discounts, and other offers for your community members. Engage communities, increase customers’ trust, and make your brand more connected with them on a personal level. Every business should take the time to build a community around their brand. Community forums are also the best tools to grow organic reach. And we all know that word of mouth is the best way to attract new customers!

Gather, measure, and analyze customer feedback and support data.

Customer support data and customer feedback are the most valuable assets of any business. Customer support data will help you understand how your support department is performing, what you are lacking, whether your customers are happy or not, and how you can scale your support department faster.

On the other hand, customer feedback can help you understand customers’ perspectives about your brands, customer experiences, and expectations about your products or services. You should not ignore this data and plan on collecting it from the beginning via customer survey.

You can use different methods and tools to collect this data:

• Your help desk should have the ability to provide various reports about support ticket data, individual agent reports, first response time, average handling time, and other vanity customer service metrics. These metrics will help you understand your customer support department’s performance. For example, Fluent Support has dedicated report tabs for this.
  
• You can set up different surveys to collect customer feedback with tools like Fluent Forms. You can do customer feedback surveys and customer satisfaction surveys to learn more about customer pain points, agent performance, team efficiency, and product usefulness.
  
• You can use direct phone calls to gather feedback from your long-term customers. Older, existing customers are more eager to share feedback than new customers.
  
• You can run automation with helpdesks (like Fluent Support Workflows) to send certain questions in different forms based on different keywords.
  
• You can collect data from your community forums, customer interactions, or run surveys from time to time to gather feedback data.
  
• You can follow your social channels or customer conversations to gather social data from various social networks.

The next step after gathering data is to analyze and measure it. Many customer support data points are easy to measure. Your help desk will do the job. Help desk data will help you understand customer behavior and help you run your customer service department efficiently.

Your customer feedback data will help streamline your customer onboarding, build better products or services, and increase customer retention. This is your customer feedback loop.

Conclusion

Building a customer support team needs thorough planning, clarity, and enough investment. Creating a support system is not a one-time job; it’s running work. As a business owner, you will need to embrace customer support as the main part of your business to become a customer-centric company.

Great customer experience can help you build a brand reputation quickly, and the only way to make it happen is when your whole company is obsessed with customer service. 86% of customers are willing to pay you more if they are satisfied with your customer service.

A fully empowered customer support team has the ability to ensure an excellent customer experience. Build a support department with clear intent, invest in the right tools, and hire the right people to do the job. Listen to your customers, take proactive actions, and motivate your service team. Your customer acquisition cost will reduce, customers will reward you with their loyalty, increased purchases, and high referrals.

The post How To Build A Customer Support Team – Complete Guide appeared first on Fluent Support.

Small business owners use customer support ticket systems to quickly reply to customers’ queries, provide the right solutions, and give their users a great experience. Fluent Support fulfills the need and does more! Fluent Support helps you to automate your support operations, gives tools to your support agents to collaborate with team members using internal notes, a shared inbox, and collision detection.

In 2022, we shipped a lot of features to make Fluent Support the best WordPress helpdesk plugin possible. In this blog, we featured all the useful features you can use to run a super enthusiastic customer support team. You will learn what makes Fluent Support the best WordPress helpdesk and why it’s different from its competitors. We plan to release more awesome features in 2023. We will update this blog after every update showcasing the best features of Fluent Support.

Features that make Fluent Support the most advanced WordPress helpdesk

There are enough helpdesk plugins in the WordPress space, but what makes Fluent Support the best? Epic features released this year by Fluent Support team gave it the advantage to become the best helpdesk plugin for WordPress in 2023! Let’s find out!

1. Webhooks for automation

Webhooks help automate repeated work and connect with other tools necessary for customer support operations. We introduced internal & outgoing webhook features in 2022, most requested by users.

Use the incoming webhook form “Global Settings” and outgoing webhook as workflow action inside any automation using Fluent Support plugin.

2. Advanced ticket filtering

Fluent Support’s other best feature is “Advanced Filtering.” You can quickly search, manage and reply to tickets using these different parameters. You can also create custom filtering tabs and parameters to fulfill your customer support team’s needs.

3. REST-API

Fluent Support offers API using REST API. You can use our API to share information between your tools. Check our detailed API documentation here.

4. Receive and reply to support tickets from WhatsApp

Many small businesses use WhatsApp for their daily customer communication. That’s why we developed a Fluent Support WhatsApp integration powered by Twilio.

Fluent Support WhatsApp integration with Twilio can help you get support tickets right inside your WhatsApp chat & you can reply to the ticket using chat reply. No need to click a link or open the ticket!

Here’s how it works:

5. Move tickets from one inbox to another

Another useful feature requested by many users running multiple business inboxes on the same support dashboard. This helps you move tickets from different inboxes.

6. Merge two tickets in one & Split tickets in two

With Fluent Support, you can merge tickets in the same topics into one ticket using the ‘Merge Tickets‘ feature. It is really helpful to reduce duplicate ticket issues.

But what can you do if you need to split a ticket into another separate ticket? Use split replies into new tickets feature to separate a conversation from the current one. You can use this feature to assign different agents to that different issue. It will make your customer support operation effortless.

7. Agent bookmarks

Fluent Support introduced this new Ticket Bookmark feature, which helps agents bookmark any tickets they are working on for later use.

They can access these tickets from the bookmark tab without individually searching. It saves a lot of time.

8. Fluent Support WP dashboard widget

We added a Fluent Support dashboard widget. You can quickly glance at how many tickets are in the queue waiting for replies and follow other metrics like Total Tickets, Active Tickets, New Tickets, Un-Assigned Tickets, and Closed Tickets.

9. Fluent Support ticket summary bar

Like Dashboard Widget, ‘Ticket Summary Bar’ gives you quick access to certain metrics such as “Total Tickets, Active Tickets, New Tickets, Un-Assigned Tickets, Closed Tickets, and Witing Replies.”

10. Frontend agent support portal

This feature is one of the most requested features by our users. It helps you to view the entire agent portal in the frontend using shortcode.

Follow our documentation on ‘Frontend Agent Portal‘ to learn more. Here is how it works:

11. Activity log filters

Fluent Support’s “Activities” feature shows you everything happening in your customer support operation.

You can filter by ‘Agent’s Name” and use dates to see activities from certain periods.

12. Hourly reports

Under the report section, we added hourly reports with vanity metrics of average waiting time, response rates, etc., on hourly basis. This will help you manage ticket loads effectively.

13. Close ticket silently & automatically

We added options to close a ticket without sending notifications to your users. You can also set up settings based on inactive days, tags, and customers waiting to close tickets automatically. You can close the tickets silently or add a custom reply on automatic closing. Check our full documentation on ‘Automatic Ticket Closing & Close Ticket Silently.’

14. Superior Ticket importer

This is the best features in 2022 that users are excited about! Now you can import tickets from helpdesk plugins & Saas tools. Use our “Ticket Importer” feature to import tickets from Awesome Support, Support Candy, JS Helpdesk & Help Scout.

More migration options are on the way!

15. Updated ticket status

Want to sort tickets using your custom update status? Now you can. We added this ability to create custom stats on the ticket dashboard using Fluent Support’s webhook feature.

You can prioritize certain categories of tickets and sort them using custom status.

16. Dynamic dashboard

Dynamic dashboard is another requested feature by our users. Using this feature, you can customize Fluent Support’s default dashboard. You can read our dynamic dashboard documentation to learn how to set up your custom dashboard.

17. Export agent summary

Customer support managers may need you to export agent reports, analyze them elsewhere, or share them with team leaders. Agent Summary Export is a useful feature shipped in 2022 that lets you do this!

Follow our documentation, and use this feature to export any individual agent reports or all agent reports in a few clicks.

18. New integrations – LearnPress, Betterdocs & WhatsApp

We shipped 3 new Fluent Support integration with the LearnPress course plugin, documentation plugin Betterdocs, and messaging platform WhatsApp.

Moving forward

2023 is going to be a big year for Fluent Support. We will invest more time into user suggestions, flexible functionality, and new useful features. Our goal is to make Fluent Support the most user-loved helpdesk for WordPress.

Take a look at our 2022 year-in-review blog; we discussed Fluent Support’s yearly growth and development in detail. We also shared our plan for 2023; fluent Support’s functionality will increase tenfold next year. Welcome to our journey of becoming the best customer support ticketing system. Fluent Support wants to empower more small business owners worldwide to take action and provide a great customer support experience to their customers.

The post What Makes Fluent Support the Best WordPress Helpdesk in 2025? appeared first on Fluent Support.

And, your biggest holiday period begins. Businesses are jumping with their marketing strategies, budgets, and products to catch as many customers as possible.

Most customers treat this Christmas deal season as the best purchase time. So, they come online during this Christmas rush and scoop the best deals. This goes the same for retailers too.

The Christmas rush has always been an exciting period to attract new customers to your brand with crazy deals and discounts.

And, with this spike in demand, the ticket volume in your customer support also spikes up. More deals bring more pre-sale support questions, more sales mean more after-sales customer support queries.

But, you can tackle this rush with a pre-planned holiday time customer service strategy. In this blog, you’ll learn how to manage the crazy customer expectations during Christmas and provide an excellent customer experience.

3 tips to handle holiday time customer service

Deal seasons like BFCM, Halloween, or Christmas are the peak selling seasons for small businesses. With proper planning and strategy, a small business can achieve tremendous sales goals at this time.

Here are 3 ways you should get prepared for the Christmas rush as a small business owner:

1. Prepare for the worst

Start planning before the Christmas seasons start. Plan for customer service early as you plan your marketing, content, or other things.

Customers will expect fast customer support available 24/7 online this season. Think how you can top that. Do you have the manpower? Remember, in this holiday season, everyone deserves family time. You can’t make your agents work on a holiday 24/7! 

You can offer high pay for those willing to do the work without pressure to do the job. Consider outsourcing customer support to cover the workload. Always plan according to your budget and operational capabilities.

Look into your data and analyze which customer service channels you get the most customer queries. Assign multiple agents on the most received ones to handle queries during rush hours. Virtual assistants could be more helpful when you have a sophisticated customer support system.

Engage with your current customer base with emails and content copy. Email them any changes before starting the Christmas deals. Managing customer expectations is one part of the pre-plans. You don’t want customers to expect something you are not offering. This will create a huge unnecessary spike in customer support tickets about something you are not selling and waste the agent’s time.

2. Consider automation

Add automation to your planning strategy for the holiday time deals. Automation workflows will save you tons of money, time, and resources. Learn how to automate services like Zapier to integrate them with your service channels and reply to your customers quickly.

Choose a good helpdesk with amazing automation features. An automated helpdesk must have these functionalities:

• Help you to assign agents automatically on tickets.
• You can choose where to assign agents and which products based on tags
• You can choose keywords and trigger automation based on it
• You can send pre-written replies based on customer queries 
• You can point customers to knowledgebase when customer type any question on support forms
• You can use outgoing webhooks to run automation as you like

The possibility of doing more with automation is unimaginable. Automation can reduce your agents’ workloads, and they can attend to more customers quickly. This helps to reduce customer queries and runs your customer support system efficiently.

3. Train your people

The third and final tip is to train your people for all events. Your agents will have to interact with various types of customers daily. Some will be kind and understandable, but some will be rude. How they manage these customer interactions depends on their training and their capabilities.

A good customer support agent knows how to manage customer conversations and turn it into a great customer experience. That’s why training is an essential investment as a business owner you should highly consider.

Empower your agents to take action quickly, and do whatever it takes to resolve customers’ problems. Do not force company policy on customers if customer preference is reasonable. Train your agents to know when to bend the rules and take appropriate actions.

Invest in an efficient helpdesk that will give agents customer data whenever needed. Create an internal knowledge wiki for VAs to learn and educate. Assure your agents to ask for help when they need your assistance.

Optimize your self-service and integrate it with your helpdesk via automation. For example, with Fluent Support workflow automation, you can handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks at a glance. So, you can reduce future customer ticket volume drastically.

Conclusion

You can optimize customer support for holiday time rushes by putting these plans in place before the season begins. Also, make sure you invest in reliable helpdesk software when building your customer support operation. Self-service should be available even before customers search for it.

Watch trends and use data to identify spikes in customer rushes. Get ready when customers arrive. Small businesses can achieve greater sales with an empowered customer support team by not compromising on quality and providing a great customer experience during a busy Christmas season.

The post How to Handle Holiday Time Customer Service on Christmas Rush appeared first on Fluent Support.

There are a few deadly sins of customer support that can make customers feel frustrated, disrespected and make them never come back! Small businesses should learn about these deadly sins and ensure their customer support team is not making these mistakes. These deadly sins can hurt your customer retention, increase churn rates and hamper your brand reputation.

In this blog, we’ll highlight some of the biggest deadly sins of customer support and how your small business should tackle these deadly sins. Let’s dive in.

9 deadly sins of customer support

Here are the most deadly sins of customer support you must be aware of and take action against them:

1. Lack of empathy

Not showing enough empathy towards customers is the biggest deadly sin of customer support. Not only does it make your customer support detached, inattentive, and unresponsive, but it also leaves customers in a frustrating stage. Lack of empathy is the main reason for bad customer experiences.

Lack of empathy shows customer support has no interest in solving customer behavior. Your words and body language can influence customer interaction. How you are talking and what energy toward customers you’re giving off can make customers feel positive or negative.

Try to understand your customer’s perspective before jumping to a conclusion. Show positive energy towards them, and put your full attention on customers while talking to them. The goal is to provide solutions and make customers feel great about the experience.

2. Offering no alternative solutions

It’s not possible to offer an immediate solution to every customer queries comes to you. It’s difficult when you are a small business owner. But you can always offer alternatives.

Most customer support representatives make this mistake. When customers ask for something, they get an answer like – “Sorry, I can’t help you.” This leaves customers baffled. It shows that customer support is not interested in the person or not making any effort to help the customers. Which makes the frustrating customers take their business with your competitors.

Small businesses should always offer alternatives to their problems. You don’t want to leave any chance of repeat customers on the table. Nurture the relationship with your customers and try to go the extra mile to solve their problems. Customers will not forget about their experience.

3. Cold service attitude

Another deadly sin that shrugs off customers from the line is the cold attitude of the customer service rep. They answer customers’ questions. That’s it. No further interaction, no follow-up, or no extra words. Customers will see this type of behavior as unfriendly or, sometimes – hostile.

Your customer support should always be welcoming to customers, interested in their situation and needs. Train your customer support team to show positive energy from the start, exclude unfriendly and cold attitudes from their body language when interacting with customers.

4. Lack of active listening

Active listening is a powerful customer support tool. Listening to your customers before speaking up and repeating their words for better understanding creates positive communication between you and your customers.

Customer support agents, who speak before letting a customer finish, make the customers more furious and make the situation ugly. You can easily tackle negative situations by starting to listen to your customers.

5. Robotic customer service

Ever got frustrated by the same pre-recorded robotic voices over the phone or human customer support following the same boring script repeatedly. If you hate it, be sure your customer will hate it too!

Canned responses are good for repetitive answers, but the same repetitive things overused will make customers angry. Robotic customer service does not acknowledge a customer as a person, leaving customers uncertain about where to look for answers.

Robotic customer support leaves customers unsatisfied. Limit your canned responses and pre-recorded answers, and train your support agents to make an effort to connect with customers as a people. It does not take much time, but it’s worth it!

6. Rulebook treatment

Every company has policies. Sure, your small business must have. For a continuous business profit, companies have to follow their policies. But is it a “must-follow” for customer support?

Imagine your long-term customers asking for a reasonable change in your offerings, but your customer support agent says, “can’t do it, sir! Company policy prohibited it.” What do you think the customer will do?

The customer will leave with the impression that your company values them less despite doing business with you for this long! Chances are they won’t return and get ready to face some negative reviews.

Make policies for people, not harass them. Educate your support agents on when to compromise business policy for greater customer experience.

7. Transferring agent to agent

Ever placed a hold on customer support calls or transferred from agent to agent? For a customer, it’s frustrating because they feel like no one is making an effort to solve their problem, leaving them confused, and not knowing which they should contact for support.

The same goes for support tickets. If multiple agents cover one conversation at a time, it shows how broken the system is. Always have a system in place for your customer support. Form a support structure before forming your customer support team.

Know how many support agents you need to tackle customer queries on special occasions and how you can use automation to assign agents to individual tickets automatically. Help customers contact your human support by reducing the point of contact.

8. Ignoring customer’s preference

Today’s customers prefer to contact businesses from the mediums they use most. That’s why omnichannel customer support is essential to the new customer support revolution. Not everyone wants to call for customer support.

When people contact your Twitter through direct messages for support, try to offer the solution there instead of making them switch channels to your support ticket system. Pressuring them to make the switch will not solve the problem quickly, but the customer will leave you quickly.

Sync your customer support operation with your all-business team. Especially with social media, support agents can attend to customer needs where they contact you most.

9. Not acknowledging mistakes

Groveling on your own mistakes can make situations worse. Yes, you can make mistakes. And you must say sorry. But apologizing in every conversation will leave the customer irritated. Make an apology on the first attempt and detail how you will make it right for the customers.

Another big deadly sin of customer support is that most agents somehow do not acknowledge their mistakes but keep repeating customers’ mistakes whenever they get a chance. It’s utterly disrespectful to your customers. Blaming your customers will not help win repeat customers; sometimes, you need to forget some mistakes and use the incident to make the customers feel respected by your behavior.

Conclusion

Small businesses need to provide excellent customer support to attract new customers. Great customer service is the backbone of customer loyalty. Businesses should be aware of these deadly sins of customer service and take steps to remove them from their support system.

What type of deadly sin did you encounter from your customer support experience? Please share with us in the comment.

The post Deadly Sins of Customer Support Small Businesses Should Avoid appeared first on Fluent Support.

JS helpdesk & Fluent Support are two helpdesk options currently holding their place in the WordPress ecosystem. JS helpdesk is older than Fluent Support, but Fluent Support is catching up with the JS helpdesk with constant updates and functionality.

In this blog, we’ll go through Fluent Support and JS helpdesk to find out which is better for your customer support system. It’s necessary to learn about WordPress helpdesks and their features if you are planning to start or looking to migrate to a suitable helpdesk system.

Why JS Helpdesk VS Fluent Support?

Customer support is a must-have investment for a business. Your company’s reputation and sales depend on how fast you can reply to your customers with quality solutions. Helpdesk helps you facilitate these operations smoothly.

We selected JS helpdesk & Fluent Support because both are well established in the WordPress support plugin category. Fluent Support is the new contender, which made a great entry into the market one year ago.

JS helpdesk offers a user-friendly interface with 190+ admin configurations. Here are some notable features of JS helpdesk:

• Unlimited agents with unlimited tickets.
• Reply to tickets using emails
• Time tracking on reporting area
• Responsive and translation-ready.
• Auto close tickets
• Internal notes
• Merge tickets

JS helpdesk might have some useful features but lacks in many areas. Some are:

• JS helpdesk has very limited free features available.
• Their premium plans are not flexible. These plans do not offer all features.
• You have to buy premium bundles to use certain features.
• JS helpdesk lacks integrations with 3rd-party, and available integrations are accessible through premium bundles.
• JS helpdesk offers very limited support. Their paid support is available in paid plans.

On the other hand, Fluent Support is a feature-rich WordPress helpdesk plugin that offers flexible plans and easy migration from limited plugins like JS helpdesk, Awesome Support & Support Candy. It offers multiple features, some are:

• Unlimited tickets, unlimited agents, and users
• Fully responsive plugin
• Very flexible pricing plan
• No premium add-ons
• Workflow automation (manual & automatic)
• Customizable dashboard
• Front-end admin portal
• Shortcodes
• Custom fields
• Add & remove tags
• Ticket form configuration
• Custom notifications
• Email piping
• Advanced search with custom filter & sorting
• Internal notes
• Saved replies
• Agent dashboard
• Integration with 20+ tools
• Close ticket automatically
• Get notification & reply tickets from Telegram, Slack & WhatsApp
• Collision detection
• Bulk action
• Activity log filter
• WordPress dashboard widget
• Merge & split tickets
• Response delay tracking
• Custom ticket status
• Advance reporting with hourly reports
• Ticket bookmarks
• Ticket summary in WP toolbar
• Fully translation ready
• Ticket importer (import tickets from other plugins)

You can check out the full feature list of Fluent Support here. 

JS Helpdesk VS Fluent Support: In-depth Comparison

Let’s peek into the detailed features of Fluent Support and JS helpdesk. In this section, we’ll compare JS helpdesk and Fluent support on certain categories to see who stands out the most. We’ll look for which is better and which has more options to run customer service operations.

Usability

Installing Fluent Support & JS helpdesk is like installing any other WordPress plugins on your website. You need to install and activate them before setting them up. If you wish to run the pro version, you need to buy the pro addon from their official websites. You have to manually download the plugin zip file and upload it to the plugin area.

The setup is pretty straightforward. For Fluent Support, you must first set up a “Business inbox” to kickstart your support system.

For JS helpdesk, setting up the plugin is a bit stressful. Their dashboard is not as flexible as Fluent Support. You will need to spend a lot of time learning basic setup through their videos because there is no documentation available on their official sites to follow step-by-step setup. 

Fluent Support offers dedicated documentation sections and a video playlist for main feature configurations. You can follow both to set up Fluent Support in 5 minutes!

Fluent Support offers basic features free in its free plugin, but JS helpdesk is very limited on its free plugin. You can install free plugins and use their offerings and basic features. Fluent Support wins at a big percentage here.

Reports

Reporting is a necessary feature for any kind of helpdesk. It helps you track your customer’s support data and give you a full picture of your support agent’s effort. JS helpdesk gives you basic reporting on these three categories:

• Overall statistics
• Department reports
• User reports

While Fluent Support gives you more with its detailed reporting. It offers:

• Personal reports – Where you can view individual performance, filter them by dates, resolve stats, and response stats.

• Agent reports – This can be helpful to get more into individual reports based on ticket stats, response stats, and resolve stats. You can also filter them using the agent’s name and time.

• The best part of Fluent Support’s reporting is that you can download agents’ report summaries. You can select all agents, and parameters or select all agents and export summary with one click. JS helpdesk has no ‘export agent summary’ feature available.

• Fluent support also has an awesome feature called “Activities.” It will help you review your customer support activities, from ticket creation to ticket replies, agent assigned, and ticket actions in one place. You can sort them by agent name and dates too!

Support Functionality

Both JS helpdesk and Fluent Support offer the same support functionality. But the main difference is Fluent Support offers all functionalities on every plan. JS helpdesk does not offer that. It is limited to their premium plans. Some of the essential support functionality both plugins offer:

• Internal Notes – This feature helps immensely with team collaboration. You can use internal notes to inform your fellow support agents about individual tickets or users. Internal notes are great for passing information between agents.

Fluent Support and JS helpdesk offer ‘Internal Notes”, but the main difference is that it is not available on all of JS helpdesk’s premium plans, while Fluent Support offers it on all. 

• Business Inboxes – Fluent Support allows you to open multiple business inboxes on your websites. You can use web-based and email-based inboxes for different emails. You can use both to serve users, and your support agents can reply to the tickets from one shared dashboard.

JS helpdesk has departments where you can set up different departments for different emails. The functionality lacks flexibility and is not user-friendly.

• Email Support – Fluent Support and JS helpdesk offer email piping on their paid plans. Email piping offers the ability to receive emails from users, and agents can reply to these emails straight from their support dashboard. They don’t need to log in to their inboxes. This feature is great for using multiple emails, receive and reply emails from one support dashboard.

While Fluent Support offers email piping on every pricing plan, JS helpdesk offers it on ‘Professional Plan.’ If you wish to use it with other plans, you’ll need to buy the individual addon with a price tag of $49.

• Automation WorkFlows – Automation is essential for regular customer support operations. It reduces extra time on repetitive tasks and gives agents more time on quality support responses. Fluent Support has unique ‘Automation Workflows,’ where you can do automated work manually or automatically. You can set up both manual and automatic workflows in Fluent Support.

On the other hand, JS helpdesk lacks full automation workflows. Only ‘Agent Auto Assign’ is available on ‘Professional Plan’ and as an individual add-on priced at $49.

• Saved Replies – Also known as canned responses, this function is very helpful for using template responses over and over again. Fluent Support offers it within every pricing plan, but JS helpdesk offers it on standard & professional plans. You can buy it as an individual add-on for $39.

• Collision Detection – Fluent Support has an awesome “Collision Detection” feature, which shows agents working on tickets. If multiple agents open the same ticket, their profile picture will show up. This will stop any collision on any ongoing tickets. JS helpdesk does not have this feature.

• Custom Fields – Fluent Support allows you to create custom fields on support forms based on your need and integrations. JS helpdesk is limited this function only accessible by premium add-ons.

• Full Customer Overview – Fluent Support offers a complete customer overview with its dynamic dashboard. When you open a customer’s ticket, you can see their information, previous conversations, and purchase history. 

JS helpdesk has very limited functionality on this. You have to buy multiple premium add-ons or a professional plan to get a complete overview of JS helpdesk.

Integrations

Integration functionality can make any customer support system super efficient. That’s why Fluent Support offers seamless integration with 20+ tools, including various LMS plugins, e-commerce, form, CRM, and documentation tools.

JS helpdesk has an awfully limited integration offer with WooCommerce, Mailchimp, Envato, and Easy Digital download only. And the frustrating thing is that they are not available in every plan. You have to buy a premium addon to use them, while Fluent Support offers all integrations with every plan.

Fluent Support also integrates Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, and Discord. This type of integration offers a seamless connection between Fluent Support and 3rd party communication tools. You can receive and reply to tickets directly from Telegram, WhatsApp, and Slack. This integration will come in handy if you run your support team from these 3rd party communication tools. Unfortunately, JS helpdesk does not have these integrations available.

Pricing

The biggest plus point of a helpdesk system is its pricing. When you start your customer support team, it may be small, but after some time, you’ll need to add more agents and functionality for a complete customer experience.

JS helpdesk’s pricing does not match the needs of a growing customer support team. They have 3 price tiers, and not all features are available on every plan. You have to buy premium add-ons to use features if you are not using professional plan and plans are limited to single site only.

Fluent Support has 3 flexible pricing plans and offers all features on every plan. You don’t need to buy individual premium addons like JS helpdesk to use Fluent Support’s full functionality. Fluent Support also offers multiple domain licenses.

Fluent Support also offers steady customer support while you need to buy a ‘Paid Support’ premium add-on to get premium support on JS helpdesk.

Fluent Support VS JS helpdesk: Final Verdict

Although both plugins have their purpose, Fluent Support stands apart from the JS helpdesk if you want more features and flexibility. When you compare Fluent Support with JS helpdesk, Fluent Support is fast, fully responsive, and can connect with lots of tools.

Using Fluent Support, you can offer customer support for your course students, product buyers, and site members. Fluent Support tickets are accessible through Slack, Telegram, and WhatsApp, allowing you to attend to customer queries from anywhere. Your agents don’t need to log in to the dashboard even!

Fluent Support gets updates regularly and listens to its active community for new suggestions to improve its functionality. Its ‘Ticket Importer’ can import tickets from Awesome Support, Support Candy, Help Scout, and JS Help Scout.

If you run your customer support system using JS helpdesk, follow this ticket importer documentation to migrate from JS helpdesk to Fluent Support in one click!

Whenever you need to select a helpdesk system for your business, always look for vast integrations, flexibility, and responsiveness. The first rule of great customer support is how fast you reply to your customers. Quality fast solutions play a huge role in creating long-lasting customer experience. Fluent Support is surely ahead of JS helpdesk in many areas as the best customer support plugin for WordPress.

The post WordPress Helpdesk Comparison: Fluent Support VS JS HelpDesk appeared first on Fluent Support.

How can companies ensure they are doing right? Here come customer service objectives, which set the seal on great customer experience.

Customer service objectives establish the goals and determine the KPIs business tries to achieve. Another part of customer service objectives is customer service resume objectives. Understanding customer service goals, objectives, and KPIs are necessary to write great customer service resume objectives.

In this blog, we’ll look into customer service objectives, the goal of customer service, why it’s important, and how to write customer service resume objectives.

Goals of customer service

Customer service goals are simple. Increase sales through great customer service & build a loyal customer base. So these loyal customers will come back again to buy goods or services from you from time to time.

Here are the straightforward goals of customer service:

1. Respond to customers’ queries quickly and retain them.
2. Show empathy towards customers and use customer interaction to build deep connections.
3. Collect data from customer interactions, find customers’ pain points, and share the data with other teams.
4. Nurture relationships through customer success and cultivate loyalty.
5. Improve customer retention through great customer service and improve brand reputation.

Good customer service is essential to make a brand customer’s first choice. Often mistakes can happen, but if your customer service is fast and provides quality service, customers are willing to forgive and forget. Great customer service requires a willingness to actively listen, act quickly with the right solutions, and communicate clearly.

Objectives of customer service

Customer service objectives help you to deliver quality customer service fast. Here are a few objectives of customer service widely used by industry experts.

1. Be a customer advocate

Businesses need to remember that company policy is only there for a while. Sometimes they focus on company policy rather than customer needs. 

For companies to become customer-centric, they should focus on customers first. Your customers do not want to know your company’s policy every time. Your agents should be an advocate for customers. But that does not mean they have to do everything a customer wants. 

Knowing when it’s time to bend the rules or policy to satisfy a customer is essential. Train your people to provide great customer service. They will become a customer advocate on the go!

2. Cultivate customer loyalty

Customer service is the one-to-one way to create long-term relationships with your customers. Your agents are the catalyst to cultivate customer loyalty for the long term. The way they talk & interact with users can influence a customer’s behavior ten times more than a product copy.

Focus on providing real value fast but not forgetting the quality of the solutions. Customers want fast replies but not poor answers. It needs more and more great interactions to build loyal customers. 

Consistent good customer service at every touchpoint of the customer’s journey is the key to connecting customers with your brand and gaining their loyalty. It is easier to retain old customers than to attract new ones. One bad customer experience can be the reason for customer churn. But a single great customer experience can make the customer stay with your brand long-term.

3. Providing fast but quality solution

Want to build customer loyalty quickly? Provide fast but quality solutions. Today’s customers’ attention is easy to catch and easy to lose. If you can make them used to your customer service, they will come back to you rather than your competitors.

A reply in 5 minutes with no value will not make your customers happy. On the other hand, a detailed answer but 5 days late will make your customers furious if they need the solution right when they email you!

First, response time is an essential metric, but do not follow the metrics only. Provide real value while keeping the metric high. The ultimate goal should be customer satisfaction.

4. Focus on customer satisfaction

We are telling you to improve customer satisfaction. But how can you focus on customer satisfaction while chasing all these customer support metrics?

To improve customer satisfaction, first, you must know how satisfied or dissatisfied your customers are. Use customer satisfaction surveys after every customer support interaction. These surveys will give you a clear picture of how customers are treating your customer service.

Note down their dissatisfaction points and try to improve those areas immediately. Train your customer support agents on how to provide good customer service. Look for potential causes for customer dissatisfaction and remove them.

The best way to satisfy your customers is to help them to find ways to help themselves. Provide knowledge base, updated documentation, quality guides, and free premium video tutorials. Most times, customers want to resolve issues themselves. You can use automation or AI chatbots to provide them with resources. Constantly work on customer experience around your products, so customers will have less dissatisfaction, and you will have fewer customer support queries.

5. Become a brand ambassador

Customer service representatives are the face of your company. They are the ones who talk to customers directly, they know their pain points and they can influence a customer’s decision with their words.

Train your customer service people to become the brand ambassador. It is their job not only to share the good news with customers but also the bad news. Without dissatisfied customers, they should be able to say no professionally.

Only empathy and compassion for what they do, service people can keep the bar high for customer experience. They are your business’s front people, who tell customers how good your product is and why they should use it. You should focus on guiding them to provide the best service for your customers using efficient ways.

6. Collect customer feedback

Customer data tells a lot. How they use your products, what they lack, what frustrates them, and what their pain points using your products can help you improve.

Learn ways to collect customer data and customer feedback. Use survey tools, polls, and short queries to learn more about customer perspectives about your product. Use them at each point of the customer journey so that you can improve the point-to-point interactions customers have with your product.

Customer feedback will also show you how effectively your customer service team works. Use customer feedback forms to collect customer satisfaction data after a customer service representative closes a ticket.

Do not hesitate to ask your customers how to improve your product. Your customers are your best critics. If your product provides real value to them, they will want you to succeed more. Use that to your advantage. Use different channels to collect feedback based on your customer’s preference. It will help you collect more data from customers who are willing to share it with you but only on their preferred medium.

7. Increase customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value tells you how valuable a customer is to your business in a certain quarter. It can be calculated by the amount of revenue generated from a user in their lifetime with your business.

You can increase your customer lifetime value by creating a customer-first strategy. Follow all the previous points we mentioned from 1-6. It is crucial you have a system to collect data, customer feedback, analyze it, and measure it.

Measuring your data will help you understand the customer’s pain point, what you lack, and how you can improve the overall customer experience. Customer lifetime value also depends on your customer retention and churn rates.

8. Improve customer retention & reduce churn

Customer lifetime value highly depends on high retention and low churn rates. Customer service representatives can be a catalyst in improving your customer retention rate. When a customer contacts you for help, your support agent should take the opportunity to win them by providing excellent customer support.

When customers are handled with a friendly demeanor and empathic way, it will leave a lasting impression on those customers. They will have a great customer experience that they might share with their friends and family and become the medium for your organic word-of-mouth marketing.

Customer churn rates reduce when you remove all fiction from a customer’s journey. Self-help tools, stand-on live support, AI chatbots, and real-time human helpdesk support can eliminate any risk of losing customers. When you provide great customer support on every interaction, customers will recognize your effort and reward you with their loyalty. 

Key metrics for customer service objectives

There are some key metrics support teams follow for their customer service objectives. They are:

1. Customer satisfaction score – This helps you determine how satisfied a customer is after a support conversation. You can also use CSAT for customer onboarding to customer refunds.
2. First response time – it is essential you log and analyze your support team’s first response time. It tells you how long customers had to wait to get the first response from your team. If your average first response time is high, it will be hard to retain new customers.
3. Average resolution time – A great customer experience highly depends on how much time it is required for your support agents to solve a customer’s problem. You don’t want a high average resolution time on your help desk metrics if you seek to provide a good customer experience.
4. Average ticket backlogs – one of the best KPIs to determine how efficient your customer support team is to determine how many tickets are on backlog at a certain time. You can find out what you should do or how many agents you need if ticket backlogs are high on specific periods (e.g.- deal seasons)
5. Customer retention & churn rates – How many customers you are losing in quarters and how many are retained at specific times can tell much about customer service performance. Great customer experience will help you retain customers, but if your customers are churning after a support conversation, it is necessary to look into where the support team is failing.  

Customer service resume objectives

Customer service resume objectives are part of your resume, which describes your skill, experience, and ability—it summarizes your expertise for HR managers.

You should write new objectives for every job before applying. Customer service resume objectives should be on top of your resume for a direct positive impression.

Why is a customer service resume objective important?

Customer service is not what it looks like. It’s not about answering customers’ emails & calls; customer service jobs require more than that. It’s where relationships are built and forged for the long term.

You need certain technical skills to handle daily customer queries and day-to-day operations, but you also need soft skills. Soft skills like empathy, positive tone of voice, body language, intuitions, quick thinking, and fast problem-solving are necessary to stand out in the competitive market of customer service jobs.

Soft skills mixed with technical skills can help you develop connections with customers and gain their trust. When your ability to influence customers’ decisions is high, you will be more valuable to your organization.

Your customer service resume objective should highlight both your technical & soft skills. A strong resume objective will differentiate you from others applying for the same positions. Clear and direct customer service resume objectives will be an advantage for you at every step. It will showcase what you can do and how your customer service resume objectives align with the business’s customer service goals.

How to write a goal-oriented customer service resume objective?

Goal-oriented customer service resume objectives and using a resume maker will help your resume stand out from others. Here is how you should write one-

1. Highlight your skills

Include your technical skills for the job in your resume objective. Highlight what you do best and what you can bring to the table. Remember your soft skills. Mix them with your skill, but don’t lie about them. You can learn new technical skills on the go. Soft skills can only be gained in natural ways. 

Some are born with it, like empathy. Some can be accomplished with determination, like time management. Technical skills are important for daily customer service jobs, and soft skills are essential for connecting with customers to win their trust.

2. Showcase your experience

If you have long-term experience in certain customer service areas, showcase it on your resume. Highlight that you are open to exploring new areas as long as you can provide value. 

Don’t have a background? Show that you can stick with certain things for the long term. Customer service requires a person who can stick to the problem until finding the solution. Your track records will speak for you.

3. Explain your expertise

Include your past accomplishments in your resume objective. If you work in customer service jobs, you might pick up certain expertise which will differentiate you from others. Explain them in paragraphs for clarity.

You can use numbers and data to describe your authority in certain areas. Businesses want people who can bring them more sales by retaining customers. Your expertise should align with the company’s needs or explain why they may need your expertise.

Conclusion

Customer service representatives must have a passion for serving customers and fueling their success. You can only grow in customer service jobs if you are interested in taking care of your customers. Showcase your skills, expertise, and understanding of customer-centric mindset in your customer service resume objective.

Research what customer service means to the business you are applying for. Learn about their brand values and how they are serving their customers. Resonating your customer service resume objectives with company goals will help you to stand out.

The post 8 Customer Service Objectives Small Business Should Follow appeared first on Fluent Support.

Millions of users now use WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, Slack & other niche messaging services like Discord. Their daily use of these apps changed customer behavior drastically. Texting and messaging are now for boomers, “DMing” is the new cool thing for the younger generation. 

Companies now adopted this ever-changing landscape to pursue their customers where they are. Users now expect you to provide customer support via these communication apps. Digital generation lives and breathes in this app ecosystem; businesses have to change their operation according to customer behavior to survive this digital app era. 

Most of these communication apps are compatible to integrate with your helpdesk systems. You can run your customer service operation from these messaging apps without problems. In this blog, we’ll feature some popular communication apps, look into their advantages, and learn how to use them for customer support operations.

14 Best messaging apps for customer support operations

Here are 14 communication apps businesses can use for their customer service. These messaging apps provide greater support and features than general texting. You can use them as your customer support channels, integrate them with your helpdesk, and attend customer support tickets through the app’s chat functions.

1. WhatsApp

Over 2 billion people used WhatsApp in 2021, and it is the number one communication app that delivers 100 billion messages daily in 2022. WhatsApp is maintained by Meta, which also offers other apps like Facebook, Messenger & Instagram.

Whatsapp is already the most used app in most countries. Meta is also investing heavily in WhatsApp Business, targeting small businesses. It directly integrates with Facebook pages; users can directly send messages from Facebook pages and contact brands for customer support.

WhatsApp has 2 types of features you can use for your business:

WhatsApp Business: It’s like a personal account but has more features to fulfill small business needs. Small business owners can set up a business profile & connect it with their Facebook page. You can also use response templates, set up customized auto-replies, and create labels and away messages. 

If you are a small business and want to create a deep relationship with your customers, WhatsApp business is highly recommended.

WhatsApp API: Like to integrate WhatsApp with your helpdesk, CRM, and other tools? WhatsApp offers a complete API for enterprises and businesses who likely have a big customer base or want to control customer support operations more closely. 

You can send customized, personalized messages and updates like shipping info, new discounts, reminders, and automated responses as you need. You can integrate WhatsApp with your help desk and reply to customer queries using WhatsApp chat. WhatsApp API helps you provide your customers with seamless & secure customer service.

2. Telegram

Telegram is well-known for its security features. It has 700 million users and aims to get 1 billion in 2023. Telegram provides cloud-based communications, end-to-end encryptions for secret chats, self-destruct features, and open-source API.

Telegram offers unlimited participation in groups & channels; it has more flexibility than other communication apps. The best thing about Telegram is anyone can create chatbots for their ecosystems. Companies can run their whole customer care service using Telegram chatbots and API integration with their favorite helpdesk, CRM, and any other tools.

B2B businesses can use Telegram to share sensitive information with their partners, and B2C companies that respect customer privacy can offer more secure customer support for their privacy-conscious customers.

3. Slack

Do you know? 40% of Fortune 100 companies use Slack. Slack is a communication app specially designed for offices. You can connect with your teams, organize tasks and provide more security than email.

Slack is used by 10 million people every day! It is the most popular messaging app used by teams. You can use slack for your company’s internal communication, provide customer service from Slack chats, create public channels to create community forums for users, or use public channels as a knowledge base.

Slack API offers tremendous flexibility. You can connect Slack with numerous popular apps. It has 2000+ apps in its app directory. You can use its API to create customized apps and build workflow automation to process your business’s repeat works. Like Telegram, you can build bots in Slack or buy bots from the marketplace to automate specific tasks. Slack offers integration with all kinds of customer service helpdesks so that you can offer customer support from your Slack channels.

4. Discord

Discord was preliminarily founded for gamer use but now serves various niche communities worldwide. This niche communication app has 6.7 million active servers hosted and 140 million active monthly users.

Although Discord started as a gaming tool, now its motto is “chat for communities and friends.” Businesses can create different servers (channels) for different purposes and share files, audio, video, or anything with a selected group.

Discord offers screen sharing ability, which is useful if your company offers video customer support. You can use Discord to share multiple screens with customers and provide complex support. Its audio quality is impressive and can be used for phone support.

You can build apps on top of Discord, create bots or integrate Discord with your favorite tools. You can easily connect your helpdesk with Discord through webhooks or integrations available. 

5. Facebook Messenger

Messenger is another popular communication app from the Meta family. It has over 1 billion active users. Most Facebook users use Facebook messenger daily. It has a big influence over their customer behavior.

Facebook Messenger can send auto-replies, pre-written, instant replies, and personalized messages. You can automate these things using messenger integration and connect most tools or helpdesk.

You can generate leads & follow up on them with live chats or automated responses. Small businesses can use Messenger to help customers with frictionless onboarding, provide seamless customer service through multiple agents, and proactively send customer notifications through the app for faster results.

6. Instagram Direct

Instagram is another popular messaging app among the younger generation from the Meta family. It has over 500 million daily active users and 1 billion monthly users. Most instagram users follow public figures, brand accounts, and local small businesses.

Business uses Instagram to share behind-the-scenes new product announcements, photos, and videos through Instagram stories. Instagram Direct is great for communicating with your fans, customers, and long-term well-wishers. Plus, you can collaborate with influencers on Instagram to amplify your brand’s messaging and reach.

Instagram offers a great range of business tools, like professional accounts with analytics, shop features, and brand management tools. You can set up push notifications and quick reply templates to help your customer service operation.

7. Twitter Direct Message

Twitter is one of the fastest social news networks. More than 229 million users use Twitter actively. Over 75% of B2B businesses use Twitter to market their products or services. Customers mostly use Twitter to share product reviews, recommendations, and conversations with others.

Businesses can share their new product news, start a conversation with customers or join customer discussions organically. Often customers use Twitter to share their frustration about customer service. Companies can jump in and provide instant solutions from there. Twitter direct messages can be 1:1 communication with customers to provide a fast response.

8. Apple Business Chat

Surprised to see Apple on the list? Apple has a “Business chat” communication app, which can connect your business with over 1.65 billion Apple device users! Apple users can send messages from Apple Maps, Siri, and Safari web browsers.

Businesses can use Apple business chat to receive buyer’s payments via Apple payments. It also offers functionality to send updates, reminders, product photos, and automated responses. If you provide high-end service or premium products, then Apple business chat is the right tool to connect with your high-ticketing customers.

9. Google Business Messages

Google is one of the most used search engines. Over 4 billion users use Google search daily! Imagine how many of your customers are using Google. Isn’t it easy to connect with these customers when they search your brand name on Google search?

Google business messages help you connect your customers directly from Google search. Customers can start a conversation from Google Search, Google Maps, and other Google apps. It can provide fast customer service; customers can contact companies directly through ‘Google Business Messages’ without clicking on websites, your store, or any other 3rd party communication.

Like ‘Apple Business Chat,’ you can receive buyer’s payments through ‘Google Business Messages’ using Google Payments. Customers can access personalized support via live chat with one click, get the latest updates, and get answers to frequent questions.

10. Viber

Viber is a Japanese chat app offering communications across 190 countries and has 1 billion registered users. It offers bots, rich messaging features, and secure chat functionality.

Businesses can use Viber chatbots to set up frequently asked questions for one-to-one communications and offer customized chat stickers for super customers and public groups for nurturing communities for long-term customers.

11. WeChat

China is notorious for banning outside apps; users are left to use only country-made apps. WeChat is one of the most used apps in China. It is used by over a billion people and is dubbed a super-app.

What can’t you do with WeChat? Everything! WeChat offers a shared inbox for customer support, branded stickers, and chatbots for automation. Businesses can use these features for personalized customer communication, segment contacts, and send automated messages using chatbots. WeChat offers an in-app payment option that you can use for receiving payments from buyers.

12. Line

Line is another popular Japanese app like Viber. It has similarities with WhatsApp. Line is used by 160+ active monthly users and has a wider reach in Asia Pacific countries. If you want to reach customers in these areas, Line can help you with lots of functionality.

Line offers business accounts for companies and tools like autoresponder with keyword triggers that can trigger certain frequently asked questions based on customer queries. Line has customizable brand stickers you can create and use in customer conversation, set up away messages, and add plugins in your business profiles for appointments, loyalty programs & reminders.

13. Zoom

Everybody used Zoom during the last pandemic, and the Covid era helped Zoom to become a worldwide brand. Zoom offers one-to-one chat and team chat too. You can do video and audio chat with multiple people using Zoom.

Businesses can use Zoom to share screens with customers and have one-to-one audio & video chat. You can record & share meetings that customers can rewatch later. Zoom also shares integrations so you can schedule and track customer meetings with one click from Zoom’s desktop.

14. Microsoft Teams

Like Slack, Microsoft Team is a new sharing & productivity app directly from Microsoft. Support agents can collaborate with their team using the team app while having a conversation with customers.

Microsoft Team offers instant messaging, video calls, shared channels, and other team collaboration features. You can integrate popular apps using team integrations and connect with Trello, ClickUp, Asana, Salesforce, or Jira and over 100+ apps.

Businesses can set up private channels through Microsoft Team and share files and notes or collaborate on ideas with team members. You can offer one-to-one support to customers and training on troubleshooting using the Microsoft Team app. 

What to look for in messaging apps for customer support

These 14 apps are some of the best communication apps, but more are out there. How can you pick the best one for business?

The first thing you should consider – how simple it is for your customer to use.

Easy-to-use tools can help your customer contact your customer support instantly with less friction, create smooth customer onboarding, and automate repeated responses.

Here are a few things you should look for in messaging apps for customer support operations:

• Does it resonate with your customer base? Is it popular with your customer demographic? If your customers use a specific communication app, it will be wise to integrate it with your support system.

• Is it mobile-friendly? Does it offer both iOS and Android versions? It is necessary to offer support for both user bases; you don’t want to leave out one to another.

• How fast can your team adopt the app? Does it offer fast onboarding? You don’t want to waste time training for a close communication system; rather, choose an app that offers minimal customer onboarding so your team can pick it up fast and start serving customers. Time is crucial for small businesses. 

• What type of integrations does your chosen app offer? Does it offer integration with your customer service helpdesk, communication apps, and internal tools? Small businesses need to invest in the right tool without hammering their yearly budget.

• Does that app offer seamless automation? Can you integrate artificial intelligence in the near future? An app with internal workflows, outgoing & internal webhooks, and automation can help you create automatic systems for repetitive & manual tasks. This way, your support agents can have more time on their hands to attend to customers one-to-one and build long-term relationships.

Go through these checklists, then select your app and check for trials. Trial will help you determine if the app is best suited for your business.

Moving Forward

Billions of people are now accustomed to using communication apps daily. Messaging apps changed customer behavior over the years. It also affected how customer service runs and business relationships with customers.

Communication apps offer speed and simplicity, which can accelerate customer support operations and help you provide customers with proactive support using automation. Take advantage of these new opportunities as a small business owner and integrate communication apps with helpdesk to offer high customer satisfaction.

The post Top Communication Apps for Stellar Customer Support appeared first on Fluent Support.

A complete customer support solution can only help fallen businesses to win customers back. The only reason small businesses are failing is not choosing a better customer support solution software for their business. Business runs on smooth communications. And that’s why it is super important to have uninterrupted support ticketing systems.

There are many help desk tools available in the market. In this post, we have taken two WordPress support ticket plugins – Awesome Support & Fluent Support, and we are going to explore them in detail to tell you what each of them offers! 

Awesome Support VS Fluent Support

Meet Awesome Support and Fluent Support. Awesome Support is one of the old customer support portals in the WordPress market. Fluent Support is the new one, but it became one of the hottest WordPress helpdesk plugins releasing awesome features in just one year!

Before we get to the plugin comparison, a word about them.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support is an effective tool for WordPress. It is user-friendly. You can create a support portal easily in your WordPress dashboard with a few clicks.

Here are some benefits of Awesome Support:

• Private Notes: Ability to save messages or instructions for other agents to follow. 
• Instant Notifications: Get instant email notifications about new tickets or tickets reply.
• Canned Response: Can save and send pre-written responses for new tickets.
• Unlimited Tickets: Offers unlimited tickets for users.
• Unlimited Users: Serve unlimited users from your support portal.

Awesome Support has some useful features, but it has many flaws. They do offer a limited free version and offer premium plans. They also sell features as premium add-ons. Their integration with third-party tools is also very limited; available options are not included in pricing plans. 

Limited Basic Features

Awesome Support lacks most of the basic features like auto-reload. You have to open every page and wait for it to load! That’s disappointing when you are trying to give your customer fast support.

Most Features available as Premium Add-ons

Awesome Support offers some features as premium add-ons. You have to buy these separately after buying their software subscription, which is a deal killer for most people.

Limited Support

Continuous Support after buying a product is a must-have. Awesome Support only offers one year of Support to the buyer. This is very limited when you have to run your business for years.

Limited Integrations

Integration with other services and top plugins makes a support ticket system more efficient. Awesome Support has limited integration and lacks the most necessary plugin integrations.

Complex Pricing

Awesome Support’s pricing comes with a regular price with a bundling price and separate premium add-ons. It is so tricky for first-time customers. They lack one simple pricing solution.

Sometimes these limitations force people to look for Awesome Support alternatives.

Hence, enter Fluent Support! 

Fluent Support, the all-in-one customer support system!

Fluent Support is the fastest WordPress support ticket plugin out there right now. It has vast features compared to Awesome Support. When you dig deep into it, fluent Support will change your view about the WordPress support plugin.

Here are some awesome features of Fluent Support:

• Automatic agent assignment
• Unlimited tickets & users
• Collision detection
• Advanced search
• Filter and sorting
• Admin dashboard
• Bulk action
• Saved replies
• Internal notes
• Seamless integration with 20+ tools
• Custom email notification
• Instant notification & reply tickets from Slack, Telegram & WhatsApp
• Automatic workflows
• Add/Remove taggings
• Custom fields
• Close ticket silently
• Auto close tickets
• Activity log with filters
• WordPress dashboard widget
• Merge & split tickets
• Response delay tracking
• Ticket importer
• Custom ticket status
• Advance reporting with hourly reports
• Frontend admin dashboard
• Ticket bookmarks
• Ticket summary in WP toolbar
• Fully translation ready

Read Fluent Support features in detail.

Fluent Support VS Awesome Support: Comparison features

In this section, we will discuss the main features of a good WordPress helpdesk plugin. What makes it useful and better than its competitors? We will go through some key points and compare Fluent Support and Awesome Support.

Basic Features

Fluent Support and Awesome Support offer some free basic features when you install the free version of the products.

You can use the free version to determine which suits you well for your support team. Then you can buy the pro version. In this case, Fluent Support is one step ahead on basic features like unlimited tickets, users, agents, and products!

Speed

Speed is the most important factor when it comes to customer support. Awesome Support falls far behind Fluent Support on this! 

Awesome Support takes a lot of time to load single pages, which makes response and closing tickets time-wasting. On the other hand, Fluent Support loads tickets faster. It is built using VueJS and runs only if you log in to the Fluent Support admin dashboard. In addition, the admin UI is super-fast since it’s a SPA and communicates via AJAX. So it makes support agents’ time well spent on tickets and they can attend to more customers!

Team Collaboration

Collaborating with your team is the second important factor after speed. A great requirement is also how much a plugin offers the best features for team collaboration. You should always look for this before selecting a helpdesk system for your business.

Awesome Support offers the tools, but their team collaboration features, like private notes and canned responses, are bundled with premium add-ons. But Fluent Support offers these features in single pricing! Fluent Support also has a collision detection feature that shows which agent is working on support tickets showing their avatar in the ticket.

Custom Fields

Want to add custom fields in your support forms? Fluent Support makes it seamless. You don’t need to do anything other than having the plugin installed on your site; it will show related custom fields in the “Global Settings” of Fluent Support.

But with Awesome Support, you have to go through Zunglings and get premium add-ons.

Workflow Automation

Every day the customer support team goes through doing repetitive tasks over and over again. This cost lots of time. You can easily do it by setting up workflow automation.

Awesome Support’s automation feature is not thorough, where Fluent Support has a dedicated “Workflow Automation” feature with manual and automatic automation.

You can do wonders like add/remove tags, automatic agent assignment, add internal notes, automated response and so much more with Fluent Support Automation! Fluent Support has 3 triggers: On Ticket Creation, On Customer Response & On Ticket Closed. You can set your actions automatically based on these triggers.

Email Piping

Email Piping helps you to give your customers the ability to open tickets by sending emails rather than coming to your support portal, registering, and opening a new ticket.

Your support agents can attend to those emails from their agent dashboards and reply to the customers. Awesome Support limited that with premium add-ons.

Fluent Support offers an email-based inbox with every pricing plan! You can use both “Web-based” & “Email-based” inboxes from one website! You can set up multiple inboxes inside one Fluent Support system.

Complete Customer Overview

Fluent Support can provide a complete customer overview whenever you open a ticket. You will know who your customers are, what they bought, whether they attended any course or are in your service, and what their previous conversations are. Every aspect of your customer profile will be visible to you!

Awesome Support limited that separating key features distributed as premium add-ons.

Integrations

Fluent Support has powerful tools integrated with its system. For example, you can replace our default support form with the powerful form builder Fluent forms to create beautiful forms for your site. You can easily add that form anywhere on your customer support website using Fluent Form shortcode. Fluent Support integration offers 20+ integration!

Fluent Support offers both incoming and outgoing webhook features in every pricing plan.

Awesome Support stands poorly next to Fluent Support in terms of integration, only offering 6+ integration for users. And most frustrating is that some of them are premium add-ons. Fluent Support integrations are part of every premium plan.

Third-Party Communication

If you want to provide superior customer support, you have to be very flexible about your service. You have to integrate reliable customer communication tools to connect with your customers and provide information about their support tickets. 

Fluent Support integrates seamlessly with Telegram, Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp. You can connect your support portal with these messaging services and your agents can get ticket notifications about new tickets on their preferred platforms. They can also attend tickets by replying directly from their Telegram, WhatsApp, and Slack chats!

Awesome Support only offers Slack integrations, although it is not available in all plans. You must buy it as a premium add-on if you want to use it. Fluent Support offers Telegram, Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp in all 3 pricing tiers.

Detailed Reporting

Tracking data and your support agent’s effort is necessary to evaluate your customer service operation. This is why you need detailed reporting. Awesome Support does offer reporting but advanced reporting is not available in all plans.

Fluent Support offers detailed reporting for both team and individual agents. It is available in all pricing plans. It also offers activity log features with filters and hourly reports; you can use this feature to track individual agent’s daily activities.

Priority Support

It is crucial to have Support for the customer ticket system you want to use as your support solution. 

Awesome Support and Fluent Support offer one-year priority support and plugin updates. But with Fluent Support, you can access a vibrant community anytime if you need help and our Support is always ready to fulfill your needs whenever you get stuck!

Are you having difficulties with Fluent Support? We are just one ticket away!

Fluent Support VS Awesome Support: Final Thoughts

Not all plugins are perfect. Both Awesome Support and Fluent Support may lack some functionality. Not all users or customer support solutions need everything; sometimes they may not be satisfied with any of them.

In such cases, businesses may hire dedicated WordPress developers to build custom solutions tailored to their specific requirements.

But when we go head-to-head with Fluent Support VS Awesome Support comparison, Fluent Support surely stands apart!

Fluent Support is faster than Awesome Support; it has more flexibility and offers deep integration with powerful tools such as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Slack, and LearnDash. 

We are constantly updating Fluent Support to make it the most powerful one in all solutions for all support needs. Whether you run online shops, digital agencies, services, or any service-related stuff, Fluent Support can help you serve your customers better.

We are constantly talking to our users and taking notes to improve Fluent Support. You can submit your suggestions and participate in the Fluent Support community. 

Fluent Support is a great plugin that is worth your money. You can still go through Fluent Support WordPress repository and check it out for yourself. Our pricing plan is not so complex as Awesome Support and there are no features locked in as premium add-ons!

How to migrate to Fluent Support from Awesome Support?

Ready to migrate but worried about how you can move your years of support tickets from Awesome Support to Fluent Support?

Don’t worry a bit!

Fluent Support recently introduced the “Ticket Importer” features in the latest 1.6.6 release. You can import tickets from Awesome Support & Support Candy in one click!

All you have to do is install Fluent Support Pro and activate it after purchase in your already Awesome Support running WordPress website.

Then after finishing setting up Fluent Support, go to ‘Global Settings. Click ‘Ticket Importer.’ Fluent Support will automatically read the Awesome Support database and show you the ticket details. Click Import Tickets. It will import all tickets from your Awesome Support system to Fluent Support. 

The importing time depends on the ticket number & data size. You can close the window if you want because the whole migration will happen in the backend.

Awesome Support migration to Fluent Support is as simple as installing a WordPress Plugin!

Conclusion

While Awesome Support lacks pricing flexibility, Fluent Support offers pricing, integration, and features to operate a complete customer support system from WordPress. You can go through the comparison of Fluent Support VS Awesome Support again to determine which is the best solution for you.

But in the end, go for the affordable one that improves functionality based on the user’s suggestions. Fluent Support listens to its users, ships new updates regularly, and offers reasonable pricing.

That’s for today! Best of luck!

The post Fluent Support VS Awesome Support: Which One is The Best Helpdesk for WordPress? appeared first on Fluent Support.

Clear conversations help to resolve issues quickly. Customers want fast solutions and expect you to understand their problems with minimal interactions. A small misunderstanding or a slight misuse of words can escalate the situation. Using the right words at the right moments can make a simple interaction into a great customer experience.

These power words or customer service lines are mostly used and well-known by customer support representatives. They vary from industry to industry, but most times they are used to convince customers. You should use some customer service phrases in conversations and others to avoid.

In this blog, we’ll cover some of these excellent customer service phrases, why they are important, and the perfect phrases for customer service. You’ll learn about some customer service lines you must avoid in customer conversions too.

To enhance your client support strategy—download our comprehensive FREE eBook and build a high-performing customer service team.

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8 excellent customer service phrases to use

Here are 8 examples of positive phrases for customer support you should use in your daily customer support operations. It’s important to clarify that these phrases are not must-follow words; you can change them as you wish based on your industry needs. These 8 are examples of customer service power words. If you follow these, you can surely get the idea of more positive customer service phrases you can use in your customer support conversations.

1. “I completely understand why you’d want/say that.”

No matter what features your product offers or your service has, there will be one customer will ask for more. It is hard to dodge these conversations. Often it frustrates the customers more if you are not empathic in your answers.

I know, it’s hard to fulfill every wish. You can’t ship all of the features customers requested. Maybe that feature is in your roadmap, maybe it will take years or maybe that is not where you see your product going. You’ll have to tell your customers that you are not focusing on this now. We certainly face that a lot with our helpdesk plugin, Fluent Support.

The most positive way to handle this situation is to become empathic. Show them you understand why they would want that or say that. Do not directly engage with negative words like No/ never/ we will not. Take the time to explain your mission & vision. Re-introduce your roadmap if you have any public one. Learn how to say no without actually saying no to your customers.

2. “Happy to help!”

Happy to help may be the most overused phrase in support conversations, yet it is the most effective! Don’t worry; we wrote a full blog about happy-to-help alternatives. You can use any of these if you don’t want to use “Happy to help” phrase.

But happy to help can be used to assure your customers that they are in the right place to ask questions. Sometimes people will leave a conversation without ending it. It will be awkward to end a support ticket or a call if you, as a support agent, close it without a proper ending. 

Happy to help is the miracle word in these situations. It tells your customers they can ask other questions if they want. You don’t want your customers to leave unsatisfied, do you?

3. “I would be frustrated/annoyed too.”

There will always be a bunch of angry customers you have to face in customer support. Some may be for valid reasons or some for nothing. How can you cool down such angry customers?

Showing empathy, AGAIN!

Maybe they are waiting for a feature you promised to ship weeks ago but can’t because of some unfortunate reasons. Maybe, they face bugs on your website when they proceed to a transaction. Or maybe they are waiting for an order before an important event that did not show up.

Bad things can happen. You can’t control everything. When you take the time to understand your customers’ situations, they will understand too. Be in their shoes, and feel their pain. Acknowledge your shortcomings and explain what you are doing to resolve that issue.

Here is an example:

“I understand your frustrations; we wanted to ship that feature. However we faced some bugs in our testing phase. We want to make sure the feature is working when we release it. That’s why we are taking this time to test it right and our developers are working hard. I hope you will understand. It will be a blast when the feature finally goes live. It will make your X problem go away instantly!”

4. “While we may not be able to do that, here are other options we can explore for this problem.”

There are times when you can’t accept a client’s offer. Sometimes you have to say no to a customer who might want something you are not offering.

It is best to show them other options rather than directly saying no. Offer alternative solutions; customers might take it. It is better to retain them than lose them now.

Here is an example of how we handle this type of query:

“Hello, Fluent support does not have the XYZ Form integration right now, but you can do it by outgoing webhooks. It may sound a bit technical but we do offer detailed documentation. You can follow the doc step-by-step and accomplish what you want without the feature! I hope this helps! If you have any problems, I am here to help you. Reply to this email if you face any difficulty!”

5. “Thank you for being our customer!”

Your customer support team is uniquely positioned to foster a deep relationship with your customer base using one-to-one interactions. Take the time to appreciate your customers while positively interacting with them.

A thank you may seem simple, but when you say thank you after a successful interaction will leave a positive feeling in your customers. A genuine thank you will help you have a long-term relationship with customers. Remember to say thanks when the issue is resolved. Do not say thank you when your customers are unsatisfied. That will leave a bitter feeling for customers.

Use your help desk features to see your customers’ full history. You can then thank them based on their time with you. A personalized thank will matter more to them. Show gratitude when you can and it will help you earn your customer’s loyalty.

6. “We really appreciate your suggestion/feedback.”

Customer feedback is a goldmine if you use them correctly. Every type of business should collect customer feedback, measure it & analyze it for new features or improvements.

Customer suggestions can help you with proactive support. It is important to resolve issues before customers encounter them. If you regularly collect customer feedback, you’ll see a pattern in issues and learn from it. This way, you can identify issues before customers face them and resolve them faster.

Ask your customers for feedback. And don’t forget to thank them for their suggestion. Always acknowledge their input. Customers who take their time and share issues they identify with you, expecting nothing in return are your best friends. Because somehow these issues can affect other users later & increase customer churn rates. 

Genuinely appreciate these customers; let them know how you will implement their suggestions. They will feel connected with your brand when they see their feedback is accepted in product features. Eventually, they will become your vocal supporter and tell their network about your brand. Thus increasing your organic reach!

7. “I want to make sure I understand your issue. Can you repeat this again?”

Active listening is a superpower in customer support. You don’t want to rush in solving problems before understanding the customer’s pain point. It will create more problems than solutions. Confusion and misunderstanding will leave customers frustrated.

First, listen to your customer, understand the problem, and ask for details for clarity. Thank your customer for taking the time to contact you. If you have any confusion, ask them to repeat politely. Then come up with your solutions. Assure your customers you are going to take care of it.

8. “I understand how frustrating this must be. I would too if that happened to me!”

Upset customers can be your most loyal customers if you handle them correctly. Most times, customers want you to feel how they feel. When you say- “Unfortunately, no!” it can trigger them to become rude, leaving behind angry reviews or frustration over social media. This leaves room for one more viral bad customer experience story!

You definitely don’t want that. Empathize with your customers using this customer service phrase. But remember to use it accordingly. You don’t want to say, “oh, I understand how annoying you are right now,” after misplacing a customer’s order! It will frustrate them more.

This customer service line will cool down the tension and offer alternative solutions. The goal is to make a bad customer experience into a good customer experience. Help your customer to help you to give yourself a second chance!

To enhance your client support strategy—download our comprehensive FREE eBook and build a high-performing customer service team.

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6 examples of customer service phrases to avoid

Now you get an idea about which type of customer service phrases you should use, let’s go through words or service line examples you should avoid in a customer support conversation. These words may not seem negative, but they don’t present you as genuine or helpful in conversations. Again, they may vary from industry to industry, but you’ll get an idea about the type of phrases you should not use!

1. “Unfortunately, I can’t do that for you.”

Saying “No” to customers’ faces is not a good idea. It will immediately turn off your customers. Frustration rises and customers leave. You’ll experience customer support most of the time.

How can you avoid this customer phrase? Replace unfortunately with “As it turns out.” Find related positive words you can use in your conversations without being rude to customers!

2. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand your request.”

Understanding your customer’s problems, why they are frustrated, and how they feel is important to solve their problem effectively. Don’t say you are sorry that you don’t understand them.

Take your time to understand. Active listening is the key. Listen to understand, not to show reactions. If you are using chatbots, make sure your chatbots are well-trained. Often, chatbots use this line when the query does not match predefined questions.

3. “Your call/ticket is important to us.”

Yeah, this customer service line is also on the avoid list. Surprised? Don’t be! 

People remember your actions more than your words. If you say customers are important for your business, then make sure your every action translates that. Most businesses treat their customers like numbers, sales prospects, and a target! You have a better opportunity to stand out than your competitors if you care about your users. Show them you are ready to go the extra mile to win their trust.

4. “Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.”

I don’t know about you, but this customer service line irritates me every time I have to face it! Many people may have the same feelings. This overused line does not convey any empathy at all.

Companies used this as mandatory in any case, which made this expression the most hated. Say exactly why you are apologizing and take action to resolve that.

5. “Can I put you on hold/Can I call you back/ Let me get back to you in a few hours?”

No one likes to be on hold. Do you? Surely I don’t particularly appreciate being held whenever I contact a business’s support team. It can be frustrating for customers who need immediate assistance.

Sometimes you may have to put customers on hold. Ask them politely before that. But if they help right now, don’t transfer their call. Use the resources at your disposal and resolve the issue faster. You can ask permission to call back but remember, customers may not have the patience to wait for your call every time. Use this option when it is necessary for you to consult your team or supervisor. Don’t keep your customers waiting for hours to hear back from you.

This situation can be handled with better internal communication without irritating the customers. You can seek help from your fellow team members internally while talking to customers. A good helpdesk with an internal notes system can help you tremendously if you operate a customer support ticketing system.

6. “Can you tell me again what your last name and phone number are?”

Nobody likes to share the same information again and again. If your customer support is only available from the phone, ensure you have a fast customer database that your support team can access anytime. So they can easily pull up customers’ information by id, code, or first name. Then customers do not have to spell their name and share details whenever they contact your support.

It will make customer support conversations more effective because support agents will have all the customer data at their fingertips. Ensure your customer database software includes all customer history with previous conversations.

For example, most helpdesks (like Fluent Support) show customers’ information, purchase history, and previous conversations right next to their new tickets. It saves time for both support agents and customers. Customer support systems help you with team collaboration within many departments and increase efficiency.

Conclusion

Customer service phrases can influence support conversations, but it does not automatically improve bad customer experience. It takes genuine action and a positive mindset to create a great customer experience.

The best way to use the customer service line is to solve customers’ problems. Empower your customer support team with the right tools and enable them to do what it takes to ensure customer success. Customer support phrases only help you establish a personal connection with customers. Use them wisely and avoid lines that create tension.

Always acknowledge your customers’ problems, show more empathy, and thank them for their feedback. Customer support is your second chance to make your first wrong right. Don’t treat customer queries as metrics to take from your list; invest time and energy to impress your customers with the right solutions. Empty promises won’t help you in the long run.

The post 14 Examples of Customer Service Phrases You Should Use (& Avoid) appeared first on Fluent Support.

I am not even exaggerating; it’s true. 

But many companies ignore this. They don’t have a system of feedback forms and use it to collect feedback from everyday customer interactions.

Customer feedback helps you to improve your products, minimize problems and establish yourself as a customer-centric brand. Feedbacks play a huge role in understanding trends and customer psychology. You’ll know what your customer wants and where you lack in fulfilling their needs.

What is the best way to design a good feedback form that works? Most small business owners fail to create a good feedback form. In this blog, we’ll cover what is a good feedback form and how you can write one. After reading this blog, you’ll learn how to create a feedback form from scratch with minimal effort.

To enhance your client support strategy—download our comprehensive FREE eBook and build a high-performing customer service team.

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What is a feedback form?

A feedback form is a simple way to collect people’s opinions or reviews about your company, service, or products. 

It is as simple as that. 

Feedback form is an effortless system to learn about customers’ perceptions of your business. It also helps you know about your company’s overall customer experience.

You can clearly understand customer relations from your feedback forms data. Feedback forms can help you with 3 key areas:

1. Where your efforts are producing great results and your strength.

2. Customers’ pain points and where you should focus.

3. Improving customer relations across all channels.

What are examples of feedback forms?

A company can collect customers’ feedback in different ways best on their internal needs. There are many ways you can collect customer feedback.

1. Emails 

Email is one of the most personalized feedback systems companies use. It is the oldest communication form, fast and effective.

If your customer communication is all done by email, you can use email to collect customers feedback. You can design your email feedback forms using simple HTML, but they may not exceed basic sections and confuse customers. Instead, go for a responsive HTML builder to collect their feedback.

2. Standalone forms  

These kinds of feedback forms are gaining popularity among businesses. You can use basic templates for these forms, but there are many types. You can use single questions, questionnaires, or in-depth answer fields.

Standalone forms are easy to design and extendable. You can share these forms anywhere with a public link.

3. Pop-ups  

Pop-ups are a new kind of attention-grabbing system. It is mostly used on websites, but app developers now use it to gain more exposure.

The cool thing about pop-ups, you can integrate these with your standalone forms. You can embed a standalone form in your pop-up and grab your customer’s attention after a certain action. It is a good way to collect specific feedback regarding features, touchpoints, or problems.

4. Chatbots 

Chatbot is a new cool thing that can help you elevate customers’ experience through personalized interactions. Chatbots are used for general queries widely. Suppose you can train your chatbots to learn from customers’ questions and set specific questionnaires to deliver. This way, it can collect customers’ feedback automatically.

Use of these feedback forms depends on what kind of feedback you want to collect and where you want to collect it.

What are the types of feedback?

Different ways of customer feedback also depend on what types of feedback you are collecting. To use a feedback form, first, you need to select what type of feedback you wish to collect. There are many types of feedback businesses collect from their customers these days.

Here are some most common types of customer feedback:

1. Customer satisfaction survey

A satisfaction survey tells you whether a customer is satisfied or unhappy with your products or service. It helps you understand the overall customer experience, what customers need, where you are missing out, what a customer expects from you, and how you can deliver a great experience.

2. User experience survey

This type of survey is a bit different from CSAT surveys. While CSAT focuses on overall customer satisfaction, this type of feedback collects data about user experience using certain service or app features.

You can ask 2-3 questions after certain tasks or about a feature, and customers can quickly share their opinions. These feedbacks focus on how the features benefit customers, what is missing, and what customers want from it. 

It is widely used by software companies to beta test their products before launching to the mass market. You can use this model on your customer onboarding journey and collect data about customer interaction at different touch points.

3. Net promoter score

Net promoter score asks a specific question – how likely are your customers to recommend you to their family and friends?

The options are given on a 1-10 scale, and customers can choose from them. The numbers are calculated as a percent when data collection is closed.

NPS forms give you meaningful data about your company’s overall performance. You can determine how your business performs in a certain period or know the whole situation at once. You can find out how many of your customers will be your brand promoters. Customers who picked the highest number in NPS feedback forms are your most loyal customers who are most likely to recommend you to their networks.

4. Customer effort score

Want to know how your customers are treating a task or event?

Use customer effort score feedback forms. These types of forms help you understand how difficult a particular task is.

You can use CES feedback forms to determine your customer onboarding touchpoint’s difficulty or use it to learn more about customer experience. You can ensure your product quality or customer service experience by using optimized CES feedback forms.

5. Customer information form

These feedback forms are highly optimized for current events or customer touch points. They help you collect data about your customers after their onboarding. You can use these feedback forms to learn more about your customers.

The more customer information you gather, you will be one step ahead of your competitors. These customer information feedback forms collect data that helps create your buyer persona. If you have a perfect buyer persona, you can easily target them with engaging copywriting and marketing campaigns.

6. Problem identifier feedback forms

I know the name may sound confusing. Let me explain. These forms are useful to collect data on single interactions instead of a full product experience.

It will help you find out what is working and where customers are facing problems most. If you can integrate these forms in every touchpoint and automate their functionality, you can collect customer feedback on every bug. You can fix them before a customer contacts your support.

Problem identifier feedback forms are highly convenient for proactive support operations. It can help you identify problems before they arise or can mark problems you are unfamiliar with.

How to write a good feedback form?

A good customer feedback form will give your desired data. But how can you write a good feedback form that gives you perfect results every time? Feedback forms have to be unique based on the needs of different industries.

Research your customers’ behavior, understand what they want, and ask them questions. Feedback forms will help you understand what makes a customer happy. Writing feedback forms that work follows certain principles no matter what business it serves.

You can write good feedback forms following these guidelines:

1. Offer a personalized & seamless experience

The first rule of a good feedback form is – make it seamless for your customers to use.

Your customers do not have time to spend on lengthy or difficult feedback forms. They don’t have time to change one channel to another to share their reviews unless they want to. Make it easy for them to write or send your survey or feedback.

Make sure your feedback forms align with your brand identity. Put your brand logo, colors, and font the same as other places in feedback forms. This way, customers will recognize & remember your brand while communicating with your feedback forms.

Use personalization to influence customers to click and fill up the form. If you already have customers’ basic data, prefill those data in the form, so customers don’t have to fill them up again. You can use the customer’s name to call out in a survey sentence to attract attention.

2. Make it short & simple

Keep your feedback short & simple. A feedback form with too many questions can turn your customers away. Use simple sentences and use your words wisely. You want your customers to understand your questions, don’t confuse them. They will leave the form before hitting submit. Know what to ask and when!

Design your feedback forms to have a clear impact on customers. White background & Black fonts are ideal for feedback forms because they cut most distractions. But you can use other colors related to your brand color. Always follow a consistent format & structure in your feedback forms.

Conditional logic is an awesome way to ask certain questions to certain demographics. Depending on customers’ “yes and no” answers, you can show a certain feedback form field. This way, you can keep your form short and engaging.

3. Offer it at the right time & place

How can you get the most value out of a good feedback form?

By offering it at the right time & right place.

Customer feedback varies from time to time. Know when to send feedback forms or show popups because feedback results & customer engagements depend on it.

Revisit your customer’s onboarding journey. Find out where feedback forms will get the best engagement & set up workflow automation. Automations will trigger your feedback forms based on customer input. This way, you will get better engagement and results.

Showing the right feedback forms at pivotal customer interaction moments is vital to improve overall customer engagement.

4. Give customers freedom

Most times, companies design customer feedback forms to collect data they think is important. That’s why feedback forms constantly have the same options and multiple-choice fields. This leaves customers with few options.

Customers usually give up after a few form fields. Do not force your customers to select generic fields. Give them options with “I don’t know” or “Maybe.” This way, you will know which questions are important to your customers. You can edit your survey forms and add the most used fields for good engagement.

Give your customer the option to speak their mind freely. Use open text fields so customers can share their personal experiences and suggestions if they want to share. Make your customer feedback forms about them, not solely you.

How to create a feedback form?

Creating feedback forms on WordPress sites is very straightforward. You use a form plugin connected to your WordPress website to make a feedback form.

There are numerous form plugins you can choose from WordPress respiratory. We’ll use Fluent Forms to show how to create feedback forms. We choose Fluent Forms because it has a deep integration with Fluent Support helpdesk plugin for WordPress.

If you don’t have Fluent Forms, install and add it from your plugin area. Activate & go to the dashboard.

You’ll see a blue “Add a New Form” button. Click it, and a new window will open with Fluent Forms pre-made templates.

You’ll find lots of variations in these premade templates. From basic to marketing, finance, education, product, and more.

We will choose survey & feedback forms from these categories. Let’s say you are in marketing and want to create a feedback form for a customer satisfaction survey. Click “Client satisfaction survey” from the marketing category.

A new window will open with a form editor.

Here you can edit your form, add and remove general fields and use advanced options like conditional logic or direct payment blocks.

Conditional logic is a useful feature to deliver short feedback forms to customers with hidden custom fields only for targeted customer responses.

From the form setting, you can set up your forms as you wish:

• You can set up confirmation types with custom messages.
• Change the layout as you choose.
• Add scheduling and restrictions to your specific needs.
• You can also set advance form validation to prevent spam.

There are many features available in Fluent Forms you can use and customize to your specific needs. You can also use their conversational forms to create feedback forms that look more conversation-like.

Fluent Forms comes with pre-built templates, drag & drop features, great survey reports with cool visuals, and you can easily export your data anytime. Without any coding knowledge, you can create a feedback form like this!

Want to share your feedback forms outside your WordPress site? You can do that too!

Fluent Forms directly integrates with the helpdesk plugin for WordPress – Fluent Support. You can easily integrate your forms with Fluent Support from the integration tab.

You can send your form data from Fluent Support forms to the Fluent Support dashboard with seamless integrations.

Feedback forms format you should follow

Crafting your feedback form in a good format is necessary for better conversions. Feedback forms may be different from industry to industry. But you can follow these basic form formatting to create a feedback form—

• Don’t mark any fields required. Give customers the option to choose whether they will answer it or not.

• Offer open text so customers can write their answers rather than choosing yes and no. This is a great way to collect customer suggestions or frustrations in detail. Customers may want to share their individual stories with you. It can help you to connect with customers on a deeper level.

• Use conditional logic to personalized fields for better customer engagements. You can get better customer results and feedback if you integrate conditional logic on your form fields.

• Choose fields targeting your customers’ needs rather than self-serving. Always think of the customer first when adding form blocks.

• Stop using “I don’t know,” “Maybe,” or “Others” in your answer fields. These options do not provide greater results.

• Do not ask two things in one question. Always focus on one. Keep your questions different to maximize engagement.

• When using a rating scale, always use the same scale in all fields. If you use 0-5 in one, do not use 0-10 in the next field. It will only confuse customers, and you will not get the answer you are looking for.

Feedback forms templates you can copy

If you want inspiration to create your customer feedback forms, here are some form templates by Fluent Support. You can use these pre-built templates or take ideas and make your own.

Comment & Rating Form Template

These forms focus on collecting customers’ ratings and feedback on individual products. You can edit, add or remove these fields as you need.

Brand Awareness Form Template

Want to know if your target audience is aware of your brand? Use this form template. With this form template, you can find out what customers think about you, what impression you have on your customer demographics and collect data about your marketing strategy.

Polling Form Template

Polling forms are the best way to engage with customers. You can get direct answers and make decisions faster in specific areas.

Website Feedback Form Template

Want to redesign your website? The best way to do it is to collect and implement feedback from your visitors. Use this type of feedback form template to collect suggestions on how to improve your website.

Market Research Survey Form Template

Need data for a marketing campaign? Use this conversation-style market research survey form template to collect data from your customers.

Client Satisfaction Survey Form Template

These types of feedback form templates are best to understand what your customers want. Ask specific questions, collect data on what’s working and where you need to improve. Use this template to start and remove or edit fields on the go.

Product Survey Form

Best way to learn what customers think of a product and where you lack it is to impress your buyer.

Customer Service Form

Want to evaluate your customer service or support team? Use these templates to understand how customers react to your service and support agents’ interactions.

Software Survey Form

Simple feedback form to collect data about software. You can add or edit fields as your software farms need.

Online Shopping Behavior Form

Knowing an individual’s perspective about your brand is necessary. This feedback form template helps you identify that and help you know your overall brand recognition.

You can find and choose more types of form templates from the Fluent Forms demo page.

Feedback forms examples

We talked about a good feedback form and how to format one. We also showed you the best feedback form templates you can copy. 

But how are companies using these templates in real life? 

We have the answer too. 

Here are a few examples of good feedback forms used by real-life companies:

1. Glassdoor

Glassdoor’s feedback form follows a simple design. It is short and asks exact questions it wants to collect from users.

2. Airbnb

Airbnb follows a simple feedback form page route. 

They use conditional logic to show the next question filed based on individual user input.

Airbnb allows users to share their experiences without limitations.

Here is how they approach users in email for surveys.

3. Apple

Apple has a dedicated feedback page for each product category. Their feedback form is straightforward.

Here is what the iPhone feedback form looks like.

4. Zoom

Zoom simply follows a basic format while focusing on questions that matter.

5. McDonald’s

McDonald’s feedback form focuses on specific individual food experiences. You can use this example to know what customers think about your specific service rather than the whole brand experience.

Conclusion

Customer feedback is essential for your business’s success. How you collect feedback and use it to improve your service or products tells a lot. Successful businesses invest in collecting customer feedback data, analyzing and measuring it to increase the efficiency of their service or make good products.

Good customer feedback form plays a huge role in these operations. Experiment with your feedback forms format & templates to get better results. Consider what you want to achieve from your feedback forms. Create a form on top of that and act on the collected data. Honest customer feedback can help you understand customer behavior, your failings, and how you can provide what customers want.

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