However, an update has been due for Q4 and it’s ready now.

Before the update though there’s some good news we’d like to share. We’ve hit 9000+ active installs on the repository. We’re very close to achieving our goal with Fluent Support. Let’s make Fluent Support into the industry standard for WordPress and a market leader for self-hosted support.

Note: We’ve begun updating the UX for Fluent Support. We’ve published a thread on our Facebook User Group. You can comment your suggestions and issues on this post. Thanks for helping make Fluent Support even better. We’ve published our Year in Review post for 2024! Go check it out to know more about what’s next on Fluent Support.

Keeping with our goal, here’s v1.8.5!

Features and Fixes

We’ve got 3 major feature updates in this release along with 11 bug fixes. Without delay, let’s get into it cause the features are exciting to say the least.

Features

Agent Time Tracking

It’s now possible to track time spent on tickets for agents. This is a managerial feature perfect for businesses wanting to tokenize customer support and offer premium support.

Time tracking works for logging time spent on individual tickets. Agents can set estimated times to clear tickets and then run the clock as they work on them.

When they are done they can simply add the time elapsed on the ticket. The difference between estimated and actual time will be shown in the reports for agents.

In many cases it’s the self-reported value that may provide some inaccuracies, but it can be mitigated with logging policy and time evaluation.

Updated email parser

The email parser used in the email piping feature has been refactored. Many users reported that email providers were flagging support emails and spam and the forwarding broke as a result.

The parser has been refactored to check back on the forwarding account every 30 minutes to fetch any tickets that were flagged or blocked due to email parser formatting.

Saved Filters

Many users have requested a function to save the advanced filters for agents. Well now it’s possible. Agents can save one filter preset each.

This means you won’t have to filter tickets every time you log in. You can just apply the saved preset and have your tickets sorted on the fly.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts save a lot of time for agents. That’s why we’ve added shortcuts for most of the frequently used features on Fluent Support. These include,

• Ticket – Advanced filter toggle
• Ticket – Refresh
• Tickets – Create Ticket
• Tickets – Reset filter
• Tickets – All Tickets
• Tickets – My Tickets
• Tickets – Unassigned
• Tickets – Waiting for reply
• Tickets – Bookmarks
• Ticket Reply – Reply
• Ticket Reply – Personal note
• Ticket Reply – Merge
• Ticket Reply – Bookmarks
• Ticket Reply – Refresh

Check out our documentation for details.

Bugs fixed

Rich text editor reverted to a normal editor

Some users complained that the rich-text editor on the Customer Portal was reverting to normal-editor on reload. Well that’s been fixed.

Unexpected Number Appended to JSON or TXT File Names

The unexpected number being added has been fixed.

Bug in Recaptcha

Fixed the reCaptcha issue on the customer portal.

Bug In WorkFlow

The workflow action issue with Titles has been mitigated.

If anything is embedded after reloading, it appears in preformatted form in the reply message

The reload function was resetting some of the formatting and showing pasted content in existing format. This has been updated. Now, embedded content will retain formatting regardless.

Compatibility Issue With Sequential Order Plugin

The compatibility issue was reported by some users. We’ve fixed and improved the compatibility.

The 404 page not showing 

After putting a wrong ticket number in the ticket view URL the 404 error was not showing. It’s been changed to now handle properly.

Once a ticket is closed, any notes within the ticket will become non-editable.

This is an improvement for the existing Internal Notes feature. Upon closing a ticket the Note edit option will become disabled.

Restricted agents can be assigned to a mailbox 

Through the ticket dashboard’s bulk action feature, it was possible to add restricted agents to inboxes that they technically didn’t have access for. It’s been fixed so restricted agents cannot be assigned beyond their access level.

Other fixes

• Some users faced error notices when loading the customer portal. It’s been resolved and now the errors simply do not occur.
• Email verification message translation and verification message hooks have been refactored.
• Displaying some error when the customer portal loads have been resolved.

Wrapping Up

Many of the requested features weren’t included in this version. However, the dev team is working hard and fast to develop the features you’ve requested.

That being said, the email parser issues were a major concern for a lot of users. So we put in extra effort to get it fixed within this release. Many users requested the CC forwarding for email piping. While that wasn’t possible in this release, we’re hopeful it will be available with the next release.

The post Fluent Support 1.8.5 – Agent Time Tracking, Email parser and more appeared first on Fluent Support.

It’s more than just managing queries or sending emails—it’s about creating a cohesive, seamless experience that makes customers feel valued at every touchpoint.

The process involves several moving parts: sales teams, support agents, marketing execs, and even product developers. All these elements need to come together with a shared goal— ideally that of delighting the customer. 

To coordinate this dance of complexity, businesses need the right tools. This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and help desk systems come into play.

Integrating them is a great first step, but it takes more than just having these tools. 

Think of it like having the best ingredients for a recipe but not knowing how to cook. Without a well-thought-out approach, even the most sophisticated tools can fall short.

Building customer relations is a long game—it takes time, effort, and a dedicated mindset that prioritizes customer experience. 

From the first interaction with a potential lead to resolving an issue for a loyal customer, every interaction counts. Especially when a single misstep can damage your customers’ trust. 

What is a help desk?

In broad terms, a help desk is any tool that lets you keep track of your customer service and support interactions. Ideally, it contains the history of your previous conversations, and a dedicated system to track ongoing conversations.

In its basicest form, even a simple email inbox can function as a help desk. But, as all things business, a dedicated solution is always better. So, when it comes to customer support, an integrated help desk is the go-to for most serious businesses.

What is a CRM?

CRM or customer relation management refers to both the department and the tools. Basically any platform you use to track customer relations and engagements with your business is a CRM.

CRM’s are actually one of the oldest tech solutions that businesses have adopted into their stack. Over the years the systems have made miles of progress, taking the scope of CRM to new heights.

Why integrate help desk and CRM?

Not to understate or anything, but integrating a help desk and CRM brings 4 major benefits for your business. 

Engaged relationships 

Engagement is the currency in this digital world. Taking someone’s money is not enough. You need their attention too!

Customers willingly engage with businesses that they support or prefer. So, when a customer is open to that, it’s your job to nurture that enthusiasm. 

Integrated CRM and Help Desks can make this easier. Simply by bringing all your interactions, including presales, post-purchase service and intermediate onboarding in one place.

This helps you plan out your engagement efforts and keep the customers hooked to your brand.  

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction isn’t just about selling a good product or service. It takes a lot more.

For starters, it takes attention to detail, empathy and planning. At a minimum. Then there’s speedy support, fast resolutions and meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

All of this is improved by integrating help desks and CRM tools. Being able to track all your interactions will keep you ahead of every customer touch point. So you know exactly what it’ll take to delight a customer to the point of satisfaction.  

Higher retention and less Churn

Satisfaction alone doesn’t mean much unless it fosters loyalty. Loyal customers are much less likely to switch from your business. Loyalty and Satisfaction is the golden standard for increasing retention rates, driving churn down.

Easier analysis

Evaluation is how you make improvements to your business efforts. Customers can interact with your business in so many ways. There’s the email inbox, social media channels, service desk, community forums etc. 

Having all these interactions gathered into a neat integrated system makes it easier to identify where your strategies are performing and where they can do better.

CRM and Help desk integration benefits

For the purpose of this blog, let’s check out how an integrated help desk and CRM augment your workflow. Integrating your help desk with a CRM might sound technical, but it’s quite straightforward. Most CRMs either have built-in support desks or offer easy integrations with third-party help desk tools. In this article, we’ll focus on how Fluent Support works with FluentCRM, a powerful marketing automation tool, to streamline customer management.

A unified view for customer profiles

One of the biggest advantages of linking Fluent Support with FluentCRM is the ability to access complete customer profiles in one place. Each customer has a dedicated profile in FluentCRM that holds all their data, from basic details to  email campaigns and ticket history from Fluent Support.

This means that sales or support teams can simply log into FluentCRM and see everything they need to know about a customer, without switching tools. 

Every ticket a customer creates gets automatically logged in their FluentCRM profile. So, your sales or service reps can view past support tickets directly from FluentCRM without needing to access the support desk. This feature is especially effective if you prefer to keep teams separated yet still want them to have access to crucial information.

Similarly, Fluent Support displays basic customer information directly within each ticket. This data is pulled from FluentCRM profiles, so support agents can see details like tags or lists associated with a contact. This helps them understand who they are dealing with right away.

Automatic tagging and lists

Beyond just viewing information, integrating a CRM and help desk brings more advanced benefits, like automated tagging. FluentCRM uses tags and lists, along with dynamic segments, to categorize and target customers based on specific criteria. This is essential for managing thousands of customer profiles.

Fluent Support enhances this capability by allowing you to tag customers directly from within the support platform. For instance, with Fluent Support’s workflows, you can automatically add tags to customer profiles in FluentCRM based on ticket actions.

Triggering marketing automation

The biggest advantage of combining your help desk and CRM is the ability to run marketing automations based on actions in your help desk. Let’s see how this works with an example.

Imagine you’ve just resolved a customer’s query, and now you want to follow up with them for feedback. Using FluentCRM’s automation features, you can send a follow-up email automatically.

With these automations in place, following up on customer interactions becomes effortless. You can ensure that customers receive timely feedback requests, boosting their engagement and satisfaction.

Integrating other popular CRMs

It’s very much possible that your CRM/Help Desk doesn’t have a spectacular integration like Fluent Support and FluentCRM. But that doesn’t mean you have to get stuck. There’s tons of connector platforms that make these connections possible for businesses of all sizes. 

For this article, we’ll use SureTriggers as a connector to integrate Fluent Support with one of the most popular CRM’s on WordPress, Jetpack CRM.

Jetpack CRM offers a powerful WordPress-based CRM solution, and combining it with Fluent Support creates a comprehensive customer management and support system within WordPress. This integration is ideal for businesses already using WordPress for both their website and CRM.

Benefits of Integrating Fluent Support with Jetpack CRM

Centralized Customer Data 

Based on actions in Fluent Support, you can update your customer profiles in Jetpack CRM. Similarly, you can create tickets and customer profiles in Fluent Support based on events in Jetpack CRM. Allowing you to always keep your systems in sync.

Automated Task Management 

Support tickets can be created automatically from customer activities within Jetpack CRM, such as creating companies, contacts and removing transactions and quotes. This automation reduces the need for manual input, saving time for your support team.

Improved Customer Experience 

By triggering functions in both platforms from each other’s events lets you focus on the overall customer experience, and how each tool helps in building that experience.

Use Cases 

Available Triggers

Example #1

An e-commerce store using Jetpack CRM can sync customer profiles with Fluent Support. If a customer creates a quote, removes transactions or goes through specific events, the Fluent Support profile is updated. 

For WordPress users, combining Jetpack CRM and Fluent Support creates a unified platform for managing customers and providing top-notch support.

Example #2

A digital marketing agency uses Jetpack CRM to manage client quotes, contacts, and invoices. When a client accepts a quote, the agency needs to quickly create a support ticket to initiate onboarding or answer any initial questions. The team also needs a customer profile in Fluent Support to keep track of support interactions. SureTriggers is configured to automate this process by creating a Fluent Support ticket and a customer profile once a quote is accepted in Jetpack CRM.

Trigger: Quote Accepted in Jetpack CRM

The workflow starts as soon as a quote is marked as “accepted” in Jetpack CRM. First, SureTriggers checks if the customer who accepted the quote exists in Fluent Support.

If not, it automatically creates a new customer profile using the contact details from Jetpack CRM, like the client’s name, email, and company information. After creating the customer profile, SureTriggers opens a support ticket in Fluent Support.

The ticket includes details such as the customer’s name, the quote ID, and any relevant comments or requirements noted in Jetpack CRM during the quote acceptance.

A default message can be added, e.g., “Welcome to [Company]! This ticket has been created to help you get started with onboarding or answer any questions regarding the services you’ve requested.”

This setup saves the agency time and prevents missed onboarding requests. As soon as a quote is accepted in Jetpack CRM, the client’s profile and initial support ticket are instantly available in Fluent Support, ensuring a seamless, quick, and organized response for new clients.

Wrapping Up

Integrating Jetpack CRM and Fluent Support through SureTriggers transforms your customer management and support processes into a seamless, streamlined experience. By automatically creating support tickets and profiles the moment a client takes an action, you ensure that every new customer gets the attention they deserve, without any delay. 

This not only saves your team valuable time but also enhances customer satisfaction from day one. Start leveraging SureTriggers to automate and elevate your support workflow, so you can focus on what truly matters—building lasting relationships and growing your business.

The post Integrate Help Desk and CRM: Guide with Steps appeared first on Fluent Support.

But, have you ever thought about the developers behind your favorite favorite plugins?

Today, we’ve decided to talk about a few brilliant minds of some of the most popular plugins we use daily. 

Now, here’s my fun question to you,  

What do you call a WordPress developer who makes a plugin without bugs? 

Wizard with a computer.

The 5 hidden WordPress developers

So, who are these brilliant minds? Get ready to meet five amazing developers who have quietly shaped the WordPress world.

They might not be famous, but their work is legendary.

Let’s dive in.

Takayuki Miyoshi

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Takayuki Miyoshi is one of those unsung heroes. Growing up in Japan, he has a great interest in Local search tech and WordPress.

He created Contact Form 7, one of the most popular plugins for WordPress. This plugin helps people to create forms easily for their websites.

Takayuki’s journey started when he saw how tough it was for people to make contact forms. He wanted to fix that. So, he developed Contact Form 7.

Today, more than 10 million websites use his plugin.

But Takayuki didn’t stop there. He went on to create other awesome plugins like Flamingo, Bogo, Listo, etc. which you can find in the WordPress repository.

Alongside, he translates a bunch of plugins like Akismet Anti-Spam, Bogo, Contact Form 7, Contact Form 7: Accessible Defaults, Double Opt-In Helper, Flamingo, Listo, etc. in Japanese.

Check this out:

Takayuki has got a whole collection of WordPress contribution badges, including bbPress Contributor, Core Contributor, Meetup Organizer, Support Contributor, Translation Editor, WordCamp Organizer, WordPress.tv Contributor, etc.

These badges show his dedication to the WordPress community throughout his journey.

He’s also regular at WordCamps, his speeches leave a big impact on the young developers. His work and contributions show just how committed he is to making the WordPress community better.

Pippin Williamson

“Empower others to succeed, and you succeed too.”

Meet Pippin Williamson, a true star in the WordPress community. He is the developer of renowned plugins like Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro.

Imagine it’s 2008, and Pippin is a student at the University of Kansas, already deep into his WordPress journey. He saw that people were struggling with selling digital products and managing their website content.

So, he developed plugins that made it super simple to handle and sell digital goods, like eBooks and software, right from your site.

But Pippin’s impact doesn’t end there. He’s also behind other useful plugins like bbPress – Admin Notes, bbPress – Do Short Codes and bbPress reCaptcha.

His contributions to WordPress are recognized by his impressive badges: bbPress Contributor, Core Contributor, WordCamp Speaker, Plugin Review Team, etc.

Check this out:

Pippin is also the Founder and CEO of Sandhills Development, a company known for its excellent WordPress plugins.

What began as a college project has grown into a big plugin business. Pippin’s journey from building small sites for clients to creating reusable products for the masses is truly inspiring.

As a WordCamp speaker, Pippin’s sessions are energetic and full of valuable insights. He’s a hero for new developers and a key person in the WordPress universe.

Tim Whitlock

“Breaking down language barriers, one line of code at a time.”

Tim Whitlock is a talented WordPress developer from the UK. His interests in PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Symfony, and Localization have made him develop many useful plugins.

He’s the mastermind behind Loco Translate, a plugin that simplifies WordPress translations.

Tim’s journey began with a deep-seated passion for languages and coding. This unique blend allows users of Loco Translate to manage and translate their WordPress files directly from their dashboard.

His software engineering skills and multilingual capabilities have been crucial to the plugin’s success. He even translates the plugin into both Canadian English and UK English, ensuring it meets the needs of diverse users.

Check this out: 

Despite his contributions not being fully reflected in the number of badges he has received, as a plugin developer, he creates a significant impact on the WordPress community.

Though Tim Whitlock might not be a well-known name, his contributions speak volumes. His efforts ensure that language barriers don’t hinder digital innovation.

John Godley

“Great software is born from solving real problems.”

John Godley is a quiet powerhouse in the WordPress community. Born in the UK, John is renowned for his popular plugin, Redirection.

This tool helps users manage 301 redirects and track 404 errors on their websites. This may sound technical, but it greatly affects how well websites perform.

John’s journey into WordPress began with his keen interest in addressing practical issues faced by website administrators.

Recognizing the difficulties in managing redirects, he developed Redirection, a tool that simplifies the process. This solution enables administrators to manage all their redirects in one place and monitor any broken links that could negatively impact their site’s performance.

John’s work doesn’t end with Redirection. He developed many other impactful plugins like Advanced Permalinks, AJAX Calendar, Layout Grid Block, and HeadSpace2 SEO, all to make WordPress user-friendly.

Furthermore, He’s a key contributor to the WordPress Meta team, the group responsible for maintaining WordPress.org and its related sites. All of this effort to make WordPress efficient can be seen in his WordPress badges.

Check this out:

He’s also a dedicated writer, sharing his wisdom and insights through blogs and articles to help young developers.

John’s contributions might be hard to measure, but his deep connection to the WordPress community speaks volumes.

Emre Vona

“Achieve faster load times with minimal effort.”

Emre Vona is a hidden figure in the WordPress community. Growing up in Turkey, Emre’s fascination with technology led to the creation of WP Fastest Cache, a plugin that revolutionizes website speed and efficiency.

Since the launch of WP Fastest Cache in 2014, Emre has been dedicated to enhancing web performance.

His plugin now supports a vast array of websites, providing them with faster loading times and smoother operations.

Emre’s story doesn’t stop there. He’s not just a one-trick pony. Emre is a multilingual master, translating WP Fastest Cache into Turkish, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian.

Furthermore, he translated other key plugins like WooCommerce Bulk Discount, WP Power Stats, Special Text Boxes, WP Display Header, etc. into Turkish, bringing massive value to the global WordPress community.

Check this out:

Emre Vona’s story showcases the blend of passion and innovation that drives the tech world forward.

His ongoing contributions are a testament to his impact on the WordPress community, demonstrating that even those who start from humble beginnings can achieve remarkable things.

Wrapping up

These stories remind us that not all heroes wear capes. They show us that significant contributions often come from those working quietly behind the scenes.

Each of these developers has enriched the WordPress community with their plugins and ideas. Making it stronger, more efficient, and safer for everyone.

Their journeys highlight the importance of dedication, passion, and the desire to help others. They teach us that making a difference doesn’t always require the spotlight but a commitment to solving problems and improving the lives of others.

For anyone inspired by these stories, remember that you too can make a meaningful impact. Follow your passion, work diligently, and, most importantly, stay true to your goal of helping others.

As these hidden gems have shown, the true measure of success lies not in fame but in the positive change you bring to the world.

The post 5 WordPress Developers You Should Know About appeared first on Fluent Support.

According to Salesforce stats, almost 91% of customers are more likely to return if they get the type of experience they prefer.

To ensure this, you might need a compact solution to streamline the overall support process and make your customers’ journey smooth.

Today, we will explore the 11 best email ticketing systems for 2025 to enhance customer success rate and scale your business.

Why is an email ticketing system important for business?

Imagine you’re using a shared inbox that multiple support agents access, leading to duplicate responses and confusion.

Or, picture one person trying to manage thousands of emails at once. This makes it hard to track each email and know who is helping which clients.

That’s why an email ticketing system becomes essential for support agents. It turns customer emails into tickets, making it easier for support agents to manage customer queries.

Thus, you’ll have a more organized support system that simplifies support management.

Moreover, it offers a well-organized dashboard to monitor tasks, assign agents, track productivity, automation, and more.

Criteria of the best email ticketing system

Selecting an ideal ticketing system for your business is not easy. There are some key factors that you need to take into consideration to streamline your support. For example,

• User-friendly interface: As your support team has to use a ticketing system 24/7 to handle customer queries, an intuitive, fast, organized, and reliable interface will help your support reps to work better.
• Integration capability: To prevent data segregation, you should have some key integrations such as CRM, Email, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, and similar tools.
• Scalability and flexibility: Suppose your business is at its peak and you are dealing with thousands of customers daily. Therefore, make sure your ticketing system is versatile and responsive to new challenges like getting millions of queries, and recurring different channels and user manuals.
• Cost-effectiveness: A cost-effective system is necessary to balance between versatility and affordability. So that you get the most return on investment to justify your expense.

So, these are some crucial things to remember before choosing the right customer support ticketing system for your business. Without further ado, let’s get into the list and find out which solution works best for you.

11 best email ticketing systems of 2024

If you’re in a hurry, click here for a brief overview

1. Fluent Support

Fluent Support is an absolute gem for a self-hosted helpdesk plugin. It is ideal for users who are seeking affordable, user-friendly, and well-maintained solutions. It’s a powerful self-hosted email ticketing system with versatile features and an intuitive interface. 

The ticketing system is designed to do many repetitive tasks like agent auto-assigning, ticket prioritization, and automated replies. This ensures time-saving and efficient support operation for your business.

Fluent support is fully equipped with everything a customer support system possibly needs. Your team does not need to take any extra burden.

Moreover, the team behind Fluent Support is committed to providing you with the best services. That’s why within just 3 years in the market 8000+ businesses are now using Fluent Support as their self-hosted support plugin.

Do you know why it comes top on the list? Because of its affordability and versatile functionality. So, whether you are a small enterprise or a startup, give it a try to transform your ticket management system.

Key features: 

• Unlimited tickets, agents, and users: No limits on ticket volume, support agents, or user accounts.
• AI-powered: Its AI-driven integrations like ticket summarization, tone analysis, generative reply, and fine tuning make the customer experience seamless and smooth.
• Workflow automation: Allowing both manual and automatic workflows enables segmentation, agent assignment, ticket closing, etc.
• Customizable dashboard: Get a customizable dashboard and WordPress widgets for more accessibility.
• Integration with 20+ tools: Seamlessly connect with 20+ plugins and external tools to enhance productivity and communication.
• Response delay Tracking: Provides necessary data such as Response time, Closing rate, and response rates to ensure timely customer support.
• Auto draft: Preventing ticket loss by automatically saving information.
• Email piping: Allows you to check tickets directly from your support email, ensuring efficient handling of customer inquiries.
• Calendar heatmap: This can predict the time and day you will most likely to face ticket overload.

Pricing:

Fluent Support offers both free and premium versions. The premium version starts at $129 per year, includes:

• Customizable ticket submission portal
• Automated agent assign
• Workflow automation
• Priority support and More.

Comment: The most prominent thing about Fluent Support is that you don’t need to spend money on extra add-ons after you buy the premium package. This quality makes Fluent Support the most affordable and compact email ticketing system for WordPress users.

Verdict: Highly recommended for businesses using WordPress.

2. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a web-based ticketing system. It has versatile features including shared inbox, agent collision detection, and automation. These features help businesses streamline their support services through automated ticket routing and customer self-service portals. They can also integrate with third-party applications.

While the wide range of features can make setup complex, Freshdesk makes up for it with AI-powered automation. This feature scans and evaluates tickets hourly. Whether you provide customer service or support, Freshdesk covers every task in depth.

Key features: 

• Automated ticket creation: Convert all emails and inquiries into tickets.
• Ticket Dispatch: Automatically suggest ticket fields to categorize, prioritize, and route incoming tickets.
• Collision detection: Ensures that multiple agents don’t end up working on the same ticket by accident.
• Automation: Automate follow-ups, escalations, and other tasks using specific time and event-based triggers to perform any action of your choice. 
• SLA management: Set deadlines for ticket response and resolution based on different business hours or categories.
• Canned response: Provide quick, consistent responses to common questions by creating preformatted replies.
• Reporting and analytics: Provide detailed reports and analytics on ticket volume, response times, resolution times, agent performance, and customer satisfaction.
• Customize agent roles: Give differential permissions for actions according to the roles and responsibilities of agents.

Pricing:

Freshdesk offers both free and premium versions. The premium version starts at $15/agent/month, includes: 

• Email ticketing system
• 1000+ marketplace apps
• SLA management & business hours
• In-depth helpdesk report
• Custom SSL and More.

Comment: Freshdesk’s pricing is based on a per-agent model, so adding more agents costs more. However, it offers many features and integrations, making customer service much easier.

Verdict: Recommended for mid-sized enterprises.

3. Help Scout

Help Scout is an email-based ticketing system that simplifies mailbox management. With features like ticket routing, automation, and seamless integrations with platforms like Salesforce and Zendesk, it enhances customer service efficiency. It also comes with built-in tools like a knowledge base and live chat for extensive support solutions.

Help Scout combines user-friendly functionality with powerful automation. It supports customer self-service options and integrates smoothly with existing systems, ensuring a streamlined customer support experience.

Additionally, Help Scout uses its cloud storage for tickets and information, which might raise trust concerns. However, their large customer base proves their reliability in the business world.

Key features: 

• Email integration: Allows emails to convert into tickets for unified communication.
• Ticket management: Capabilities like tagging, assignment, prioritization, and status tracking are included to ensure proper handling of customer inquiries.
• Automation: Automation of workflow, query, and hourly report-based replies.
• Response templates: Pre-defined response templates enable agents to quickly respond to common inquiries while maintaining consistency in communication.
• Team collaboration: Assign conversations, leave internal notes, and see when another team member is replying to avoid duplicate replies.
• Analytics and reporting: Facilities of custom reports with unlimited reporting history.
• Knowledge Base integration: Access and share relevant articles or resources with customers directly with the ticketing system.

Pricing:

HelpScout has several packages starting from $25/month, Includes:

• Automated workflows
• Advanced API access
• Beacon help widget
• API and 100+ integrations
• Live chat and More.

Comment: Help Scout charges you by the number of agents. Also, they have tiered features for each plan that aren’t available for cheaper plans. You have to choose your plans wisely.

Verdict: Recommended for enterprises.

4. Zendesk

Zendesk is a popular web-based platform that offers an email ticketing system, AI-driven automation, live chat, etc. It combines all support channels into one workspace, making it easier for agents to manage requests. On the other hand, AI features route tickets to the right agent and suggest solutions, helping provide faster, personalized support. Automation saves time by solving requests without human help.

Despite all these excellent features, Zendesk has some complexities. Users with basic knowledge may face difficulties while implementing the integrations. However, Zendesk is a modern-day solution that offers a huge number of features and ways through their ticketing system to accelerate your customer service.

Key features: 

• Ticketing system: centralized hub to connect all customer conversations for a complete view of each customer.
• AI agents: AI agents solve customer issues on their own across all of your channels.
• Reporting and analytics: Prebuilt analytics dashboard with multiple data collection facilities.
• Extensive integrations: Offers over 1,500 apps and integrations for enhanced functionality.
• Routing and intelligence: Automatically send your ticket to agent best agent by analyzing the problem.
• AI and automation: Advance features to control the workflow include chatbots, ticket routing, frontline, etc.
• Multilingual support: Provide support and localize your help center in multiple languages (40+).

Pricing:

Zendesk has a variety of plans starting from $19/agent/month, including:

• 1,000+ apps & integrations
• AI Agent
• Custom business rules (triggers & automation)
• Pre-defined responses (macros)
• Eligible for quality assurance add-on

Comment: Zendesk went very far based on its facilities and features. But there are many add-ons you have to purchase to enjoy and see its full efficiency.

Verdict: Recommended for enterprises and large businesses. 

5. Hiver

Hiver is a Gmail-based shared inbox ticketing system for businesses seeking to optimize Gmail for scalability. It allows you to assign emails to team members, track progress, automate tasks, and produce reports within the Gmail interface. This keeps response times fast without using any extra software.

Hiver provides a Google workspace for agents to collaborate across multiple channels like email, live chat, chatbot, voice communication, and knowledge base. Moreover, Hiver’s Kanban boards provide visual workflows for project management, enabling teams to set project status and track task progress. However, It’s not a scalable solution. It can be limiting for larger customer support agents looking to achieve more than just Gmail-based collaboration.

Key features: 

• Gmail integration: Organize and track emails as tasks and drive visibility into your team’s workload.
• Workflow automation: Build rule-based automation with triggers, conditions, and actions. 
• Team collaboration: Work together as a team with features like shared drafts, approvals workflows, collision detection, etc.
• Multi-channel support: Multi-channel engagement, including channels like Email, Live Chat, Voice and WhatsApp.
• Reporting and analytics: Get insights with users, tags, contacts, and customer dashboards.
• Auto assignment: Auto-assign incoming emails in a round-robin fashion among your team members.

Pricing:

Hiver offers customer-friendly packages starting from $24/user/month, including:

• Team collaboration
• Multi-channel engagement
• Asana, Jira, Slack, and QuickBooks app integrations
• Round-robin auto-assignment

Comment: Hiver is great for companies using Gmail for support. However, enterprises or businesses with a large customer base might need more advanced ticketing systems.

Verdict: Recommended for startups.

6. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is an email ticketing system that helps teams manage emails and other channels. Its sentiment analysis tool shows the mood of customer emails, so agents can quickly respond to unhappy customers. This makes customer support faster and more efficient.

Zoho Desk also has more useful features like a chatbot, automatic ticket tagging, and basic reply drafting through its AI assistant, Zia. So, teams can understand and improve customer experiences by marking emails as positive, negative, or neutral. However, Zoho Desk may not be the easiest software to navigate but its AI functionality makes up for it.

Key features: 

• Sentiment analysis: Identifies the mood of customer emails, allowing agents to prioritize and respond to negative feedback quickly.
• Multichannel support: Collects tickets from email, social media, live chat, web forms, and phone calls, ensuring comprehensive customer support.
• AI assistant (Zia): Provides a chatbot, automatic ticket tagging, and basic reply drafting to streamline support tasks.
• Reporting and analytics: Generate detailed reports to help teams monitor performance and improve customer service.
• Ticket management: Offers traditional ticket management features to track and resolve customer inquiries efficiently.
• Accessibility control: Empower users of all abilities to work on tickets smoothly.

Pricing:

Zoho Desk has several packages starting from $20/user/month, including:

• Ticketing system
• Sentiment analysis
• Multichannel support
• AI assistant (Zia)
• Reporting and analytics and more.

Comment: Zoho Desk is heavily AI-based. If an AI virtual assistant is important to you, choose Zoho Desk. However, if you prefer a more advanced and better interface, then choose something else.

Verdict: Recommended for small businesses.

7. Awesome Support

Awesome Support is a WordPress ticketing plugin designed to meet the diverse needs of businesses. It simplifies creating, assigning, and tracking support tickets organized in one place without the chaos of scattered messages. This system is well-suited for various customer service needs. Its advanced tools, such as custom forms, analytics, and AI integrations, help businesses provide specific information and efficient support.

Awesome Support is a compact service system that provides every necessary tool to improve customer support. Yet, it lacks most of the necessary plugin integrations and the packages are not affordable for a new startup business. 

Key features:

• Ticket management: Efficiently create, assign, and track support tickets from a centralized platform.
• Email integration: Seamless integration with email for managing customer inquiries directly within the help desk.
• Customizable workflows: Tailor workflows and processes to fit specific business needs and preferences.
• Multilingual support: Provide customer support in multiple languages to cater to a diverse customer base.
• Reporting and analytics: Generate insights into support team performance and customer satisfaction metrics.
• SLA management: Set and manage service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure timely resolution of customer issues.

Pricing:

Awesome Support has a free version plugin available in WordPress.The premium version starts from $149 per year, Including:

• Unlimited tickets
• Unlimited agents
• Canned response
• Custom status & labels and more.

Comment: Awesome support got both regular and bundle packages but add-ons are separated. You need to buy the necessary add-ons again. It can be a hassle.

Verdict: Not recommended.

8. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is part of HubSpot’s software suite, focusing on customer service alongside marketing and sales tools. It transforms customer service into a revenue driver through its AI tools and seamless integration with HubSpot’s other platforms. Not only does it help teams expand their support services, but it also fosters business growth by enhancing customer relationships.

Moreover, the free plan for managing emails, setting support tickets and using email templates to respond faster. This also includes live chat and Facebook Messenger for multichannel support. It helps teams to connect with customers more easily.

Key features:

• Email management: Manage emails from a shared inbox, assign tickets, and use email templates for quick responses.
• Workflow automation: Automate repetitive tasks and workflows to increase efficiency.
• Omnichannel messaging: Access multiple channels in the inbox and seamlessly switch between them.
• SLA management: Set and manage service level agreements to meet customer expectations
• Team collaboration: Facilitate collaboration among support teams with shared inboxes and internal notes.
• AI-driven Tools: Utilize AI for smarter customer interactions and proactive support.
• Integration: Seamless integration with HubSpot’s marketing and sales platforms for a unified customer view.

Pricing:

HubSpot Service Hub has both free and paid versions. Premium models start from $20/month/seat, including:

• Ticketing system
• Live chat
• Calling SDK
• Conversational bots
• Email templates
• Reporting dashboards and more.

Comment: While Service Hub may not offer the widest range of advanced support tools, it provides a compact ticketing system supported by a top-notch team.

Verdict: Recommended for mid to enterprise.

9. ProProfsDesk

ProProfsDesk is a Saas customer support and email ticketing system. It automates tasks like ticket assignments and notifications to speed up support processes. Agents share a dashboard to manage and prioritize support tickets easily. It integrates with tools like Slack and Salesforce for enhanced functionality and provides personalized support while reducing costs.

ProProfs Desk is a reliable and affordable system for handling startups. However, it lacks the extensive features of other SaaS ticketing systems and does not yet include any AI capabilities. 

Key features:

• Email ticketing system: Manage and track customer support tickets efficiently via email.
• Shared dashboard: View, assign, prioritize, and resolve support tickets from a centralized dashboard.
• Agent collision detection: Avoid multiple agents working on the same ticket accidentally.
• Parent-child ticketing: Break down parent tickets into a group of child tickets that can be worked on by different agents or teams.
• Customizable workflows: Organized workflows to fit specific business needs for streamlined operations.
• Customer satisfaction surveys: Gather feedback from customers to measure satisfaction and improve service quality.

Pricing:

ProProfsDesk offers both free and premium versions. The premium version starts from $59.99/month/user, including:

• Advanced automation and workflow customization
• Integration with Slack, Salesforce, and Zapier
• Reporting and analytics
• 24/7 priority support

Comment: ProProfs Desk’s free version includes all the features of the premium version. This unique aspect sets it apart from other ticketing systems in the list.

Verdict: Recommended for small businesses and startups.

10. Groove

Groove is an efficient email ticketing system designed with a user-friendly interface that simplifies setup and operation. It ensures customer engagement by supporting communication through various channels like email, live chat, social media, and phone calls.

Groove is a reliable service system for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. It facilitates quick responses and efficient team collaboration, making it good for customer service management. However, Groove lacks modern functionalities and dedicated workforce management tools which may not match broader business needs.

Key features:

• Email ticketing system: Manage customer inquiries and support tickets efficiently via email.
• Live chat: Engage with customers in real-time through live chat for instant support.
• Social media integration: Monitor and respond to customer inquiries and comments across social media platforms.
• Team collaboration tools: Facilitate internal communication and collaboration among support teams.
• Automation: Automate repetitive tasks such as ticket assignments and follow-ups to improve efficiency.
• Customizable workflows: Efficient workflows to fit specific business needs and streamline operations.

Pricing:

Groove offers subscriptions starting at $20/user/month, which include:

• Included channels
• Web widget with contact form & knowledge base
• Collision detection
• Customer feedback and more.

Comment: Groove offers a limited number of integrations, lacks advanced features, and has fewer proof points for assisting medium and large businesses.

Verdict: Recommended for SMBs and startups.

11. Support Candy

Support Candy is a WordPress plugin for managing all support inquiries. It allows you to manage tickets centrally so that you can assign, and track tickets easily. One of the outstanding features is its email notification system, by which both your team and customers are up to date about ticket statuses without constant checking. Support Candy offers effective customization for almost every aspect of the product. You can customize the user interface, ticket submission page, and agent dashboard to match your branding.

Although Support Candy integrates with third-party knowledge base tools for creating articles, it has no sufficient native knowledge base functionality. They do not provide activity history or collision detection, so a high volume of support tickets can create confusion. Apart from that Support Candy is a reliable source of customer support for WordPress users.

Key features:

• Email piping: Allows customers and agents to create and reply to tickets directly from their email inboxes.
• Workflows: Unlock the power of automation with SupportCandy workflows, revolutionizing the way you manage your processes.
• Schedule tickets: Automatically create periodic tickets by setting recurring times and information.
• Canned reply: Agents can save their replies which can be accessed in just a few clicks while replying to the tickets.
• Export tickets: Export tickets in CSV format as per the current filter from the ticket list page.
• Assign agent rules: Conditionally assign agents to new tickets automatically using set rules and workload.

Pricing:

Support Candy has a free plugin version available on WordPress. However, there are several paid versions starting from $79/year, which include: 

• 1 site license
• 1-year plugin updates
• 1-year priority support
• All extensions included
• All integrations included

Comment: They charge based on the number of websites instead of agents. If you have more websites, you’ll get a better deal.

Verdict: Not recommended.

Comparison of email ticketing systems

You already have an idea of the brief functionalities of some of the best email-based ticketing systems available on the market. Here is a tabulated list to go through before deciding to make sure we get a clearer picture.

Software	Unlimited Products	Unlimited Agents	Email Piping	Calendar Heatmap	Integrations	Pricing
Fluent Support					20+	Freemium (Premium starts at $129/year)
Freshdesk					600+	Freemium (Premium starts at $15/month)
Help Scout					100+	Premium starts at $25/month
Zendesk					1000+	Premium starts at $19/month (billed annually)
Hiver					9	Premium starts at $24/month
Zoho Desk					900+	Premium starts at $20/month
Awesome support					9	Freemium (Premium starts at $149/year)
HubSpot Service Hub					1500+	Freemium (Premium starts at $20/month/seat)
ProProfs Desk					5	Freemium (Premium starts at $59.99/month)
Groove					16	Premium starts at $20/month
Support Candy					8	Freemium (Premium starts at $79/year)

Plugins and SaaS are different types of software, but this doesn’t mean they are different business models. The main difference between Help Desk Plugin and Saas ticketing systems is that they offer different ways of software solutions.

Final thoughts

At the end of the day, it’s up to you whether you want to maintain a good relationship with your customers or push them aside. From our perspective, a customer is a good friend and a well-wisher of our business. If we take care of them with our service, they will definitely give it back.

That’s why we created our own email ticketing system, Fluent Support, to ensure every customer service team has the full functionality to meet their customers’ needs.

Our main motive for creating this list (overall, Plugin & SaaS) is to help you easily choose the right email ticketing system for your customers. Every system in this list has outstanding capabilities. Choosing one wisely can be a valuable asset for your business if you want to improve customer service and support operations.

The post 11 Best Email Ticketing Systems for 2025 appeared first on Fluent Support.

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.

We are committed to continuously updating Fluent Support to make it more efficient for your team. Our 24/7 team is actively collecting feedback and applying it one by one with every update.

This version update is no different. So let’s start with the newly added features.

What’s New in Fluent Support 1.7.9?

As we are saying, this version update will help you organize team workflow more efficiently. To do that, we have two brand new features.

Activity Trends by Time of Day

We know you struggle with the ticket overflow. We all do. But have you noticed something interesting? Not every time of day or not every day, this overflow occurs. There is a hidden pattern.

To find the hidden pattern, we have introduced a calendar heatmap in Fluent Support. It’s a brand new way of reporting. Just go to ‘Reports’ on the Fluent Support dashboard and click on ‘Activity Reports’.

This feature will help you predict which day and what time you will most likely face ticket overload. And using this data, you can redistribute your support assets to tackle the overload more effectively.

You cannot just reorganize your team or automate the ticket flow using Fluent Support ticket automation on that specific date or time. Isn’t it handy?

Duplicate or clone workflows

Speaking of ticket automation, we all know that Fluent Support has workflow functionality. Using this, you can really dig deep into conditions and make very complex automated or manual triggers.

From time to time, you might need to recreate a similar workflow but for a different target. Instead of making it from scratch, now you can just make a duplicate of the workflow and start working on it.

Required option in product

In Fluent Support, you can add unlimited number of products. This product or brand will appear on the ticket submission portal. Now you can make this input section compulsory in the settings.

Just go to the ‘Ticket Form Config’ in global settings and check the ‘Required fields for products and services’. That’s it. Selecting a product from the dropdown is now a required field.

Now tickets will be more organized as per product, which will help you set automation triggers or assign agents automatically.

Uploaded files are more organized on cloud storage

If you love organized files and folders, then you will love this feature. Fluent Support gives you the ability to upload ticket-related files directly to cloud storage without eating up your hosting storage.

To keep everything in one place, the system created a mother folder to keep all the files in one place. But after this update, Fluent Support will create ticket-wise subfolders to make it even more neat.

Integration with FluentBoards

This is the biggest update to this version. This will make you a pro-task manager. WPManageNinja, the team behind Fluent Support, released a handy task manager, FluentBoards. And Fluent Support will be integrated with this automatically.

FluentBoards is a WordPress project management plugin featuring unlimited boards, CRM integration, Kanban boards, and project reporting. It simplifies project management within WordPress, making team collaboration and task management easy. It’s ideal for support heads to keep track of all tasks in one place.

The plugin is easy to use, offers different views and customization options, and offers a lot of integrations. It boosts productivity with clear visuals. Whether you’re handling a small team or working alone, Fluent Boards simplifies project flow with task mapping.

With this update, you can easily convert a ticket into a task with a couple clicks, and FluentBoards will add it as a task on board. All you have to do is click on the ticket, and from the top right corner, click on ‘Add Task to FluentBoards. If you check the board, you will find the ticket as a task right there.

Integrations logs 

If you want to check if FluentBoards is integrated with Fluent Support or not, we have another new update. With this update, you will be able to see all the integrated products in one integration log.

This will tell you not only what is connected with Fluent Support but also show what other interaction options are available with documentation.

A few bug fixes

Here are a few bug fixes you will get with this version update.

Language default issue

When the site language was not set to English, the workflow automatically switches to manual mode, causing potential confusion. This is fixed now.

Inbox CSS issue

There was a CSS problem hiding the text of the ticket identifier tag in all inbox tables. This impacted the tag name display. This is also fixed.

Dashboard view bug

Selecting “View dashboard” and “draft_reply” together was causing no tickets to be displayed. This issue is fixed now. 

Migration issue

Users were experiencing problems when migrating tickets from Zendesk and Freshdesk, causing potential data loss or inconsistencies. Both of the issues are fixed in this version.

Import tickets module ug

Clicking the “Import Tickets” button in the ticket migration module opened multiple modals at once, leading to a cluttered interface.

Bookmark issue

The bookmarking feature is not functioning as expected, reducing the efficiency of managing important tickets.

File upload issue

Files with long names fail to upload during ticket creation due to the WordPress log name restriction. This was limiting the ability to share detailed information.

Now a new webhook introduced, which will keep the name up to 50 characters and cut off the rest. It will allow easy upload. This webhook needs to be activated manually.

Business box restriction bug

Even after restrictions are applied to a specific business box, it still appears on the dashboard. But it’s not now.

Memberpress integration issue

In the Memberpress integration, two subscription lists appear—one for recurring and another for non-recurring. This complicated management is fixed.

WooCommerce Widget Bug

The WooCommerce widget did not appear on the ‘View Customer’ page, reducing functionality for managing customer interactions. That’s also fixed in this update.

Wrapping up

All in all, this version update is giving you a few very exciting new features. It’s taking your team management to the next level. 

The Fluent Support team is still working on the next update. We are dedicatedly listening to your needs and trying our best to make this WordPress helpdesk system more and more powerful.

The post Fluent Support 1.7.9: Activity Trends, Manage Task By FluentBoards And More appeared first on Fluent Support.

The year went by so fast that it seems like it was yesterday I was writing the YiR for 2022. Don’t let that fool you into thinking this year was uneventful. It was absolutely far from it, to say the least.

To put things in perspective, it was an eventful year for WPManageNinja in the sense that we released 2 fresh new plugins for you people!

• FluentBooking – The ultimate solution for appointment scheduling in WordPress
• FluentSnippets – WordPress Code snippets made faster and safer

Mentioning these releases is a crucial reflection of Fluent Support because all of the interactions from these new launches, deal promotions, and communications were handled using Fluent Support. A delightful experience was that some Fluent Support users contacted us for collaborations using Fluent Support itself.

There’s nothing more satisfying than watching your idea in action, improving businesses and helping people. This is probably the highlight of the year for me regarding Fluent Support. But there’s so much more to talk about!

It’s worth mentioning that Fluent Support and WPManagNinja took part in the first local WordCamp organized by the WordPress community Sylhet. Having a WordCamp in our own home ground in beautiful Sylhet was the biggest highlight for us as a WordPress Plugin company.

Growth in 2023

Last year was all about growth and this year has luckily been no different. As all our early users know the story of how Fluent Support was created but for the new members here it goes once again! 

Our WPManageNinja support team was struggling to support customers using tools available on WordPress. Then we thought, why not create our own tool? After launching Fluent Support in November 2021, our main goal was to improve the plugin’s usability and add more features based on user feedback. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past 2 years.

Fluent Support team shipped a total of 6 releases this year packed with awesome features! We also celebrated the 2nd birthday of Fluent Support on 16th November 2023!

The best part of Fluent Support’s growth – it crossed 6000+ active installs on the WordPress plugin directory. To put that in perspective, in comparison to another one of the most popular support plugins for WordPress– it took them 7 years to reach 10K active installs. More importantly, some new plugins tried to mimic Fluent Support’s first year’s success but were only able to manage a couple hundred users.

Fluent Support gained 2K users in less than a year and that says a lot about how much you trust us as users and the reputation WPManageNinja has created for itself. 

Here are some metrics you might find interesting:

• We used Fluent Support to resolve 25,000+ tickets for all WPManageNinja plugins in 2023!
• The Fluent Support team shipped more than 15 unique features, made 12 major improvements and fixed 46 minor bugs.
• 6000+ businesses are using Fluent Support.
• 1200+ members in our Facebook community along with a thriving presence on LinkedIn and X.
• To make the journey easier for our users, the Fluent Support team published 65 helpful articles related to WordPress helpdesk, customer service, customer experience, and Fluent Support use cases.
• Our video team published a detailed video playlist with 8 videos detailing important features of Fluent Support. Check the video playlist here.

Major Features from 2023

Added Migrators

Introducing the Freshdesk and Zendesk migrators for Fluent Support, designed to streamline your ticket migration process. The Freshdesk migrator, facilitated by Fluent Support’s ticket importer module in v1.6.6, allows for a straightforward transition from Freshdesk, a SaaS product. Although the process is a bit more intricate than with WordPress plugins like Awesome Support or Support Candy, our detailed documentation guides you through the steps. 

Similarly, our Zendesk migrator simplifies the migration process for Zendesk, another SaaS product. Admins can effortlessly transfer tickets by providing the Zendesk domain, email address, and API key. This ensures a smooth transition without data loss, guaranteeing a seamless support experience for both your team and customers.

Trigger CRM Automations

Elevate your customer experience with Fluent Support’s enhanced WorkFlows feature! Now, you can seamlessly integrate FluentCRM automations into your workflow, triggered by actions in Fluent Support. This means you can effortlessly manage customer onboarding and survey emails based on customer interactions in Fluent Support. 

By incorporating published automations from FluentCRM as actions in WorkFlows, you gain a powerful tool to simplify and automate tasks, taking your customer experience to new heights. Streamline your processes and enhance customer engagement with this innovative feature.

File Sharing Options

Eliminate storage constraints with our latest feature—third-party file attachments! In the global settings, explore the “File Upload Integrations” option, featuring Dropbox Settings, Google Drive Settings, and Local Upload Settings. By default, files are stored locally. 

To switch to Dropbox, visit Dropbox Settings, complete the simple form with Dropbox Client ID and Secret, and activate the integration with a checkbox. After making the changes, all attachments seamlessly upload to Dropbox. Repeat the process for Google Drive. Enjoy a straightforward and flexible file storage solution with this user-friendly integration.

Block Editor

From Fluent Support v1.7.4, the Gutenberg block empowers users to seamlessly integrate a ticket portal into any created page, streamlining the process of receiving customer ticket requests. However, the excitement doesn’t end there.

Beyond basic color adjustments, users now have advanced settings to tailor the portal to their brand identity. Modify everything from border color and thickness to border radius. For those seeking even more customization, an additional CSS class can be effortlessly added.

The ticket submission portal comprises three distinct pages—a ticket listing page, a submission page, and a single ticket conversion page. Every aspect of these pages, from buttons to background elements, is now fully customizable. This feature provides users with the flexibility to align the portal seamlessly with their brand aesthetics, ensuring a cohesive and personalized customer experience.

Email CC

Since Fluent Support v1.7.0, customers now have the convenience of including CC recipients in their support emails. When a customer initiates contact with your business inbox, the system identifies the sender as the primary customer, generating a corresponding ticket.

With Email CC, subsequent replies from the main customer including CC users automatically designate them as sub-customers for that ticket. Should a CC user respond to the thread, our system recognizes it as a customer’s interaction. Furthermore, if you activate email notifications to the customer, the sender receives updates while maintaining an inclusive conversation thread for other CC users. This enhancement optimizes communication and ensures a more collaborative support experience.

Drafts

In the admin panel’s global settings, you can choose to turn on or off the draft mode. When it’s on, every reply you write for a ticket gets saved automatically until you’re ready to send it. No need to worry about losing your work—everything is saved, giving you peace of mind and making it easy to continue where you left off.

Now, there’s a new permission feature that lets you decide which agents can save draft responses. It’s like having a way to make notes before sending messages. Agents can save drafts, ask for feedback, and make changes before sending their responses, making the process smoother.

With draft reply permissions, you have control over which agents can save and edit drafts, and higher-ranking agents can approve drafts. This way, support managers have full control over draft responses for each ticket, making customer support more efficient and keeping the quality high.

Peering into 2024

In 2023, Fluent Support is on a roll! Our strong team is working hard to make us the go-to WordPress helpdesk for customer support.

Here’s what we’re up to,

Community love: We want your ideas! Tell us how we can make features like automation, integration, and ticketing even better. Your input matters!

Easy switching: Moving from other plugins or tools? We’ve got your back. We’re making it super simple for you to switch and enjoy a better help desk experience.

Fast fixes: Bugs and issues? No worries. We’re on it, fixing things quickly to keep your experience smooth and trouble-free.

Monthly updates: Exciting news every month! We’re releasing cool new features regularly, keeping things fresh and effective.

Helpful content: Check out our blog! We’re sharing tips and tricks about customer support and experience. We’re not just a helpdesk – we’re your buddy on the journey to excellent customer relations.

Super support: Need help? We’ve got you covered. Count on Fluent Support for top-notch customer service that’s always ready to help.

Join us on this journey as we make Fluent Support your go-to solution for WordPress helpdesk needs!

Wrapping up

As we bid farewell to 2023, WPManageNinja is buzzing with excitement. Fluent Support is helping small business owners navigate customer support efficiently!

2024 promises to be a year of growth, packed with new features and improvements brought to you by the unstoppable Fluent Support team. Be prepared to be amazed!

To our incredible users and well-wishers, a heartfelt thank you for being the wind beneath our wings. Your support means the world to us. As you tackle new challenges in the upcoming year, we’re cheering you on!

Merry Christmas, and here’s to a fantastic 2024 filled with success and flourishing small businesses! Don’t forget to follow our Fluent Support blog for all things customer success, CX management, and customer service tips.

Until next time, happy serving!

The post Fluent Support: 2023 in a nutshell! appeared first on Fluent Support.

In today’s competitive business landscape, customer loyalty is a coveted asset that can significantly impact the success of any company.

And therefore, to foster a strong customer relationship, a robust support team is essential.

But what attributes make a team powerful?

The answer is clear communication, extensive knowledge, and adequate training. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of a group can be significantly enhanced with the right software system, making them even more powerful.

So, if you’re in the WordPress world and want to enhance customer loyalty, you’re in the right place.

11 best WordPress helpdesk plugins

In this blog, we’ll be showcasing a selection of highly effective WordPress helpdesk plugins to help you achieve your goals and build strong customer relationships.

So, for your ease, we went through all the available WordPress plugins for a support team. After testing and tinkering, we found the best 11 plugins for your WordPress website.

Let’s dive in!

1. Fluent Support – WordPress Helpdesk Plugins

Fluent Support quickly gained over 10,000 active installations within just a few years. Although it is relatively new, numerous small to large-scale businesses adore this WordPress helpdesk plugin.

With its simple, intuitive interface and extensive feature set, it’s no wonder businesses love this plugin. What sets Fluent Support apart is its exceptional features and integration with a wide range of tools and plugins. The cherry on top is its seamless OpenAI integration.

It provides the best after-sales customer support. The dedicated team behind this helpdesk plugin not only responds promptly but also provides efficient assistance, making it even more lovable.

Key feature list:

1. Integrated OpenAI helps agents respond to tickets faster by analyzing AI-generated ticket summaries and customer sentiment. It then generates a response with AI, allowing line-by-line fine-tuning.
2. Automatic workflows. Such as automatic tagging to a certain customer who comes from a certain page or domain.
3. Speaking of the domain, it has the webhook feature for subdomains.
4. You can keep track of the ticket as a team by adding members in CC or BCC in your email chain.
5. The auto-draft feature allows you to start right where you left off. So, no more loss of ticket content because of an urgent meeting.
6. You can add maximum-sized files directly from a cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox.
7. You can take private notes about your customers for consistent communication. It’s visible to agents only.
8. And the best thing is that there is no limitation regarding ticket or agent or product numbers.

Improvement area:

1. Customer feedback or survey box is not there yet after getting help from an agent.
2. This has a very simplified interface which is easy to use. But if you like trendy UI then this lacks that. And no dark mood yet.

Endnote: The developer team at Fluent Support is highly efficient and continuously working to add new features. They prioritize customers’ demands and make the system more productive for your support team.

2. Awesome Support

Awesome Support has been active on WordPress since 2016. Over the years, this WordPress ticketing system has gained a lot of trust. Now it has 10,000+ active installations as of now.

This is an open-source system created by the community. It means contributors from around the world are helping to develop the plugin.

Key feature list:

1. With this support system plugin, unlimited users can create unlimited tickets. And you can create unlimited agents to deal with the tickets.
2. It has a powerful ticket filtering feature to find out a particular ticket. Routing can be set up for specific tickets as well.
3. A single system can be used for multiple sites and manage all of your products in one place.
4. You can customize it to match your brand style.
5. Two or more agents can collaborate on a single ticket if needed.
6. Finally, a custom report can be generated and shared with others.

Improvement Area:

1. The dashboard interface design might feel a bit dated. User flow might be a bit difficult for some users.
2. The customer support team behind this plugin is not as prompt as it should be.

Endnote: Lots of developers are contributing to this plugin as it is an open-source project. Overall, it is a good WordPress helpdesk plugin for your support team.

3. Heroic Inbox

Heroic Inbox is offered by HeroThemes. It is known for its innovative customer-centric WordPress products, such as the KnowHow theme and the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin, and serves over 29,000 customers.

Heroic Inbox is no different. It’s a robust helpdesk plugin that lets you manage customer support from your WordPress dashboard. Giving you total control over customer care.

Key Feature List:

• Manage multiple email accounts (e.g., support@, sales@) from a single unified inbox with added WordPress features.
• Assign emails to team members or add notes to the conversations.
• Automate routine tasks such as tagging, assigning, and responding to emails. Use pre-written responses, and user signatures to speed up the process.
• Customer profiles and easy-to-track conversation history.
• Integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce and other popular WordPress plugins.

Improvement Areas:

While Heroic Inbox offers some really good email management features, the addition of built-in AI wouldn’t hurt.

Free Version: Not available.
Premium Version: Pricing starts at $199/year, including all features and premium support.

Endnote: Heroic Inbox is a robust solution for building your own help desk system. The onboarding process is easy to follow and the system is easy to use.

If you are a medium to large business, you can easily save hundreds of dollars compared to other SaaS alternatives.

4. Tidio

Tidio is a modern AI-powered customer service platform trusted by many businesses worldwide. It combines live chat, ticketing, AI automation, and workflow builders into a single, easy-to-use help desk solution.

Even though Tidio is primarily known as a SaaS platform, it integrates smoothly with WordPress without any heavy setup. Also, its AI agent “Lyro,” Tidio can automate up to 70% of customer inquiries (sometimes reaching up to 90%), significantly boosting response times and CSAT scores.

Its intuitive interface, central conversation hub, and strong automation features make it a standout choice for businesses aiming to scale support while maintaining personal connections.

Key feature list:

• AI-powered agent “Lyro” handles and resolves a large volume of customer queries automatically.
• Centralized inbox collects all customer conversations from live chat, email, and social media in one place.
• Live chat widget that’s lightweight, customizable, and easy to integrate into WordPress.
• Automation builder to set up workflows like FAQs, lead generation, or proactive messages.
• Seamless integration with platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Zendesk without complicated migration processes.
• Multilingual support to serve customers globally.
• Easy-to-use mobile app for managing customer communications on the go.

Areas for Improvement:

Some features might rely on external Tidio dashboard management rather than inside the WordPress admin.

Free Version: Available with basic features and limited automation capabilities.

Pro Version: Plans start from $29/month, depending on usage and features (live chat, automation, and AI chatbot).

Endnote: Tidio is ideal for businesses that want a highly intuitive, AI-powered helpdesk system without overcomplicating their WordPress setup. If your goal is to automate a large chunk of your customer support while keeping conversations personal and manageable, Tidio could be a winning option.

5. ThriveDesk

ThriveDesk is a fully hosted, lightning-fast helpdesk solution that integrates seamlessly with WordPress—no database maintenance or complicated setup required. ThriveDesk is designed for simplicity, speed, and deep WordPress compatibility, allowing you to manage customer support effortlessly.

Key Features list:

• Enjoy cloud-based hosting with native WordPress integration for smooth operation.
• Add as many support agents as your team needs without extra fees.
• Manage multiple inboxes and organize tickets easily across departments.
• Engage with customers in real time using an AI-enhanced live chat system.
• Boost agent productivity with Neo, an AI copilot that provides support suggestions and solutions.
• Embed a customizable help center directly into WordPress, enhancing user support.
• ThriveDesk works seamlessly with WooCommerce, SureCart, FluentCRM, Freemius, and more.

Areas for Improvement:

ThriveDesk currently does not offer a native mobile app. Limited reporting options and third-party integration support are available at this time.

Free Version: No free version is available.
Pro Version: Plans range from $9 to $99 per month, with unlimited agents included at every level.

Endnote: ThriveDesk is a modern solution for support teams looking for efficient, cloud-hosted helpdesk software that integrates smoothly with WordPress, eliminating the need for hosting or database management.

6. Support Genix

Support Genix is a WordPress plugin that seamlessly integrates a robust support ticket system into your WordPress site. This tool empowers users to create and manage unlimited tickets directly from their WordPress platform.

Support Genix provides companies with efficient email handling and management. It also allows companies to add and manage unlimited agents, ensuring prompt ticket responses for every client query.

WordPress website owners can effectively manage their support efforts and improve their customer assistance experience with Support Genix.

Key feature list:

• Add unlimited agents to assist with ticket management.
• Import emails from an email address into the support ticket system with Email piping.
• Seamlessly integrates with renowned platforms like Envato marketplace, WooCommerce, WPForms, and so on. 
• Assign various roles to agents for specific permissions.
• Organize your tickets efficiently by creating distinct ticket categories.
• Customers can attach files to their tickets with customizable file type options.

Improvement Area: 

1. Limited integration with 3rd party tools. But it offers webhook integration for enhanced connectivity.
2. Report generation isn’t available now, but it will be available soon.

Free version: Available in the WordPress repository with basic features.

Pro version: Plan starts from $59/year and $99/lifetime

Endnote: To deliver smooth customer support, Support Genix provides all the essential tools to your support agents.

7. JS Help Desk

JS Help Desk is another good player among the support software plugins. It’s another feature-rich system with 5,000 active installations.

It was first released in 2017 on WordPress repository. Since then, it has kept adding functionalities to this plugin. So, let’s see what features they bring to the table.

Key features list:

1. This also offers an unlimited number of tickets and agents.
2. Users and agents get notifications via email after a ticket is created, updated, or closed
3. Guests can create a ticket without creating an account or logging in.
4. You can set tickets’ status. It will help users track their ticket process easily.
5. You can follow up on a ticket with your team by putting them on the CC list.
6. It has the capability to create detailed reports of the support service.

Improvement Area:

1. Most of the features are not out of the box. That means you need to purchase add-ons to make this system more functional.
2. Priority support might be lack for this plugin

Endnote: Either way, this whole system is very impactful for the support team if you set it up with all the premium add-ons.

8. SupportCandy – WordPress Helpdesk Plugins

SupportCandy, a WordPress ticketing system, has been active since 2014. It covered all the important features that a support agent would need. Currently, they have gained over 10,000 active installations.

The SupportCandy team has introduced a few good features. Let’s see what they have to offer.

Key features list:

1. Like other systems, this WordPress plugin also supports unlimited tricks and unlimited agents.
2. The text editor supports rich text. So you can make your ticket text more organized and formatted.
3. Agents can take notes that are only visible to them.
4. It has an advanced ticket filtering option to find a particular ticket faster.
5. Users and agents will be notified via email if tickets are modified or closed.

Improvement Area:

1. The free version of this plugin does not have that much functionality, and to make it more usable, you have to install premium add-ons. 
2. Integration options with support plugins are very much limited.

Endnote: Being one of the oldest plugins in the market, it has quite a reputation. And the developer team behind this is also very active.

9. KB Support

KB Support is a simple support system for WordPress. So far it’s got 2,000 active installations with good feedback on WordPress.

Though, it is not a new system on the market (released in 2017). And over the years, it got better with features.

Key feature list:

1. Agents can create a knowledge-based short article during ticket management.
2. Any user can submit a ticket as a guest. That means there is no need for a login.
3. You can put restrictions on an agent’s ability to access unassigned tickets.
4. You can set up a simple automation to assign agents to certain tickets.
5. This system also provides a private note-taking feature for agents only.

Improvement Area:

1. They covered the basic features. A few important features are not available such as report generation.
2. Integration with the helpdesk plugin is limited to a few applications.

Endnote: If you have a small team and need something simple, then this could be a good option.

10. WordPress Advanced Ticket System (WATS)

WATS might be the oldest WordPress plugin for the support ticketing system. However, it has only 1,000 active installations.

Released back in 2009, this is yet another simple WordPress SaaS for helpdesks.

Key feature list:

1. The system generates a ticket number as a reference. It can help track the ticket easily. It will be listed as a WordPress support number in settings.
2. You can set a ticket’s priority or status. It can be for products and also set the type of tickets by setting a key to the tickets.
3. A ticket can be submitted in various ways. You can choose from admin ticket submission, front-end form submission, or via email.
4. This plugin can generate a raw report regarding your support data.

Improvement Area:

1. The WordPress support plugin user interface is very much dated and lacks easy usability.
2. Free versions do not have much to offer and the premium version also lacks some important features such as automatically assigning a ticket.

Endnote: This system can be useful if you are looking only for a simple ticket-generating plugin for your WordPress website. However, it might not be ideal for a large-scale support team.

11. Help Scout

Here is a bonus one. Help Scout released its WordPress helpdesk plugin back in 2015. And, since then, it has had just over 700 active installations on WordPress sites.

This helpdesk system has some useful features for a support team.

Key feature list:

1. It has a knowledge-based feature that allows you to create short articles and FAQs
2. It has an email management system in the build to organize all the emails.
3. You can sort or filter the customer list easily.
4. You can generate custom reports and share them with your team with this SaaS.

Improvement Area:

1. Even though it has a good list of features, most of these are only available in premium versions.
2. This is not a fully integrated WordPress helpdesk system. You have to leave the WordPress dashboard to use the system.

Endnote: This is an individual SaaS system rather than a WordPress helpdesk plugin. It is only used for the integration of the helpdesk software. So, if you are looking for something fully integrated into your WordPress site, then there are other options in this list to choose from.

Comparison of WordPress customer service plugins

Up until now, we have covered our best picks for WordPress helpdesk plugins available in the market. Here is a brief tabulated list with some basic comparisons.

We have a detailed comparison among more WordPress helpdesk plugins and SaaS. It will help you decide which one is more suitable to manage your support team.

Final thoughts

At the end of the day, you must need a smoother pathway for your customers. Communication with your customer should be easy and prompt. To ensure this ease and promptness, you must well equip your support team.

That’s why you need a highly effective WordPress plugin for helpdesk. So do not choose this system randomly. Take some time and do your research. Go through your customer journey map. Figure out what your customer needs are.

A fully featured, resourceful WordPress helpdesk plugin not only makes your support team productive. It will also provide a better experience through budding customer sentiment.

The post 11 Ultimate WordPress Helpdesk Plugins For Customer Support 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.

To make that research simpler we’ve published a series of comparisons between the best help desks out there. This time we’re going to put Fluent Support against Freshdesk. 

Why Freshdesk vs. Fluent Support?

Well for starters, we at Fluent Support believe self-hosting is the best way to get a support system for your business. Freshdesk is a contrasting product that works on a SaaS model. So it only makes sense to compare them to see if WordPress-hosted help desk can beat SaaS tools at their own game.

We’ve also compared WordPress plugins like JS Help Desk, Awesome Support, Help Scout, and Support Candy. Make sure you check them out before finalizing your customer support desk.

Freshdesk vs. Fluent Support: In-depth Comparison

Like our comparison with Help Scout, this article is also going to rate the top 5 aspects of the help desk systems with a max score of 5 for each aspect. The system with the highest total score is the best product among the two. So let’s get started.

Ease of use

First off, we’ll look at the ease of use for each help desk. This will include the setup process, product usability, and similar aspects. This section compares the learning curve needed to start off with either product.

Fluent Support 4.5/5

To start off, it takes just 5 minutes to set up a business inbox and get started with Fluent Support. The setup process is pretty straightforward needing very little information. Similarly, it takes less than 10 minutes to set up email piping and adding agents for the first time. Overall it takes anywhere between 10-20 minutes to get a support portal up and running on your site.

Fluent Support has an effective ticketing interface that takes no time to get the hang of. The learning curve for advanced functions like sorting and filtering is pretty flat. A support agent can become a pro in less than a day’s worth of fiddling.

The recent updates even made migrating from an existing help desk simple by adding a migrator module. Not to mention it’s ready to be used on any WordPress site without any hassle.

Freshdesk 3/5

Now for Freshdesk. The setup process is a bit complex compared to Fluent Support. According to Freshdesks own documentation, it can take up to 48 hours to get the support desk up and running. In this aspect, this is the clearest drawback for Freshdesk. 

Other than that, Freshdesk scores pretty well. Mostly because of the fact that their user interface is top-notch. Another effective part of Freshdesk is they allow customer filtering for support tickets which is definitely a good feature to have. To fit your branding, you can also personalize the user interface, ticket submission page, and agent dashboard.

However, the most problematic issue is the fact Freshdesk has no direct compatibility with WordPress. So if your website is on WordPress you’ll need an additional plugin to use the portal with your website. 

Reports

Next, we’ll look at the reporting capabilities. Customer support data is crucial for businesses. To actually help a brand improve customer experience it’s crucial to have this data readily available. 

Fluent Support 4/5

When it comes to reports, Fluent Support performs exceptionally well. It provides you with all the necessary data such as Response time, Closing rate, and response rates for both individual agents and for the whole team. It also provides real-time hourly data for better performance tracking.

You can export the reports in multiple formats for evaluation in third-party systems too. It takes less than a minute to get the bigger picture of your support team so reporting is definitely a strong suit for Fluent Support.

Freshdesk 3.5/5

Freshdesk reports come in tiers like most SaaS features. You’ll have to at least get the Growth plan to get reporting for your support desk. If you upgrade to the Pro plan it provides customization for the reports which is a great feature. However, the data available to users is very limited compared to Fluent Support.

The only good bit about the reports is you can schedule reporting for agents and admins. But other than that, the reporting module is a bit underwhelming.

Support Features

In this section, we look at the individual feature list for each support desk. The aim is to evaluate the products based on efficiency and the effectiveness of the features included in different pricing plans.

Fluent Support 4/5

To start off with support functionalities we have to consider Fluent Support’s automation. It allows multiple triggers including manual and automated workflows. These can be used for segmentation, agent assignment, ticket closing, etc.

Along with that Fluent Support comes with email piping enabled. This allows you to check tickets directly from your support email. Not to mention you can organize the tickets based on multiple business inboxes, individual products, and query types as well.

For team efficiency Fluent Support also has built-in collision detection with live activity logs. This prevents agents from overlapping on the same tickets. To make collaboration smoother and save time you can save canned responses and leave internal notes for agents.

Last but not least Fluent Support allows custom privileges for agent management. This allows customer support managers to manage access to the support desk. Along with all this, you get a customizable dashboard and WordPress widgets for more accessibility. 

Freshdesk 3.5/5

The first drawback for Freshdesk in this aspect is that they don’t allow product-based ticket sorting. On the basic plans, it’s not possible to customize the dashboard so that limits some of the functionality.

However, Freshdesk more than makes up for that with its automation. Their time-based triggers are exceptionally effective and allow you to automate almost any action within the support desk. A great fact worth mentioning is their automation is powered by AI. This allows the automation module to scan and evaluate support tickets every hour to provide notifications where needed.

Along with that, they’ve included SLA management inside Freshdesk so no need to use third-party SLA managers.

Lastly, they allow custom agent roles for agents to manage privileges and access to certain parts of the help desk which is a basic but essential feature.

Integrations

A support desk is only as good as the tools it can connect to. Most businesses rely heavily on multiple third-party apps and tools. A proper support desk needs to be able to connect with these tools to improve efficiency.

Fluent Support 3/5

Fluent Support currently has 30+ integrations with popular WordPress plugins and some external tools. These tools include eCommerce platforms (WooCommerce, EDD), LMS builders(LifterLMS, TutorLMS, LearnPress, etc.), and communication apps (Slack, Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp).

However, the best integration is the CRM and helpdesk integration with FluentCRM. With this integration, you can automate marketing automation directly from Fluent Support. On top of that, Fluent Support allows incoming and outgoing webhooks along with REST-API support. So even if a tool is not available for direct integration you can still connect it to Fluent Support.

All integrations are available for every pricing tier so you won’t have to upgrade to use the integrations to the fullest.

Freshdesk 3.5/5

Freshdesk follows the paywall method when it comes to integrations called addons. Freshdesk has a whooping 500+ add-ons that are free for use while also having 48 paid add-ons. These add-ons are not included with the basic pricing and need to be purchased separately. Sadly enough, it doesn’t allow REST-API or Webhooks to connect apps not included in their list of add-ons.

Pricing

Lastly, we’ll look at the pricing to see which tool gives you the biggest bang for the buck.

Fluent Support 4.5/5

Fluent Support has a simple pricing model that becomes more expensive for the number of sites you can use the plugin on. It’s possible to use Fluent Support on up to 50 sites with a single purchase. There’s no per-agent cost or any paywalls for integrations.

You get the whole plugin with all features at every price point. The only thing limited in pricing plans is the number of email piping inboxes. So to increase email piping capabilities you might have to upgrade but that is rarely necessary for small and medium enterprises.

Starting at just $129 for single sites/month, Fluent Support is the most reasonably priced support desk you can find.

Freshdesk 2.5/5

Off the bat, the first issue with Freshdesk is it’s based on the per-agent model. Costs upwards of $15 dollars/agent in the starting plan. So for 10 agents, it’ll cost $150 without any add-ons.

This brings us to the second drawback which is paid addons. If you’ve read our previous comparisons, you’ll know if there’s one thing we don’t like that’s paywalls. Freshdesk scores poorly simply because the per-agent model and paid addons can inflate the cost that the estimates you make. 

Not to mention it adds more cost if you want to expand your support team. This is a direct blow for fast-growing businesses that need to expand teams on the fly.

Verdict: Fluent Support

The results are in and there isn’t much of a surprise in it. We considered the most crucial aspect of customer support and evaluated each plugin individually. 

So from the scores, it’s obvious which is the better help desk. Now the thing worth mentioning here is that Freshdesk being the SaaS is better suited for large enterprises that don’t have much need for expansion and have used for advanced enterprise functionalities.

On the other side, Fluent Support is a product that suits best fast-growing businesses that need room to grow rapidly and don’t need complex features to improve customer experience. So if you’re looking for an effective customer support desk with reasonable pricing Fluent Support is the option to go for.

Until next time, happy serving.

The post WordPress Help Desk or SaaS: Fluent Support vs. Freshdesk appeared first on Fluent Support.