A Help Desk For WordPress… In WordPress (Fluent Support Review)

what's up folks it's dave here from profitable.tools and we've got a very anticipated product to talk about today of course i am talking about fluent support you already knew that when you clicked on the video this is the latest fluent product from wp managed ninja of course they already have fluent crm fluent forms fluent smtp they love that word fluent uh and what is this one it's all about help desks it's uh think of it like zendesk or help scout people can send in emails or fill out a form on your website and then you can have support agents reply to them right from wordpress you'll be able to keep everything secure and running fast so says the wp managed ninja team i'm gonna test that in this video and show you how it all works but i do know that we have to address this whole idea of having a support desk on wordpress before i really show you the application because a lot of people are going to leave comments i promise you somebody go look right now unless you're the first person to watch this they're going to say why would you even want to put a support desk in wordpress that's a dumb idea well the folks at fluent support have already made fluent crm so they've done email marketing inside of wordpress and they did so successfully it works quite well so there's obviously the ability to do it now why would you want to i guess is the real question well it comes down to data in my opinion go down here and see some of their integrations we've got woocommerce easy digital downloads integrations with you know membership sites lms's learndash things like that and then just kind of to throw this out there you can also reply to tickets from things like slack and telegram so that if you're on your mobile phone you don't have to log into wordpress just to make things a little bit easier so the reason is that the data is already on wordpress right you're already charging your customers on wordpress they have all of their information stored there you can see their progress in the course everything is already right there why wouldn't you want your support to be there as well and the answer that a lot of people have to why you don't want your support there is obviously it'll slow down your website but the way that they've approached this is to maximize efficiency they throw some kind of technical information out here if you're not a developer you might not know what this means but it's built with a super fast spa meaning single page application they're using vue.js and the rest api now that's all a lot of technical information to mean that they're using the most modern technologies to build out this application that lives alongside wordpress now it's not using your wordpress database so it's not going to make your wordpress database bloated it's not going to slow down wordpress as a whole it's going to still utilize server resources so the one thing that might happen sooner is that you need to upgrade your hosting as your site grows now you do that eventually especially if you're already running a woocommerce site or an lms but you might have to upgrade it a little bit sooner if you add support onto that same website the upside to this is that it's self-hosted all of your data is yours you have unlimited resources no one's going to tell you how many agents you can add or anything like that so let's go ahead and take a look at how this works if you want to follow along with me there is a free version of the plugin in the wordpress repository called fluent support i've also got the pro version installed which is fluent support pro the difference here is that i'm going to have all of the third party integrations be able to create templates it's just everything you want from an actual support desk is going to be in pro but you can kind of get a taste for it inside of the free versions now i've already been using this to kind of test it out i was going to give you an initial impression as i set things up but it's actually fairly complicated to wrap your head around how everything is working i can do a better job of explaining it now that i've used it a little bit once you install the plug-in it does have a setup wizard it's simply going to ask you to go ahead and create a business right over here i've got what's called business settings now what they refer to this later on is actually inboxes and you can see here we've got business inboxes if i had to give one critique to wp manage ninja as a whole is that they do this fairly often where they'll use terminology here that's different than terminology here and then later on they'll even use different terminology where they just call it an inbox so it would be nice to just say inboxes inboxes and then later on on the next page i'll show you also call that an inbox but basically what we're doing here is we're setting up ways that people can communicate with us and we can also kind of segment it so right now i've just got my one default profitable tools type of inbox this is going to be a web inbox if i wanted to also receive emails i'd have to add another inbox so let's go ahead add a new business inbox and i'll call this profitable emails and i'll add my support inbox now the important step down here is that i choose an email-based inbox i'm gonna go ahead and choose that and let's add the business inbox now you can see i get a big notification over here this is another little theme of the the plugin that i think needs to be optimized this should really be a notification that ends right about here it doesn't need to cover up my entire screen all right let's close that out remember this is a brand new plugin so i'm gonna be pointing out all of the little bugs and tweaks i see along the way that doesn't necessarily mean i think it's bad i just hope that they kind of tweak the interface as they go all right so i've already got my web interface set up and i'm going to show you what that looks like then we'll come back here and set up the email piping so you can see how to get emails into your support desk when i installed the plugin it went ahead and created a support portal for me here you can see it's just a page inside of my wordpress website if i view it right now it's going to give me this error it says the support portal is for customers only and you're an administrator so it'll tell me where to log in as an administrator so i can actually answer my tickets so let's go ahead and open this in an incognito window so we can see what it looks like for our users so here is the support portal page when i visit it as a non-logged-in user i've just went to the actual url that was created for me when i installed the plugin now i actually have some critiques even about the support portal page the login field itself i do have some issues with first of all if i enter in the wrong password it actually takes me to the default wordpress login let me show you what i mean so it takes me out of that user experience rather than just telling me on the page i was on hey you need to log in now obviously i could customize this and make it look good but why not just tell me on this page why kick me out and go to another page this is the global settings where i can actually configure that support login page that we just saw now when i set up the plugin there was actually a typo in their own short code now i'm sure this will be fixed probably before you even have a chance to buy the plugin but it was like this right so it just said actually it was h so the actual shortcode itself rendered on the page because it wasn't accurate so another just kind of little thing that they needed to tweak and i'm only including that in the video to point out that one this product is brand new like literally they're still coding it right now they're adding features every day and two if it does ship like this and you're like hey what it took me a good five minutes to figure out that they made that little typo hopefully that saves you the five minutes of wondering all right so i am logged in right now as a customer and i've already gone ahead and created several tickets from this customer account and i've actually found that it's pretty usable but there are some bugs that need to be tweaked so let's go ahead and these are the tickets that i've already created let's go ahead and make a brand new one so you can see that there's a subject line just like you'd expect i can go ahead and type what my question is or what help i need but i've already gone ahead and integrated this with a knowledge base now you don't have to use a knowledge base plugin and fluent support doesn't come with one you can actually just use any custom post type so you could even use your blog if you want as i go ahead and say type in i'm going to go ahead and add some lorem ipsum here and what it's going to do is actually look for similar articles and it's going to find one with the exact same name right here that's because all of my support articles already have lorem ipsum as as the names of the articles i'll show you what i'm talking about here on the back end so i'm using better docs which is a great knowledge based plug-in i actually think that fluent support might be using better docs on their own website but you can see here that i've got a few different categories of support docs and then i just went ahead and populated it with some fake data so as i write a support ticket about that it's going to go ahead and search and find those terms inside of several different articles here the upside to this is obviously it's going to cut down on the amount of tickets that you receive if people can read an article about the actual question they have before they submit it integrating this was really really easy under fluent support we'll go to settings and then under the ticket form configuration i'm going to click right here and i can choose which post type i want to reference for those search queries i can choose multiple post types so better docs is using this doc slug but i could also just use like the regular post type which would be your blog post so maybe you want to pull people over to existing content you already have you don't need to copy and paste everything over to a new knowledge base i really think that this is the best way that fluent support could have possibly integrated this with their system not trying to do everything and just let you use wordpress how it was meant to be used but it is not all sunshine and lollipops from here on out i do have a few more issues with this support portal page first of all we can enter in our text here this is all laid out very nicely just the kind of standard wordpress editor if you don't want to allow the more rich text editing you can disable this over in the settings you can see it's right here just click this little button under the uh ticket form configuration the same place we were before turn that off and people will not be able to add lists or links or anything like that i'll probably recommend leaving that on just to make the editing experience a little bit nicer for people but here's where my complaints begin i've got these form labels down below so these are the different sections that people should be able to fill out when they are submitting a ticket now i can't get some of them to show up so i don't know if i'm doing something wrong but the two that i can't get to show up are the priorities i don't see anywhere to edit the priority levels inside of settings anywhere i have looked but nothing springs up quite yet and it doesn't show up on the forum itself i can see in the back end that there are actually default priorities but no way to configure them so i'm still trying to figure that out there's no option for priority level right here and the next thing that is missing is this the content help message i don't see anywhere to display that or really why it's necessary when we have the form content heading with the ticket details i'm not sure what the difference is between that now we can add custom fields here which is strange that it's not inside of the same screen but to add the custom fields you can go right here to custom fields and we'll just add new we'll do a select choice here give it a label we'll add in some options and then hit add back over on the customer view if i reload this form i should see that show up how are you feeling and i can get some custom information added to the form so i can really customize it as much as i want however the one thing i'm just really not seeing that seems important is the priority level okay if that were it i'd be okay with it but there is still one more bug let's go ahead and just submit this ticket i'm gonna go ahead and fill it out and i'm gonna hit create ticket it's going to give me a little spinning wheel takes me over to a screen where i can see all of the tickets that i have submitted however there is a problem so i'm going to submit this new ticket but i want to point out that i can add a file here i can add a photo a csv a pdf a zip or a json file with a max two megabytes in size this is configurable by the way so if you don't want to accept uploads you could turn this off under ticket form configuration i can disable it right here altogether disable file uploads and under the global settings i can actually choose which file types i want kind of a weird organization i'm not sure why that isn't all on the same screen but here it is you know why not just add the disable option right here then we can also up change the amount you know if we want to accept like five megabytes we could do that okay so i'm not going to save this we'll go back over here and what happens is when i upload an image which went ahead and attached an image right here when i try to upload this image and then submit the ticket watch what happens i just get a little spinning wheel and then nothing happens it looks like the ticket is not submitted so you might go ahead and hit it several times well each time i do this it's actually creating a new ticket for me on the back end i can go ahead if i check my tickets here under fluent support tickets i'm seeing that the ticket was submitted three times here ticket with image number 11 12 and 13. this is all the same thing submitted just a few seconds ago so that's definitely a little bug these are not deal breakers but definitely some rough edges to smooth out once this is fixed it's going to definitely be a really good experience everything on the user experience seems very nice and obvious familiar if you've ever used you know a ticketing system with anybody else it seems to work very very similar okay so while we're in the ticket screen i might as well show you around a little bit here there's quite a few options in terms of bulk processing tickets sorting and just kind of making your life easier as a support person so first let's talk about bulk processing i can select as many tickets as i want from one screen of course i don't have to select them all i could just grab a couple here and you're going to see these options show up at the top of the screen this is to reply to multiple tickets at once so if a bunch of questions come in about a specific error maybe you know there's something wrong with your site you could select all of them and then reply all in one go that's really cool then we can also set up a agent to respond to a particular ticket i'm going to show you how to set up agents in a moment so maybe we'll come back to this we can tag tickets that are all related to a similar subject we can also close and delete tickets in bulk as well so if you're done with something and you just want to get them all off the screen you can go ahead and do that now as far as sorting i think the options here on screen are pretty obvious we can sort by all tickets my tickets and on assigned tickets we can also choose the status of tickets that we'd like to view open active new closed or all we can sort by our inboxes remember i was talking about inboxes earlier well here are inboxes so we have profitable tools this is the web form that we're filling out and then we have the email uh inbox that we haven't quite configured yet so this is what i was talking about over in the business settings where we have multiple inboxes here it's called business settings here's called business inboxes and then back over on the tickets page it's just called inbox so a little confusing but once you connect the dots it's like okay that makes sense the next option over is to sort by product now right now i've got two products added in their web design and seo now this is really just topic right so we're gonna sort by topic the way that's configured is just under settings and then go to products here and you can add in whatever topics you'd like emails to be sent in about i actually think that the word topics would be a much better name for this you could have inboxes for support or inboxes for sales or maybe separate products you know support for those products you can add as many as you like that's the beauty of having it hosted on your own platform just this word products is a little bit confusing all right back over to tickets and you can see as i'm moving around here it's responding pretty fast even though i've already got some data in there it's pulling up very very quickly i am not on a powerful server right now like a bottom of the barrel uh you know vps five dollar a month type of server so this is nothing to write home about in terms of the server power that i have but the application is still responding very very quickly the last two options over here are for priority and as i already mentioned i can't figure out how to assign priority as a customer but the options are normal medium and critical for administrator it is the same so there's different options for administrator priority and customer priority i don't know that i've seen another application a help desk that does that but this one does so that's good to know so let's see what it's like to actually respond to a ticket let's go ahead and open this one up after we're done with this i'll show you how to add your own staff members and what that looks like so right here we've got a submission from a user named profitabledave and they said their thing is broke and it needs to be fixed now what i can do as a support staff is to actually go ahead and reply right from this message it will go ahead and email that customer it just uses your normal wordpress transactional email configuration i recommend using fluent smtp i do have a video on how to configure that we go ahead and reply right here add our messaging and this will actually email them now my options are just to add the reply or i can reply and close of course i can also add an upload here let's go ahead and test out this upload to make sure it works here let's add the reply and it looks like that sent just fine now if i go under my tickets i'm going to see the ticket that i just replied to you right so i'm sorting out all of the tickets that have not had replies yet and i can see only the ones that i'm engaged with or assigned to and i can see the reply here with the attachment now there's some other options right i can click on this little icon right here which is a notebook this will allow me to add notes that are internal to the ticket and other support staff will be able to see it so i could explain the problem in a little bit more detail let them know some history about the customer if they're not aware and that way anybody who's working can easily continue to provide support for people the last option over here is the staff member that's actually assigned to the ticket so let's say i'm working on this and i just you know my shift's gonna end but i really want someone to take over for me i can go ahead and click on my name and then choose the agent that i'd like to actually take over for me here we can update the priority levels so this is the client priority level whether it's you know maybe it's critical to them but it's you know just medium to you you can go ahead and set that up and then we can go ahead and close out this ticket and then that way it will be removed from my available tickets so this user experience really really delightful very very clean and easy everything operates the way you'd expect all right we're just going to do a few more things i'm going to set up some new staff members right now let's head over to settings and we'll go to support staffs now i have to point this out that staff is a plural word as is at least in american english so there's no reason to add an s to it i actually don't know if it's like that across you know british english or maybe it's just me and it's actually correct but it's a little bit of an eyesore to me every time i see this support staffs but anyway without further ado we can go ahead and add as many support members as we want here just click the add new button add their email address their first name last name and title here the one catches they do need to already be a user on your wordpress website so it can't just be added directly here they have to be a user on wordpress so after you've added your user to wordpress and you're setting them up inside of fluent support i want to point out that you do have some pretty granular permissions here so you can allow them ticket permissions right whether they can view the dashboard manage their own tickets manage unassigned tickets so that'd be ones that come in and no one's reply to yet or manage others tickets or delete tickets so these last two things being a little bit more of an administrator's job someone you'd really trust to make sure that they're going to do the right thing they would have those options turned on workflows we're going to talk about in a minute but those are basically automations that you can set up then the last two headings here settings and reporting are again going to be more administrative whether they can manage the overall settings access private data about customers view activity logs and view reports there's a decent reporting section here that maybe we'll take a look at in a minute but yeah those those last options are going to be reserved more for administrators of course a lot of users of fluent crm are going to be interested in fluent support so i should definitely mention that there's a very simple integration simply check a box and now you can have a default list and tag added to someone when they go ahead and submit a support ticket all right next up we're going to check out the reporting section right over here it's fairly simple but it's going to give you all the information that you want to know we can see the total number of replies that this is going to be my personal stats here total number of replies the number of interactions and the number of closed tickets then if we go to the overall agent's report i'm going to get a little bit more of a broad view of everything that's going on total number of tickets number of active tickets closed tickets and responses and then down below we can see each agent's individual performance there's no data here right now but be able to see things like their responses interactions open tickets close tickets and current overall status of course we can sort this by start date and end date right now we're just looking at like the last month's worth of data and i've only been using it for a day or so here and the graph we're actually looking at is the ticket stats so how many tickets are coming in you might want to see some other information like how many tickets are resolved and how many tickets get replies those could be helpful but i think another metric that people would really like to see is the time to response it'd be great to see if we can get that on the reporting chart as well and then maybe just some kind of export options so that if you wanted to send this around to uh you know people inside of your company but they're not going to be logging into wordpress uh you have the option to do that there's not right now the ability to export into pdfs all right let's go ahead and finish up our email piping that we set up for this email inbox that we were configuring earlier in this video so once again this is under business settings which is actually business inboxes or inbox and let's go ahead and configure this we'll click view settings here and where we need to begin is at the bottom here where it says email piping what they mean by email piping is that you're going to be sending email to one address and it's going to go into our wordpress website which is a little bit strange but you're you're piping it somewhere else other than say your gmail inbox or your amazon workmail inbox so let's go ahead and turn this on we have to agree to their terms here and it gives us this email address right here which is actually a fluent support email address so know that this is going to go through their server but it's actually going to get auto forwarded to our email address so if there's any sort of issues with you know confidentiality well you really can't use this type of service on any platform then because you're gonna always run into an issue with this on zendesk on help scout they're gonna always have you pipe it through their email address just to get it forwarded to you i just went ahead and set up the piping inside of my gmail account there are directions on exactly how to do this depending on your email provider over on the fluent support documents page i'll link to this in the description of this video so you can go right to it but basically you're going to click on your email provider here and they're going to walk you through the process of adding a forwarding address so i've already went ahead and done that for the address that fluent support gave me over here and let's go ahead and trust this out see if it works i'm gonna click i have done it so heading over to tickets here and sorting by the profitable emails inbox sure enough i just sent a message from myself to the support address and it shows up just fine inside of the inbox for some reason i didn't see it when i clicked on the button to have it forward but i think that has something to do with how i configured my google workspace groups to forward so definitely follow along with the fluent support docs if you have any trouble but it did work for me when i just wrote an email myself as long as i didn't send it from the same email address so don't use the same email address it won't forward i think google thinks hey you already got this so it doesn't seem to pass along that way but otherwise everything is working great with the email piping we have a few more settings to address over here inside of the configuration this is going to be basically relevant whether you're doing a web form or an email configuration we have some email settings so this is going to be the emails that are sent to the people related to the inbox right so when we create tickets is an email going to go out so someone creates a ticket do they get a reply back the customer do they get a reply back to say hey we've received your ticket if you want them to you can set it up right here this is the text that they would receive and then the other options are replied by an agent so someone gets a message reply to ticket closed to get created and replied to customer all options right there all right we've already looked at email piping inbox settings are basically you're going to be fine leaving this alone as is you can set up a footer here if you want to you know ask people to you know leave a review or something like that you can definitely do so should point out there's no review services included influence support but if you have a third party kind of uh you know collection of hey how are we doing smiley face thing you can definitely uh include a link to that the last feature we're going to talk about in this video is called workflows this is going to allow you to automate a lot of the responses so if you have certain procedures that you go through frequently you can set them up as workflows and will make your life easier let me show you what i'm talking about i'm going to click on add new workflow and i can give this a name let's say it's a sales assignment so what i'm going to do here is when a ticket comes in i'm going to direct it over to our sales team and i'm also going to tag it appropriately i can go ahead and create a manual workflow right here and hit continue now the first action that i might want to take is to assign this to an agent so i know that my best salesperson is johnny on the spot i'm going to go ahead and assign it to johnny and then i can say assign to johnny as the title and then i can go ahead and add another action maybe i want to add an internal note here is a sales lead i don't know why you'd want to do that but it's an option i'm just trying to demonstrate the idea here then we can add another action like maybe we want to reply to the customer and say i'm going to direct you over to sales johnny will be right back with you as soon as you can you get the point here you can go ahead and set up these workflows so that when you're in the heat of the battle answering a lot of support messages you can click one button and all of these tasks will be accomplished for you let me show you how easy it is to use this i'm going to go ahead and pull this out of draft mode and let's go ahead and hit update here just to be certain it looks like that is working properly all right now let's go ahead and answer a ticket so i'm going to go back to a ticket here here's our test email and then inside of this ticket i should see that workflow right here i did have to reload the page like it was cached even though i don't have any caching on this page if i click right here i have the option to choose which workflow i want i'm gonna click sales assignment and it's going to let me review the workflow and i'm going to go ahead and run it right now i was just saying and there a few times because i didn't actually give those titles when i set them up but otherwise it would show each of the steps and you can see that it added the notes it replied to the person that you're going to go to our top salesperson johnny and if i go over to look at johnny's tickets uh let's do that right now support staff should see that that is now assigned to him so everything worked properly that's pretty cool now we can also do this same thing but automatically so the example here is that when a subject line contains bug report you can automatically tag it and so on and so forth so let's go ahead and do the same thing that we just did but in a more automated approach all right so i've got a new workflow here titled automatic sales assignment and the first thing i need to do is set up a trigger so we can do on ticket creation or on customer response so on ticket creation i'm going to go ahead and choose the ticket title contains and then i can add anything here i want i'm just going to write buy so someone's expressing that they want to buy something this probably is not a good idea you would not necessarily want to do this because there's lots of reasons people would use the word buy but i'm going to go ahead at that point then assign it to my agent and same thing we saw before we can set up as many actions here as we want all right so we've just added a few steps here first it's going to add an agent and then it's going to write back a short message to the customer okay so i just published this workflow let's go ahead and test it out behind the scenes i'm going to send an email using the word buy in the subject line and hopefully it gets assigned to johnny on the spot okay so i just did that let's head over to the tickets and i want to point out that my filters are staying in place so right now i'm only looking at johnny on the spot i'm gonna go ahead and close this and i should see my other email here show up in a second all right and so here we go the new email just came in and it says i want to buy a new website it's already been assigned to johnny a few seconds ago so the automation is working correctly as far as i can tell here so overall fluid support looks like it's going to be an absolute beast of an inbox solution for people who need to handle wordpress based support now it's also a work in progress so i wouldn't necessarily throw this to the wolves right away as you can see there's a few things that need to be tweaked i'm sure there's even more than what i've discovered inside of this video but i bet if you give it a good three months or so it's going to be running really really smoothly maybe even less than that the folks at wp managed ninja always tend to address things really really quickly they're very fast to iterate on ideas and refine things it's one of the reasons that i'm so excited when they release a new plug-in so that's gonna do it for this video if you have any questions make sure you leave me a comment down below again i always have my social media links as well as links to my email newsletter down there as well and you can always find some affiliate links if you want to buy this product for example i'll have my link in the description you can help support the channel so i can make more videos like this one it's gonna do it i will see you in the next one stay profitable

Channel: Profitable Tools

Views: 2,115

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Id: HxiJ6zLpbw8

Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021