Fluent Support: A New Helpdesk and Ticket Management System

hi this is david mccann for web tng in this video i'm taking a look at a new help desk and ticket management system for wordpress called fluent support my first it job was doing customer support and later at another job i help program an internal support application of course as a customer i've also experienced different ways companies offer support what i've learned is that customer support is essential for the success of a company that offering support day in and day out is a challenge but that the right tools help companies offer support in a professional manner while i like support forums because i can learn from the questions others post ultimately a company will need to have a ticket system in place in order to maintain customer privacy and keep track of support requests the hallmarks of a good support system is that it captures all of the data needed to understand and respond to requests customer interactions are tracked so nothing is lost it's easy to use and as much as possible the workflow is streamlined and automated fluent support is a new help desk plugin from the wp-managed ninja team the makers of fluent forms and other well-respected plugins it provides a robust ticket management system and has integrations with a number of popular wordpress plugins fluent support has a free version and a pro version i think the best way to show the different features of each version will be to first walk through the free version and then to take a look at the features of the pro version i set up a test site using the cadence theme and i installed one of their starter templates this one here it has a number of different color palettes so i chose this one and set it up for the pipa page builder pipa is the name of my dog let's see i saw the free easy digital downloads plugin and the edd auto register this add-on for easy digital downloads makes it so when the user purchases a user is automatically created on the wordpress site so i have a pricing page here and two packages we'll use this as our product that the support team is working with so i'm going to begin by installing the free version of fluent support and this is one of those plugins where when you do install the pro version you need to have the free version installed also so here it is you can see on wordpress.org it's brand new less than 10 active installs so let's install and activate and then we get a new menu item here for fluent support so the first thing it asks you to do is to set up your business so my business is going to be the pipa builder company and the business email will be david at webtng.com and then a support page so let's see i think i have a page name support already yeah so here's the support page you can see it's just a blank page at this point so here it is here it says to put this shortcode in it so let's go and add that shortcode i'll update that and then we've completed the business setup now let's look at the settings here so first there are global settings this is the support page that we set up this is the message if the user is not logged in you have the option to disable public ticket submission file types and the max size that people can add like for screenshots or whatnot then tags is a pro feature and it's the ability then to tag your tickets so you can do searching and filtering and bulk operations ticket from config is pretty interesting this allows you to choose a source for knowledge-based articles and you can then give suggestions to users when they submit a ticket of here are some starting articles that might help you out you can add custom fields and that's a pro feature products so you can select which product the ticket relates to so you'll want to set up your products i set up the pipa builder already so it's just a simple thing here support staff i've added myself and two other users one for tech support and one for accounting and an interesting thing here let's look at my record here is you have these pretty fine-grained permissions for reporting for managing settings for workflow permissions and ticket permissions and so when i created bob and cindy i just gave them the contributor role i didn't have to give them an admin role and we can do that because we have these fine grain permissions we can give them a lower role in wordpress and then control what they can access in fluent support there's an integration with fluent crm which is another plugin by the same company and it's an email marketing automation plugin and since a lot of support involves email messaging it's nice that you have the option for this integration and then there's some other integrations for messaging and notification platforms telegram if you want to say have a chat option you can integrate with telegram slack if maybe your developers are on slack and it's not showing here but there's also a discord integration i'm not going to try to set these up but we'll come back and look at the screens when i activate the pro version so you can see what kind of information is needed to link them up so we don't have any tickets yet let's go as a user and place an order and submit a ticket okay so i've got an incognito window here and we come to the website we go buy we choose our package and we purchase go to checkout and here's our package i did create a coupon so that i wouldn't have to enter a credit card and this user will be kits i apologize didn't customize the colors here so we'll purchase and here's our purchase confirmation here's the download so we can download the pipa builder plugin we've downloaded the plugin we've tested it a bit and we noticed that it doesn't have a back to top button option so let's go to support and let's add a ticket and let's ask for a feature request and this is the form that users see by default and they can add a screenshots or whatever if they need to and then they can choose the product and the user can choose a priority so if the user feels that you know they have a site down or they're on a deadline or whatever they can let you know that and then we create the ticket all right so now let's go back and take a look from the support person's point of view so here are the new tickets and we see it the user has given us a feature request this is a little chart here that shows you the number of new tickets active tickets close tickets responses interactions unassigned tickets and then this interface you can see all tickets you can see your tickets and you can see unassigned tickets so manager could come in here and look at unassigned tickets and assign them to users and support staff can come here and see their tickets okay so you have a interface shows a number of tickets you can add one manually you can refresh the screen you can look at the last customer response you can sort by ticket id product id priority client priority title last agent response and or last customer response then you have some filters here for open active new closed all you know which inbox or you know company it is so you could support theoretically more than one company the product you can if you have multiple products and you have different support staff supporting different companies are assigned to different products and then here is a list of your support persons your internal priority what you give it as opposed to what the customer gives it and then the customer priority i think this is a title search for a keyword and you can toggle on waiting for reply which is nice so where you know that you've answered the customer and you're waiting for a reply from them and then here's kind of a summary of the ticket and who it's assigned to the status and the date how long it's been active okay so let's go take a look at this ticket here we can add a reply we can add an internal note can say this is a good feature request and here we can assign to an agent we can refresh the screen we can close a ticket this shows the company and the product and here it shows the client priority our priority and its status and over here you have the customer's name and their email and we'll see you get some more information with the pro version over here we'll see that in a few minutes let's go ahead and assign this to me i'll reply and say great idea thanks we'll add it to the list okay and then that goes out to the customer over here you have a reports menu item these are closed tickets or resolve tickets and then this is an agent report and then this shows individual performance reports by agent is a pro feature here you have a list of customers you can add a customer manually like if say you get a support request from social media or something this is the user id on the system their name this is their basic info which comes from you know the users here it's showing their support tickets their email their status how many tickets they have and then i think this would be for the slack telegram information okay so that's this interface here now we go over here and you see that you can create some kind of canned replies which is a pro feature you can look at kind of an activity log you can set the number of days to keep the log or disable it here you can edit the company information or add another business or company workflows this is where you get into automations that's also a pro feature and then this is back to the settings so that's kind of a quick walkthrough of the free version this is the fluent support website this is where you get the pro version they have a page for features and we're going to look at you know a lot of these and this is a page for integrations which is good to see here's a list of all the integrations you can see they have woocommerce and easy digital downloads are kind of the e-commerce options they have lifter lms dash and tutor lms which are the wordpress e-learning options they have slack and telegram and discord for messaging and notification integrations they have membership pro wish list member buddy boss and restrict content pro which are membership site options then they also have an integration with their own fluent forms so you can create support forms using fluent forms if you want something custom and then it also has the integration for fluent crm which is wordpress hosted email marketing and email newsletter plugin so there are some good integrations for just kind of starting out it's a pretty good list then the last thing i wanted to show you on the website is this is the help documentation i don't see a link to it at the top i got the documentation link from the bottom in the footer maybe they'll add that to the top of the page and they have a pretty good knowledge base going here for example i've selected one of the kind of more advanced pro features which is the email piping and this gives instructions for how to set that up i'll show you the interface where you do this but it's nice to know that here's kind of the instructions for how to do these things sometimes people launch themes or plugins and the documentation isn't there so i like seeing that they've kind of been proactive here on the documentation okay so let's go back to the site now okay so now let's go and install the pro version and let's set up some of these pro features okay i've installed an activated fluent support pro the pro version and let's go to the settings you can see i've activated the license we can create now some ticket tags so let's create one called feature requests and one for pre-sales and you know you could keep going here you could add ones for bugs or for beta testers you know however you wanted to do it and then you can also add custom fields so let's add a custom field and you can see you have some choices you have a single line multi-line text number field a select you know drop down a radio check boxes edd products edd order so notice that the pro version here has picked up our easy digital download integration okay so that's nice so we will do the select choice label will be called department we'll call it sales accounting and support we've got that done we don't need conditional logic i think we're going to actually use this in a form so we won't make this an agent only field okay so there's our custom field which we'll use products we already did we already did support staff i'm not going to go into the fluent crm integration there were the notification options this is where you would link fluent support with telegram and then here's where you would link with slack and here's where you would link with discord and so now let's go to the dashboard let's go to saved replies actually let's go to tickets and let's copy this text that we sent for the feature request and we'll go to save replies create new so now when we get a feature request and we like it we have a canned email we can send to them [Music] and let's add another one we'll call this accounting question thank you for contacting us your ticket has been sent to the accounting department okay so we have our kind of canned replies and i just want to show you where you can access these let's go to that ticket that was created okay and we're responding to the customer there's a templates button here now and you see you can then pick the template the canned response and paste that in and then reply that's a nice feature there to save time typing for frequent types of responses then another thing we see here when we're working with the tickets is that when we look at the customer it shows us what the customer bought gives us a summary of the customer order so that's another easy digital download integration feature and it's the same for woocommerce you know you'd have woocommerce information here as well there's a little icon where it tells you the purchase date and if you click on that then you go look at the receipt order information for the order now we go to workflows and we have the option to create a workflow there are two types of workflows there's manual and automatic so let's create an automatic workflow and we'll call this one ticket received and [Music] we'll go and set it up so we have a trigger right now we have two triggers on ticket creation and on customer response so let's do on ticket creation and a condition is you can set up workflow conditions based on the customer information title message attachments date time range and priority and product for example if you had several products you might want to send a different message or customize the message by product and when you pick one of these like let's say title then you have an operator contains or does not contain and then you can put in a value so let's choose selected product equals the pipa builder so when a ticket is created then we do an action so we could add a tag for the product but let's assign the ticket to cindy who's our customer support person and we can skip that if it's already assigned to somebody else and so this will be called assign ticket and then we'll add another action okay and that will be to respond and we'll say thank you for contacting us we'll respond to the ticket as soon as possible and then you can put in here you know like a link maybe to faqs or the documentation or whatever and you can have respond by the current assignee which is why we assigned the agent first and then we can fall back to me the action title is send initial response so here's our first automatic workflow and you notice that when you save them it starts off as draft so if you're ready for it to take effect you can set it to published or if sometimes you might want to pause automated workflows then you can set the draft to pause them okay so now let's go back to our incognito window okay so let's add another ticket and this ticket will be another feature request where the user suggests please add a theme builder i noticed the pipa builder doesn't have a theme builder what do you think okay we'll select our product our priority and now we have a department option okay so we're going to send that to support and we create the ticket okay so let's go back now to our support view take a look at the tickets and here's our new ticket and it's waiting but notice that it's assigned to cindy already okay because our automation worked let's go take a look at the ticket we notice that cindy sent the email that thank you for contacting us will respond to the ticket as soon as possible okay so our automation worked okay now let's go and add a reply and now we'll use our canned reply okay so let's look at how the tagging and the manual workflow work i'm going to select multiple tickets here and you notice we get this kind of toolbar here you can add a reply and then the reply would be sent to all the selected tickets you could assign an agent you know select a bunch of tickets and assign them to an agent here you can run a workflow here you can add tags you can close tickets or delete them let's apply the tags we know these both are great ideas you know add a theme builder add a back to top button so we added tags for feature requests okay and i apply that and we see now these have their tags you could search you know if we had a bunch of them here it would be more illustrative but you can search and filter now on tags so it's done that and if we select them now we have remember a manual workflow feature implemented so what this should do is send out the email that the feature has been implemented and close the tickets so let's run that and those tickets are gone now and if we go look at the close tickets there they are okay so that's an example of using the manual workflow and you can see how easy it is to automate some bulk operations okay we've looked at many of the features but before we get to the discussion and conclusions there are a few more things i want to show you let's go to reports and remember agent reports was a pro only feature so here you see we have our agents that have been active and it tells you know what they've done if we go to resolve stats we see the two tickets we just closed we go to response stats we see those so those are the agent reports that come as part of pro then one last thing when we set up the inbox that we've been using it was for type web remember now fluent support allows you to have multiple channels for ticket handling if we look at the add new business inbox option we'll note you notice that there's a web-based one which is what we've been using but there's also an email-based channel and this is a powerful feature i'm just going to kind of show you the first steps of this okay what you have to do is you have to connect that email address with the fluent support email parser and basically what you're going to do is you're going to go to your setup for that mailbox for in this case support webtng.com and you would set up forwarding so that when someone emails to support it would get channeled into the ticketing system okay and so here it gives you a masked email address that the support webtng.com would forward to once you set up that auto forwarding you click here and it will enable email piping so it's nice that customers can submit tickets and respond to emails from their email box if that's more convenient okay now it's time for some discussion and conclusions we've had a pretty good walk through of the free version of fluent support and we looked at the features of pro there's definitely a lot more that could be shown fluent support is very comprehensive for a first release they use the plugin themselves and also had a number of other wordpress businesses use it so there's been a lot more testing than most new plugins get there are several hallmarks of good help desk and customer support systems you need to be able to capture the information needed to help customers and close tickets customer interactions need to be tracked you need performance metrics to help prioritize and make sure everyone is working efficiently it needs to be easy to use with automations to streamline processes and integrations also make it easier to use on the front end the support portal was easy to use as a customer the integration with knowledge base articles is nice as it gives customers something to check on which may help them the custom fields help to make sure tickets have the crucial information the business needs to make it easier to route using workflows and to organize tickets with tags the ability to submit and respond via email is a huge convenience for customers on the back end for support staff tagging sorting and filtering of tickets manual and automatic workflows and saved or canned replies are great features to make it easier to manage respond and close tickets the integrations seem to have been carefully selected and make a lot of sense they represent the most popular wordpress plugins for e-commerce learning management systems and membership management the notification and messaging options chosen are also popular and frequently used by development teams in terms of metrics on pretty much every ticket related screen there were signals related to indicate time and priority there are also decent reports for tracking performance fluent support is very sophisticated and full-featured but there could still be improvements in additions for example the customer could have an option to indicate how happy they were with support that could be shown in a time to resolve report i didn't notice in reports the ability to view statistics by priority but such a report would help managers to see how effective the priority options are i was pretty happy with the number and types of integrations but i did notice that you needed to manually create support persons both in wordpress and then again influence support the find grain permission system looked to work well but maybe a support team role could be added when the plugin is installed and that would make it easier to add users in the support system another integration point is that you also have to enter the products manually and maybe that could be something that could have helper code so that products or courses can be picked up by the system easier also it's not hard to imagine that some businesses would want to install fluent support on a subdomain and i'm not sure how well that would be supported in terms of single sign-on or web hooks for cross-site communication i was very impressed with fluent support obviously a lot of thought and care has gone into the architecture and user interface the product is under active development and the team is adding new features at a fast pace wp managed ninja has a solid reputation in the wordpress community and all in all fluent support looks like a home run so that is my walkthrough and review of fluent support there's a text summary available on the web tng website along with other walkthroughs reviews and resources i hope you found the video useful thank you for watching

Channel: David McCan

Views: 679

Keywords: fluent support, ticketing system, helpdesk ticketing system, helpdesk software, help desk software, wordpress helpdesk, webtng

Id: qncHY5GsVIU

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021