Looking back: 3 years of Fluent Support

When you think Customer Support, a gazillion SaaS platforms are already here. The customer support market has been saturated even before WPManageNinja came to be as a brand. 

When it was finally time, we were staring down the barrel of a daunting question. SaaS, or something else entirely?

In the early days, when support tickets were piling up and inboxes just weren’t cutting it anymore, we had to make a decision. 

Go for the typical SaaS customer support package. Or, think outside the box.

If you’re one of the people that know me and WPManageNinja well enough, you know which path we took from that crossroad.

Why “self-hosted” made sense for us? 

Like every growing business, the overhead cost of customer support was a huge challenge for us. But customer support is so much more than just the cost. The data a customer support system holds is no less than a gold mine. Storing this at the mercy of another company, on a cloud hosting seemed risky, to say the least.

So, as a WordPress company to the core, we opted for the self-hosted option. Hosting our customer support desk on our own servers and managing tickets through the WordPress dashboard.

Self-hosted help desk up until that point only had 2 brands splitting the market share 50/50.

We opted for the older of the two, and immediately regretted our decision. The support team while expecting a massive upgrade was left disappointed with the product we had chosen for them.

It was simply not going the way we hoped it to.

Need something done right…

Do it yourself. 

It’s surprising how this motto keeps coming back to us, in so many varying contexts. But that’s pretty much what we did for WPManageNinja’s customer support.

We put our best developers and agents together, to build a customer support desk that does the job for us. Not for large firms, agencies or corporations but for us.

A support system built for a rapidly growing business, with severe limitations on overhead costs.

This allowed us to bring all our customer support into our own domain, reducing overhead for a support desk. Along with letting us generate custom reports for our support performance.

Admittedly, we still didn’t realize we were sitting on the next big thing for the WordPress ecosystem.

Enter Fluent Support

After using our own system for WPManageNinja, it finally occurred to us – “Why not turn this into a support plugin for businesses just like us”.

The answer to that question became what we all know today as Fluent Support.

From launch to market leader

Since the official launch in 2021, Fluent Support has gained users at a steady pace. As a WordPress plugin, it sits right along with other market leaders, having been live for a fraction of the time.

As of November ‘24, Fluent Support is powering more than 9000 businesses across the world. Ranging from software sellers and creative agencies to hardware manufacturers and consultants.

The diverse portfolio of users and growth-scale of these businesses shows, we were able to reach the exact people we wanted to. 

The first surprise (and sign of success) came in the very first year, when Fluent Support as a product broke even within 6 months of launch and gained 5000 active users.

Considering we had to compete in a hyper-saturated market against giant SaaS platforms with millions of $$ in marketing and sales budget, this was a serious achievement. 

But Fluent Support is about more than just making money!

We’ve cleared 100K tickets on WPManageNinja across 10 products making it one of the largest businesses using Fluent Support. But we’re looking forward to onboarding larger businesses in the future, to make self-hosted support the new golden standard when it comes to customer support.

An SME ecosystem: Fluent Suite

Fluent Support is one of the foundational pillars for our lead generation and customer management ecosystem. Fluent Suite is the ultimate lead and customer management ecosystem you’ll likely find on WordPress.

Paired with the largest growing Form plugin (Fluent Forms) and the most cost effective Email Automation plugin (FluentCRM), Fluent Support completes the holy trinity of customer relation management.

Businesses that opted for the complete Fluent Suite ecosystem, enjoy unparalleled convenience when it comes to lead generations, email automation and customer engagement.

Over the years we’ve also added project management with Fluent Boards, scheduling with Fluent Booking and lastly community and membership management with FluentCommunity.

The Fluent ecosystem is our way of building up the WordPress system for future businesses.

3 years of Fluent Support

Fluent Support has had its share of milestones. From getting 5000 active users in the first year to scaling to being one of the market leaders is truly an achievement worth celebrating.

Beyond the numbers we’ve actually made significant progress with Fluent Support as a product too.

For starters we’ve launched 32 major and minor updates since launch. We’ve introduced numerous features along the way, to make Fluent Support a better product.

While we struggled a bit last year to maintain our regular update flow, the plugin still remained one of our most well-engineered codebase among all other WPManageNinja products.

Major achievements and improvements

Just last month we reached 9000 active installations and are looking to hit the golden 10000 number within a couple weeks.

We got integrations from powerful tools like Uncanny Automator, AutomatorWP, SureTriggers and Zoho Flow. On top of that, we integrated with the leading LLM AI – OpenAI to make customer support seamless and efficient.

Aside from growing in users and product, Fluent Support grew in value as a brand as well. We collaborated with industry leaders on the Future of Support. The collaboration yielded an awesome ebook on Customer Support Trends and a magazine version on the Future of Customer Support in 2024. 

We were able to collaborate with not only tech specialists but also customer experience leaders bringing the latest in customer support. 

On top of that, we launched our own glossary, guide to customer support and customer service stats pages, for support enthusiasts to join our audience and get value right away.

Our newsletter subscribers also grew to 1000 users and we’ve successfully onboarded 500 users through our onboarding workflow. We implemented more customer engagement strategies than we ever imagined and it played a huge part in bringing us to the top of the support market.

Overall, it was a truly eventful year and making the top of the market was just one of many achievements.

Looking forward: Year 4 and beyond

As tradition dictates, I’ll reiterate our motto and what we believe as a business.

“Selling products is important. But efficient after-sales is more important!”

With Fluent Support we want to help every business live by this motto and give their best for customers. Expressing the overwhelming feeling of watching something you love grow is hard to put into words.

That being said, I and the Fluent Support team thank you, for being part of this incredible journey and trusting us with one the most crucial business functions there is.