Fluent Support: Objectives and Vision

In the past, customer support was an in-person kind of real-time interaction, mostly confined to the local barrier. Now products are sold across the globe, but customers still want real-time support. That is essentially why anyone would need a professional support system. 

What is a support ticketing system and what makes a good one?

A good support system allows you to accumulate and manage all support requests in one clean dashboard. Making it easier for support agents to resolve the tickets while giving the team a clearer view of what they are doing.

As a business grows, it constantly evolves. But the fundamentals change very little. For the highest customer satisfaction, ready and reliable support is invaluable. A support system makes this possible by enabling these aspects of your support efforts.

So, what makes a support ticketing system or helpdesk good enough? We identified these factors as quintessential to determine if a support tool is worthy enough to handle a business’s support team.

Instant responses

The first and foremost purpose of a support solution is to allow you to answer customers’ questions with minimum delay. 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as essential for support queries. This goes a long way in creating a good impression and sustaining positive rapport. If you don’t have a support tool fast enough to respond to your users instantly, you need to step back and think again.

No missed or lost customer queries

Secondly, an integrated ticketing system gathers and stores all of your support queries from multiple channels into a single dashboard. Ensuring every issue is resolved and none falls through the cracks. To ensure that, an organized and well-maintained ticketing system is a must; eradicating the slightest chances of user queries getting lost in a haystack.

Team efficiency

A support solution can eliminate tedious tasks with automation workflows and provide a steady platform for collaboration. A tool that can minimize the amount of tiring repetitive chores is vital here. Along with that, a reporting and stats dashboard helps build a full picture of what your team is doing right, and where the team needs a little nudge.

What is Fluent Support?

Fluent Support is our answer to all things support, tucked neatly into the WordPress dashboard. That’s the short version. This article is about the long version. 

Fluent Support is the newest self-hosted support ticketing plugin for WordPress. Created to offer a smoother support experience for every party involved.

It enables your support agents to offer responsive support, in turn giving your customers easy and fast solutions. Moreover, as administrators, you stay in the loop about every aspect of your support team. 

Create a robust support portal in minutes that can fulfill all support needs, packed neatly into a WordPress plugin.

If you were under the impression that having a support portal means dealing with bulky off-site SaaS solutions then, Fluent Support is here to change your mind. 

How did Fluent Support come to be?

Here, at WPManageNinja, we hold one principle core to our operations-

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

That’s why providing top-notch support has been key to our day-to-day operation since day one. But after a certain point, we found our hands tied by the limitations of technology we had at our disposal.

As our user base grew at WPManageNinja and support tickets were rising by the dozens, our support team was increasingly overwhelmed. What hurt us the most? The support ticketing system we used back then wasn’t fast and robust enough to cope up with our demand. After using a couple of the plugins available for WordPress, we found nothing that suited our needs. 

So we set out to build a solution for ourselves. At the time it was not our intention to make it into a product, rather use it for our internal support operations only. But the community certainly had other ideas. Especially our FluentCRM users, who were eager to have an integrated support solution with FluentCRM.

So we went on ahead to announce a release for such a plugin for the community. After that, there was no turning back. Our developers got to work armed with insights from our support execs. After almost a year-long development phase the first build for Fluent Support was installed on WP Manage Ninja website in February 2021.

Since then, we have been using this plugin to respond to all kinds of assistance our users expect from us, more efficiently than before. Not just us, but a handful of other business owners had been using the same tool for months, blessing us with useful insights that helped us make it more robust every passing day.

Now, we gladly present to you the simplest and fastest support plugin on WordPress. When developing, we knew it would be for support agents across businesses. So when releasing the plugin for WordPress we kept a versatile target group in mind. 

Who can benefit from Fluent Support

Small and medium business

Businesses that need room to grow without limitations or drawbacks. 

E-commerce

Online businesses or e-commerce businesses looking to set up their own support portal from scratch.

Digital agencies

Agencies that consult and collaborate with businesses to set up their websites and stores.

Service providers

Dedicated service providers for varied industries who also rely on WordPress.

But bear in mind that these are not the only kinds of businesses that can tap into Fluent Support’s efficiency and reliability.

A peek at what makes Fluent Support stand out

Everyone talks about features. We’re not gonna do that just now. First, let’s talk about how Fluent Support can help you offer better support and manage your support team better. 

Here’s what our team has worked to ensure:

Speed and responsiveness

Speed and responsiveness have the highest priority and with Fluent Support, that priority was escalated to a new level. Especially since speed is a prime factor for customer satisfaction. 

As a Support Ticket system, Fluent Support has to work with multiple agents and tons of interactions on a daily basis. However, that has no significant effect on your website’s speed.

Built with the Rest-API and VueJS, Fluent Support boasts a true web app experience. This means loading times are cut down to a minimum. Our support statistics show Fluent Support reduced loading times and response delays by a whopping 70%.

As of now, Fluent Support is the fastest support plugin for WordPress, and we want to make sure we keep it that way. As with all our products, Fluent Support is always open to suggestions and feature requests. 

We will put in our utmost effort to fulfill these requests. However, the speed of Fluent Support and the implications it has on your website’s speed will always be the prime factor for approving and implementing new features.

User-friendliness

A bad UI is all it takes to undermine the effectiveness of an otherwise well-made plugin. More importantly, a bad tool is more than enough to effectively destroy the team morale of an otherwise efficient team.

With that in mind, we brought in our support execs into the design process to offer the most intuitive design. Not only that, we incorporated proven design elements for easy administration of the entire system. 

No doubt, Fluent Support will grow to become more powerful. As that happens we’ll make sure that growth doesn’t compromise the user-friendly experience over time.

No hidden costs

Fluent Support is a standalone WordPress support plugin designed to operate without any additional add-ons or extensions. Unlike other plugins working in this niche, we do not charge you by the number of agents you need or customers you acquire. With Fluent Support, you’ll get all the existing or future feature updates into a single package.

While we will continue to enhance Fluent Support with new features and integration updates, we’ll always keep the asset size as low as possible. Connect with all available integrations from the get-go with no additional costs, or fees for support.

Exemplary support

If you’ve already used FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, or any of our other products, you know that the learning curves are nowhere near being steep. Yet, we understand that beginners may suffer difficulties and need support. Providing steady support has always been one of our strongest suits, and you’ll get premium support 24/7, whether you wish to or have already purchased Fluent Support.

Our Priorities when developing Fluent Support

Developing a product isn’t as much as packing a bunch of features together and calling it a day. We ended up asking ourselves again and again which problems Fluent Support solves. In hindsight that ended up being the best way.

We developed Fluent Support to make every aspect of your support team faster. The approach we took not only ensures a fast web application but actually makes your agents react faster as well. Let’s take an in-depth look at how Fluent Support makes all this possible

Efficient Support Ticket Management

Complete Ticket History

Every support interaction is a chance to learn. Keep track of every interaction on your support system with a complete ticket history. View all created tickets regardless of status. Quickly view tickets that are not assigned to agents to delegate tickets in less than 3 minutes. Not to mention there are logs for every agent that interacted with a ticket alongside a complete activities log for admins.

Filter and Sorting

From the Fluent Support dashboard, you can filter and sort to find any ticket, using a number of parameters. Apart from sorting by open/closed status of tickets you can filter by tickets that are unassigned as well. This lets you know exactly how many tickets are waiting for an agent to respond.

Next, you get sorting options for the Business inbox, that separate tickets from multiple business inboxes. Right next to that, you can filter tickets by pertaining products if the customer labels it. You can also filter tickets by agents, to know exactly who is responding to which ticket. 

You can further sort with priorities set by both admins and customers. If that isn’t enough you can always use prefixed sorting parameters such as Ticket ID, Product ID, Priority, Title, Last Agent Response, Last Customer Response, Waiting Time, Response Count, and Ticket Created At. 

Bulk ticket actions

It takes very little time for support tickets to build up. Having to manage tickets one at a time is something absolutely no one has time for. So we’ve added bulk actions for tickets. 

Whether you want to reply, close, or delete multiple tickets using bulk action features. All you need to do is select the tickets you want and the actions will appear on the dashboard. 

From this list of actions, you can choose to add a reply that will send the same response to all selected tickets. Add/Change Assigned agents; so you can assign multiple tickets. 

Add Tags

Fluent Support functions with custom tags that you can assign to more than one ticket at once. Or, simply close and delete the tickets from your system.

Customizable email notification

Get customized email notifications whenever a support ticket is submitted to your system. This keeps support agents updated with new tickets being submitted. You can even control the notifications for users, agents, and admins alongside designating which events to notify about i.e ticket submission, user response, ticket reopen, etc.

You might want users to receive a notification when they successfully submit a ticket, or you might want agents to be notified when a customer adds a response. These are easy to execute with Fluent Support. 

You can store customized templates for the notification emails. All you need to do is make sure your email address is properly set up. For now, this works with only one email address that you set up as your notification email.

Workflows

Workflows are basic automation you can create to automate specific ticket-based tasks. For ease of use, Workflows are separated into two classes.

Automatic workflows are designed to execute when a trigger condition is fulfilled. You can select between when a ticket is created, for automatic agent assignment right away. Or, you can add other actions after using customer response as a trigger. This way you can edit tags for tickets based on what the customer says in their response. 

You can select from a list of actions to execute such as add response, close ticket, or add an internal note to the ticket. 

Respond on the go with cross-channel support

Email piping

Email piping allows you to carry out your support interactions via emails. This lets your customers start a support conversation with a simple email. On the flip side, your agents can respond to these emails right from the Fluent Support dashboard. So no need to jump between your support page and email inbox.

The tickets are created automatically when a customer sends an email to your support email id, so no need to manually create tickets either. 

The best part is your users can continue to receive responses from support agents, even when the agents are replying from the Fluent Support dashboard. 

Telegram Bot

Support efforts can’t be confined to a single dashboard. Telegram is one of the most happening platforms used for professional communication. A large number of businesses rely on Telegram to maintain communication on the go.

With Telegram integration, you can create a chatbot that notifies you of ticket submissions as they are filled out. Moreover, your agents can respond from the Telegram inbox. So managing support on the go becomes easy and seamless.

Slack integration

Right after Telegram, the most definitive professional communication software is Slack. Slack connects more than 150K businesses with its application. That is one of the primary reasons to add Slack to our priority integrations list. 

Integrating with Slack lets you receive notifications in your company’s support channels. This helps keep your agents notified of support tickets even without visiting the Fluent Support dashboard.

The best part is you can respond to these tickets by simply replying to the tickets thread and your customers will receive your replies at their support ticket.

Discord integration

Discord is another app that is very popular among gaming and digital product-related businesses. Fluent Support integrates with Discord to send notifications similar to Slack and Telegram.

Additional features

We’re definitely not done with all the benefits Fluent Support can offer for your business. Here are some more ways Fluent Support improves your support experience.

Stay in the loop with Advanced Reports

Fluent Supports advanced reports allow you to track and measure all efforts by your support team Including,

• Overall team performance
• Individual agent reports
• Tracking response delay

Make agents more effective

To keep your agents focused Fluent Support makes use of both UI and features. Among them, you’ll definitely appreciate these the most,

• Custom priorities
• Agent dashboard
• Collision detection

Ensure efficiency for every task

Making a plugin fast is not enough to improve response rates and activities. We wanted to make the agents themselves work more efficiently to improve these metrics. That’s why we’ve included,

• Saved replies
• Detailed user overview
• Internal Notes
• Short Codes
• User Privileges
• Advanced Search

Final thoughts

If you have been following WPManageNinja products lately, you know one thing already. We are committed to making products that add real value to people’s lives. We did the same for Fluent Forms, FluentCRM, Ninja Tables; and we are gonna replicate our efforts for Fluent Support.

We have already assigned a dedicated team of developers behind Fluent Support. They have been a part of the development endeavor since the first day. We have a roadmap ahead of us that we are going to follow strictly. Our aim is to enrich the product every month with brand new functionalities and 3rd-party integrations, to make your support ticketing system as smooth as possible. At the same time, we will maintain the performance and speed of Fluent Support just as we did Fluent Forms. Practically, making Fluent Support more and more powerful over time, without having to make it heavy.

And that’s not all. We have a milestone set ahead of us. Let’s not spill the surprise already; it will get sweeter in due time.

For now, start using Fluent Support. I am pretty sure that you are gonna love it! And we are all ears for suggestions. Let us know in the comments what new features you’d like to have introduced to Fluent Support.