Top Free WordPress HelpDesk Plugins for Improved Customer Relationships

Providing exceptional customer support is one of the major concerns of business owners. Customers should be able to interact with you and get resolutions for problems they may be facing with your products or services.

If you have a WordPress website, you can easily incorporate a support ticket system with the help of help desk plugins. They will help you provide customer support in an organized, specific manner on your website. In this article, we will look at some of the best free WordPress helpdesk plugins to help you enhance your customer relationship management.

How to improve customer relationships?

Maintaining great customer relationships is key to the success of any business. You need to focus on several aspects while interacting with customers in order for them to come back to your site. Here are a few best practices suggested by specialists to improve online customer relationships.

Create a dedicated helpdesk system with experts

If you have an eCommerce store with multiple products, you might get varied queries from customers. One of the keys for customer support success is to develop a team of support agents with adequate expertise on each of your products. This will help in the more effective resolution of user issues, as the experts will be able to offer quick solutions.

Develop a systematic workflow

Now, you may have an expert team with great product knowledge. However, without a systematic workflow that will assign the query to the right agent, your support system won’t be as effective. So, it is important to design a workflow and execute it well enough to ensure that customer issues are solved accurately and quickly. A lot of popular WordPress helpdesk plugins offer options to automate your customer support workflow. If you have multiple products and multiple departments, automation options could really add a lot of value to your customer support.

Use customer feedback to improve efficiency

Now, you cannot just go out there and build the most efficient help desk. It will take time to optimize your customer support system, and one of the most important contributors to this will be customer feedback. You should make sure to have a system to collect regular feedback from your customers. Competent helpdesk systems will incorporate customer feedback as an essential component. Apart from the direct feedback, you can also use other metrics like resolution time, agent rating, periodic variations, etc. If you are using an online helpdesk system, ensure that there is an option to gather customer feedback consistently.

Try multiple channels

In the current digital environment, customers interact through different channels. So, in order to take into account different preferences of your customer base, you may need to invest in different support channels. Depending on the interests of your customers and industry trends, you can opt from different channels like telephone, email, live chat, social media, etc for multi-channel customer support.

Use a superior online helpdesk system

Now, one of the fundamental aspects you have to focus on to set up an efficient customer support system is to invest in a good helpdesk system. Finding a comprehensive helpdesk system that offers you advanced features is an important step towards this. Most of the modern customer support software offers useful features like workflow automation, canned responses, customizable contact forms and so on. It is important to find a helpdesk solution that is effective for your business model. Before choosing the software, go through the features and make sure that it is the right fit for your specific needs.

Best WordPress Helpdesk plugins

If you have a WordPress website, you will need a customer support tool that will integrate seamlessly with your website. Here is a list of some of the top WordPress helpdesk plugins that will help you create long-lasting customer relationships.

WSDesk

WSDesk is one of the most popular WordPress helpdesk plugins to help you improve the customer support process on your website. The free version of this plugin has a large range of features to help you set up an online support system. Compared to some of the other free plugins, this plugin is really exceptional in terms of the features offered with the free version. Unlimited tickets and agents, email piping, customizable email replies, file attachment options, etc are some of the standout features.

Features

• Ajax-based user interface to contribute to fast page loading and thereby faster resolution of customer issues.
• Complete control of user data, unlike popular SaaS-based helpdesk tools.
• Helps agents to track, prioritize and resolve issues quickly and ensure the superior customer experience.
• Open source helpdesk system, which helps developers make feature additions, modifications and bug fix easily.
• Unlimited support tickets and agents.
• Easily convert emails to your support mail id into tickets, and filter them to avoid spam
• Detailed analytics reports measuring agents’ performance and customer experience.
• Customizable ticket fields and support forms.
• File attachment options to help address issues with more details.

JS Help Desk

Formerly JS Support Ticket, JS Help Desk is a simple and user-friendly customer support plugin that you can use on your WordPress site. Your customers will be able to create a support ticket from the website’s frontend. And, your support agents will be able to work on them from the backend with the help of advanced features and provide quick resolutions. As the plugin follows all the best practices in coding, you can expect it to create no hassles with your site’s speed and performance.

Features

• Allows customers and guests to create support tickets from the frontend of your website.
• Filters to sort the tickets effectively for both customers and support agents.
• Several advanced features to help support agents including multiple file attachments, priority highlighting, auto assigning, etc.
• Option to set up ticket notifications to users and agents according to specific requirements.
• Shortcodes to help you create and place ticket forms conveniently.
• Simple user interface for site admins to add or modify tickets, manage ticket status and create email replies.
• The plugin has a bootstrap based design and allows easy translation.

SupportCandy

This is a popular WordPress plugin that will help you create a robust helpdesk system on your website. Setting up and interacting with customers using this plugin is exceptionally easy, and it makes it quite popular among WordPress site owners. The plugin ensures GDPR compliance and gives you no hassles with regards to users’ personal data. You can download and use the free plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. However, you will find premium add-ons for WooCommerce integration, email piping, canned responses, agent assign rules, and several other advanced features.

Features

• No limit to the number of agents and tickets that can be created using the free version of this plugin.
• Ajax functionality contributes to a very fast user interface.
• Agents can manage the ticket data from the frontend with the help of agent-specific additional fields, filters, and sorting options.
• Option to allow guest users to raise a ticket on your website.
• Several custom field options to create the most suitable support form for your business.
• Create multiple attachment fields along with an option to attach files in the ticket descriptions.
• Unique fields are visible only to support agents and options for agents to add internal notes.
• Customizable email notification templates.
• Responsive, mobile friendly design and supports developer level customization.

Zendesk Support for WordPress

You can use this plugin to integrate Zendesk customer support system on your WordPress site. Once you have installed this plugin on your website, your users will not have to sign in separately to Zendesk to raise a ticket. The plugin also helps to automatically convert your blog comments into tickets. It also lets you add a support widget anywhere on your pages or posts as you deem fit. Moreover, you can easily collect feedback from your users to improve the efficiency of your customer support process. Please note, you will have to sign up for a Zendesk account to be able to use this plugin. You can try out the Zendesk support system for a 30-day free trial.

bbPRess

If you are looking to create a discussion forum on your WordPress site, and not create a full-fledged help desk system, you can use bbPress. You can easily install and configure it, and let your customers find answers to several common queries they may encounter on your site. The interface is quite similar to WordPress and hence you can easily manage it even if you are a beginner to WordPress. bbPress offers a range of add-ons to help you customize it the way you want it. Moreover, it comes with a lot of theme options that will help you control the look and feel of the forum.

Conclusion:

Hope this article has provided you a few strategies and tools to improve your customer relationships. Keep in mind that you need to build a loyal customer base to grow your business. Leave a comment if you have a query.

Creator: Vijay, the founder of ELEXtensions.com & LearnWoo.com, and you can get in touch with him via his Twitter.

Featured image by Tran Mau Tri Tam ? on Unsplash