So you’re looking for a WordPress Help Desk ? Good! Providing service and support to your client should be done in a professional and reliable manner. No matter the size of your operation, you will always have happier customers when you provide them an easy and user-friendly way to contact you for customer service or support.
It is surprising how many businesses out there still rely purely on email to provide service and support. While it does work, in the basic sense that you can communicate back and forth with each customer, support over email is unorganized, unstructured, and leaves you without any data that would be very helpful to your business operation.
With a WordPress help desk, or a support ticket system, you can interact with your customers as easy as you would over email, with the added benefit of contact history, ticket status, searching by product, category, agent, keyword and so on. Additionally, a help desk allows you to create automated email responses, so your customers don’t get frustrated waiting or wondering if anyone is going to answer their request.
What are some of the most important features you should look for in a help desk?
- Authentication: Simple registration, login, logout functionality. While some business owners think that having customers register might be a nuisance, it is actually much better for both the customer and the business to have them register to your help desk. This simply allows them to come back at any time to check the status of their ticket, add comments, create additional requests and so on. Since you’re already using WordPress, it would be ideal to use a help desk that leverages WordPress’s authentication. This allows for far more customizability and plugin compatibility, especially if you’re using E-commerce or membership plugins.
- User Roles & Capabilities: Your support ticket system should allow you to grant levels of access based on user roles. This gives you control, as the admin, over who can do what. For small operations, this may be less of a concern. This is crucial however if you have more than a couple of people responding to customer concerns.
- Search & Filter: It’s quite simple, you need to be able to search for tickets by ID, keyword, or filter by product, category, assigned agent, status and so on. This makes your life much easier when working with repeat issues or customers.
- Notifications: Your help desk should be able to send automated notifications to you, and to your customer when there are updates on the ticket.
- Reporting: Having the ability to see stats such as tickets per day, week, month, or tickets by category, product will help you immensely in your business operation.
- Email Piping: This adds a lot of convenience for your self and your customers. You can tie your help desk with an inbox, so that your customers can respond to you by email.
- Knowledge Base: Many customers will ask similar questions. Provide them with a knowledge base, where they can search for questions that have already been answered allows your customers to get their answers right away, and reduces the amount of work you have to do.
- Automatic Agent Assignment: A great feature to have if you have multiple people in your company providing support. Being able to forward billing requests, for example, to one person, and technical tickets to another, makes everyone’s job a little easier.
- Customer Satisfaction Survey: Find out how satisfied your customers are with a simple “rate our service” option after a ticket has been closed. It’s a great place for your customers to share their experience with you. It places accountability on your agents and it gives you insight to anything that you may want to improve.
Recommendations for a WordPress Help Desk
There are several plugins out there that cater to the customer support system idea. We at Smartcat have created our own WordPress support ticket system, as a WordPress plugin, because we needed a system that provides us with many of the features mentioned above, while being customizable, scalable and integrated with our existing WordPress users, and e-commerce customers. After using our own help desk plugin to provide support to our thousands of users, we decided that everyone should be able to do the same. Hence, we released a plugin, which we truly believe to be the best WordPress help desk & support ticket system. And since the entire point was to create a system that is focused on professional customer care, we named it uCare.
uCare – WordPress Help Desk & Support Ticket System
