You know the value of retaining your customers if you are running a business. Unfortunately, you will lose your customers if they do not receive the proper support. Your customer will contact you if there is any problem with the product or service you offer.
You need to make sure these problems are addressed and resolved. This is vital for you to maintain a healthy relationship with your customers. This will, in turn, determine if you successfully attract and retain your customers.
A Help Desk is an integral part of customer support. Here, customers can raise issues and problems they are facing. Here is the chance for you to interact with your customers about your product or service.
You get an opportunity to resolve your customers’ queries. However, this is more challenging than it seems. You need a proper system that can help you keep track of issues.
A Help Desk plugin for WordPress can significantly simplify the task for you. Here, we have compiled a list of 12 Help Desk Plugins that can work well with your WordPress website.
1. Zendesk
Zendesk Support for WordPress is a popular help desk plugin. Users first need to make a new ZenDesk account to be able to use this plugin.
On signing up, you get a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. The premium pricing is divided into slots, and it is pretty flexible. You can check out the pricing here.
Features:
- Single Sign-on: With Zendesk, the customer doesn’t need to sign up separately if he already has logged in to your WordPress website.
- Change Comments into Support Tickets: This functionality lets you turn any comment into a support ticket with one click. This is especially helpful when you want to extend help to your customers.
- Zendesk Support Web Widget: This widget can be added to any webpage. It helps your customers search the knowledge base, submit a ticket, or chat with your customer support representative.
- Zendesk Support Feedback Tab: This functions in the same way as the web widget. You can customize the look of this tab. You can decide where you want to put it with the help of the template tag.
- Tickets On Dashboard: You can view all the tickets and other info on the dashboard.
2. Awesome Support
Awesome Support is a feature-rich help desk plugin that offers unmatched facilities even in its free versions. Just look at these primary offerings in the free plan: Unlimited tickets, unlimited agents, unlimited users, unlimited products, unlimited departments, unlimited tags, unlimited custom priorities, and unlimited channels.
You can attach multiple files to tickets. You can select the file extensions that are allowed for uploads, drag and drop files for upload, and synchronize product lists between WooCommerce and Awesome Support; all this is free. The premium version offers even more features. There are several add-ons available. You can check out the pricing here.
Features:
- Ticketing: The standard ticket creation and answering are included. The user can submit tickets, and the agent can answer them from the back end.
- Email notifications: It sends emails to concerned parties. Six email notifications are available, e.g., new tickets, reply to agent, etc. You can customize the email notifications.
- Private Correspondence: All correspondence between the agent and the customer is personal.
- Multiple Departments: You can provide support to multiple departments.
- Agent Collaboration: Multiple agents can work on the same ticket and the tickets can be transferred between them as well.
3. Support Candy
SupportCandy is the next version of the popular help desk plugin “WP Support Plus Responsive Ticket System”. It offers so many features out of the box.
Its free offerings are good, and it has additional premium add-ons. This is the one plugin that focuses on simplicity and functionality.
You get unlimited tickets and unlimited agents in the free version. The plugin has already been translated into multiple languages and is translation-ready. The plugin is fully compatible with GDPR.
Features:
- Ajax Functionality: The plugin makes full use of Ajax capabilities. It optimizes the operational speed.
- Front-end management: Agents can manage tickets on the front end itself. They can access the tickets from the same page the user can. The plugin maintains the agent view and customer view. It can be customized in the settings.
- Guest Tickets: A customer often chooses not to create an account. At such times, Guest ticketing can be a lifesaver. Guest ticketing is creating a ticket without creating an account with the website. This feature is entirely free.
- Private Notes: Agents can create personal notes that are not visible to customers. These notes can be used in communication between multiple agents.
- Premium Addons: The plugin has premium addons that extend its functionality even more. Some helpful premium plugins are WooCommerce integration, Email Piping, Canned Reply, etc.
4. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is another popular help desk plugin. Its free offering includes an Email channel, Basic social channel, Freshcaller Integration, Freshchat integration, contextual team collaboration, and Knowledge base. Moreover, you get access to unlimited agents.
The premium offerings are categorized as Blossom, Garden, Estate, and Forest. Prices vary with each plan. You can see for yourself the cost of each plan here.
Features:
- Ticketing: You can convert your customer’s conversation into a support ticket. Every email, chat, feedback, or call can be converted into a ticket. You get a custom ticket view along with the ticket log. You can also merge tickets.
- Team Collaboration: Freshdesk allows team collaboration when resolving tickets. Multiple team members can access the same ticket, chat about it, and solve it with the past context. The Fresh Connect feature keeps everyone in the loop so a ticket can be resolved faster.
- Multi-channel Helpdesk: This plugin integrates all multi-channel support so that one uniform support can be provided through all the channels. It unifies Email support, Phone support, Chat support, Website support, Facebook support, and Twitter support.
- Automation: You can automate multiple tasks on the same ticket. You can classify frequently sent answers as canned responses. You can automate follow-ups with your customers, prioritize your incoming tickets automatically, and automate other operational tasks.
5. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is one of the most reviewed and top-rated Help Desk plugin and software. The reason is simple: it offers a comprehensive list of features. The sheer number of features is exhaustive. All the communication is organized in one place and sorted out with priority.
The software manages the help desk through the following services: ticketing, live chat, Phone calls, Support portal, and Social media (Facebook and Twitter).
The pricing is per the three plans: ticket, ticket+chat, and All-inclusive. The ticket plan is priced at $9 per agent per month. The ticket+chat plan costs $29/agent/month. The all-inclusive plan costs $39 per agent per month.
Features:
- Ticket Management: Ticket management includes Universal inbox, ticketing, hybrid ticket stream, Automated ticket distribution, solve button, Departments, Time tracking, Tags, Contacts, Agents, companies, and email notification, among other features.
- Live Chat: The live chat feature consists of real-time chat, proactive chat invitations, Chat button gallery, Chat button animations, Chat invitation gallery, Chat window docking, Chat overview, chat history, chat distribution, and internal chat.
- Call center: The call center feature provides a Call Center Overview, Video chat, IVR, Call transfers, call routing, Unlimited Call recordings, and softphones.
- Reporting: LiveAgent provides thorough reporting through Analytics overview, Agent ranking overview, Performance report, department report, Tag reports, SLA compliance report, Agent report, channel report, and agent availability.
6. Kayako
Kayako is a premium Help Desk software. It comes bundled with live chat. With Kayako, you can organize a shared inbox and provide customer support through email, live chat, Facebook, and X. With its out-of-the-box functionality, customer support teams can manage support requests over any channel.
Kayako does not offer a free plan. It has competitive pricing for its premium plans. You can check out their premium plans here.
Features:
- Shared Inbox: You can manage all your customer conversations in a shared team inbox. All these conversations will be organized and accessible. You can categorize them with tags. The conversations are automatically routed.
- Collaborators: Kayako provides this unique feature called collaborators. These help you remove the distance between your teams and your customers. This is a type of user role that improves internal collaboration between teams. You can invite colleagues from other departments, leave internal notes, and draft help center articles.
- Ticketing Software: Kayako features a ticketing software that is integrated with all multi-channel conversations the customer has. This helps the agent grasp the situation correctly and respond more personally. Canned responses and notes help increase the productivity of the customer support team.
- Ecommerce Support: Kayako offers insights into consumer behavior. Kayako brings all consumer data into one place, from the pages viewed to the total purchases made. With multi-channel ecommerce customer support, you can connect with your customers through email, Facebook, X, and live chat.
7. Help Scout
Help Scout is a premium service that provides email and live chat support. They add a personal touch to your customer and agent conversations. It empowers more than 9000 businesses across 140 countries. It provides support for its product through 24/6 support training and classes. It also offers education from HelpU.
It emphasizes real personal interaction with the customer instead of robo-talk. The emails from Help Scout look like emails from a friend. Their system organizes your team’s communication 24/7.
All the communication across different email addresses, teams, and brands is accessible from one place. The mailboxes are there to keep it all organized. The premium plans offer all the features as per different plans. You can check out the premium pricing here.
Features:
- Docs: Docs is a knowledge base. Help Scout offers Docs as a knowledge base site that can work on any device. It comes with SSL support at no extra charge. It is optimized for SEO.
- Beacon: Beacon is the Help Scout’s chat service. It focuses on the instant resolution of queries through answers. The customer can view answers related to the page he is viewing so that he doesn’t have to look for support. The chat window optimizes answers and support in one place.
- Reports: Help Scout comes with intuitive, out-of-the-box reports. Through reports, you can discover your team’s busiest hours, the favorite topics of your consumers, and the saved replies that save the most time.
- Integrations: Help Scout offers tons of integrations. It supports a volume of apps besides integrating with HubSpot, Jira, and Salesforce. It has an app directory with various apps across all major categories.
8. WPHelpDesk
With WPHelpDesk, you can manage customer support from inside your WordPress site. It is a simple yet powerful help desk plugin.
The setup is relatively easy, and you will be up and running with your customer support in a few minutes. It is organized so that support tickets have priorities, customer information, and filtering. It gives you complete control over your customer support.
You can start with the standard plan at $99 per year for 1 site. It comes with unlimited accounts with one year of updates and support.
The professional and concierge plans are bundled with the following addons: Email Piping, WooCommerce Integration, Easy Digital Downloads integration, and Ninja Forms integration. You can find out more about these plans here.
Features:
- Straightforward Configuration: WPHelpDesk is packaged as a plugin for WordPress. It works just like any other plugin. With a few tweaks, you are all set with your customer support.
- Custom Fields: You can customize the help desk by adding text custom fields or drop-down. There is a custom fields editor in the wp-admin panel.
- Canned Responses: You can create canned responses to repeatedly asked questions.
- Public Forums: With public forums, customers can solve their queries with each other’s help. This helps to build a community around your product or service.
9. SupportEzzy
SupportEzzy is a help desk plugin which is available at codecanyon. It is an elegant solution built for WordPress. It has a support ticket system and FAQ portal.
The app works with any WordPress site as it does not interfere with the themes and plugins that you have installed. The app uses the latest technologies and is built with Vue.js 2.0.
You can purchase the Regular license from here
Features:
- Customization: The app uses the Bulma CSS framework for its UI components. You can customize brand colors, text or image logos, etc., from the plugin settings.
- Email Piping and Routing Integration: You can add a separate email address for each department. New emails to the specified email address will be treated as a new ticket, and replies will be counted as comments.
- Push Notifications: There is a free One Signal Push Notification service for web browsers. You can use it to get notified of new tickets and comments.
- Unlimited users and tickets: As you own the software and web hosting, there is no limit imposed on the number of users and tickets by the plugin. You can add unlimited users and tickets.
10. bbPress
Customer support doesn’t have to always be in the form of tickets or live chat. Most of the time, customers benefit from support through a forum. The BbPress forum which is one of the popular help desk plugins has its advantages.
First, it’s a great place for interaction. Fellow customers can interact with the product, and support agents can join the conversation. Most of the customers’ queries get solved only by such mutual interaction. This saves crucial support resources and time.
When it comes to forums, bbPress is an excellent plugin for WordPress. It integrates with your site and adds forum support effortlessly. There is ample control over the forum right from your WordPress admin panel.
For any business, a customer is key for growth. Customers are happy when they receive timely support and help when they encounter a problem. A Help Desk helps you organize your support.
11. TotalDesk
You may want to tone down all the hours you spend allocating customer support. You may like a more passive way of helping your customers out.
You’d like to lessen the number of support emails and telephone calls you send your customers. Of the WordPress plugins we saw here today, TotalDesk one is special since it helps you create a knowledge base and a self-service customer helpdesk, live chat, and ticket system.
TotalDesk has a parent company called ‘WeLaunch,’ and elite author that ships with its unique drag-and-drop features, live search, post reordering, FAQs, multiple notification options and ticket reports, responsive design, custom widgets, WooCommerce integration, multilingual support, and more!
Features:
- The ticket system handles all the issues, no matter where the questions come from.
- LiveChat feature for personalized issue resolution.
- Searchable knowledge base based on your tickets.
- Reports with in-depth analysis.
- Multiple integrations support like WooCommerce, Envato, Gmail, and Slack.
- Well Documented
12. WSDesk – ELEX WordPress Helpdesk
With WSDesk, you can easily add a custom support system to your WordPress. All you need to do is install the setup wizard to get started. Then add in all your agents – there are no extra charges since you are just managing your support platform.
The same thing goes for the tickets. With WSDesk, there are no limits on the numbers your customers can submit. You can also assign statuses (unsolved, solved, and pending) and tags to organize your tickets.
Plus, unlike other help desk plugins, WSDesk stores all of your data on the site, giving you total control of your customers and support data.
There are also some in-built options to make your support easier. Options like automatic ticket closing after inactivity, email notifications, assignment by department, and more. You can also use the IMAP or Google OAuth to create the tickets automatically from the emails that are unread. Isn’t that great?
Features:
- Unlimited Tickets & Agents at no cost.
- Simple User Interface for quick usages.
- Custom ticket views based on Agents, Forwarded emails, Ticket Tags, Tickets, and much more.
- Automated response using OpenAI ChatGPT integration
- Triggers and Automation
- Email-based
- Canned responses and rich text
Conclusion
Choosing the right WordPress Help Desk Plugin can really prove to be a game changer for you in 2024. Reason being its ability to provide excellent customer support, and enhance user experience.
The 12 help desk plugins that are mentioned above offer a wide variety of useful functionalities, and features that we saw individually for each of the plugins.
Whether you prioritize ticket management, live chat, knowledge base integration, or other support features, there’s likely a plugin that suits your requirements.
Before choosing any of the plugins, make sure you consider things like the scale of your support needs, specific features that aligns with your customer service strategy, and lastly the budget.
Regularly updating your help desk plugin will ensure that it continues to meet the ever-evolving needs of your website and user base.
Investing time in understanding the nuances of each plugin, reading user reviews, and testing as per your business needs can greatly help you make informed decisions. A well-chosen help desk plugin can contribute significantly to customer satisfaction and the overall success of your WordPress site.
FAQs
Are these help desk plugins suitable for all types of websites?
The suitability of a help desk plugin depends on the specific requirements of your website. Some plugins might suit e-commerce sites, while others might prove useful on content-driven websites. It is best to evaluate the features and customization options to determine the best fit for your particular niche or business model.
Do these help desk plugins integrate with other tools and platforms?
Yes, many help desk plugins offer integration options with popular tools and platforms like CRM systems, email marketing, and social media. Check the documentation and the features to make sure your plugin integration is as seamless as possible.
Can I customize the appearance of a help desk plugin on my WordPress site?
Almost all help desk plugins provide customization options to the users which allow them to match the appearance of the support system with their website’s design. You can also check for features like color schemes, branding, and customization of support forms.
Do these help desk plugins offer multi-language support?
Most help desk plugins offer multi-language support to meet the needs of a diverse user base. If your website targets an international audience, it is best to use a plugin that provides translation options or integrates with translation plugins.
