WordPress helpdesk plugins enable you to offer centralized and timely support therefore boosting user interaction and, ultimately, conversions. Getting more conversions means you’ll walk around with a smug look on your face like Simon Cowell, which is always a good thing.
In today’s post, we point you to the best WordPress helpdesk plugins available in the market, so you can add a fully functional support system to woo more customers. But even with the best WordPress helpdesk plugins, great support eventually boils down to one thing: availability.
You can have a helpdesk plugin forged in the fires of Mount Doom, but if you are unavailable to render support, it’s all useless. It’s just like getting stuck in the Sahara Desert with a Humvee that just ran out of gas. Yes, you have a high mobility vehicle but what’s the use? The searing desert heat, which in this case represents customer rage, will consume you.
Without further ado, let’s get down to business. All helpdesk plugins here are relatively affordable and easy to setup and use. Really, you should be able to set up your support system in less than 5 minutes with any of the following plugins.
1. Catchers Helpdesk WordPress Plugin
Thanks to Marti, one of the guys behind this auspicious helpdesk plugin, I had a chance to test drive Catchers on one of my site. And between you and me, I was so impressed I now use it for one of my contact forms.
It’s incredibly easy to setup and use, which means you can provide amazing support before the next guy reads the rest of this post. You can easily customize your support forms to look exactly how you wish and place them wherever you desire using shortcodes. You can even have contact forms pop up to ensure readers don’t leave your pages.
Need more power? Note that Catchers Helpdesk plugin comes with custom fields that allow you to extend your forms whichever way you fancy, while Google reCaptcha keeps out the spammers.
WooCommerce Extension = Yay!
At the time of writing, Marti and company are working on a WooCommerce extension, which means you can look forward to all sorts of good things.
On top of that, you can assign tickets to different support reps, change ticket priority and organize said tickets into categories. Additionally, your readers can contact you via the contact form or email, and Catchers Helpdesk will convert all support emails to tickets that are easily retrievable via WordPress admin.
If your visitors ask the same question repeatedly, you can take advantage of saved replies to save time at all stages of the conversion funnel. That, and you have auto reply to keep visitors interested, and a fully personalizable email footer that drives more engagement. To keep tabs on the team, you can use private notes that are only visible to your and your support agents.
If need be, you can easily export tickets to a CSV file for future reference and view visitor details using the customer card feature.
Get Catchers Helpdesk
2. WSDesk – ELEX WordPress Helpdesk
With WSDesk you can easily add a full custom support system to WordPress. Just install and use the setup wizard to get started. Add all of your agents – there’s no extra charge since you’re managing your support platform. The same goes for tickets. With WSDesk there’s no limit on the number your customers can submit. And you can even assign agents, statuses (unsolved, pending, solved) and tags to keep your tickets organized. Plus unlike some options, WSDesk stores all of you data on your site – so you’re in charge of your customer and support data.
WSDesk also offer built-in options to make your support easier. Enable settings for email notifications, automatic ticket close after inactivity, assignment by department, and more. Add canned responses for your agents. Checkup on your team using the agent ratings and ticket reports. You can also use IMAP or Google OAuth to automatically create tickets from unread emails. How great is that?
Other plugin features include integrations for WooCommerce, EDD, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, and WPML. As well as simple xml backups, a premium SMS notification add-on, and tons of customizations.
3. Richpanel Helpdesk & Live Chat for WooCommerce
The WooCommerce Helpdesk, Live Chat and CRM plugin is an all-in-one customer support solution. The plugin makes it possible to combine Richpanel’s advanced customer management tools and analytics with the popular WooCommerce extension.
The only requirement is that you must have a Richpanel account to use the plugin, which starts at $50 per month. Considering it’s equivalent to combining a HelpScout membership with multiple premium WooCommerce upgrades, it’s a fair price for all of the powerful features you’re getting. After signing up, you can sync WooCommerce with Richpanel and start using the plugin.
Richpanel makes it easy to manage your customer’s needs, support requests and sales analytics effortlessly. The software creates customer profiles so you can see their purchase behavior making it possible to anticipate their needs and increase your conversion rates.
But besides that, Richpanel includes built-in options for live chat support. This way you can provide customers with instant help as they need it. The live chat is mobile friendly and easy to embed on your website.
The service also includes a full-featured helpdesk setup so customers can open tickets, which are easily managed by your support staff using the agent screen. From here you can assign tickets, set priorities and follow up with open cases. You can even setup filters to target keywords and assign tickets to specific support teams (anything about “sales tax” might go to your Finance team for example). Staff can also view customer’s purchase history and activity timeline to provide targeted support.
If you are using WooCommerce, Richpanel WooCommerce Helpdesk is likely the best fit for your helpdesk setup. The combination of live chat, ticketing and detailed data & reporting make it possible for you to provide better support for customers while also maximizing your conversion rates.
4. Knowledge Base & Helpdesk Plugin
Perhaps you’d like to cut down on all those hours you spend dispensing customer support. Perhaps you’d like a more passive means of helping your visitors out. You’d like to lessen customer support emails and one-on-one telephone calls.
Of all WordPress helpdesk plugins we review here today, this bad boy wins big since it helps you to create not only a knowledge base, but also self-service customer support centers, product documentation, wiki, and extensive FAQs among others.
Knowledge Base is brought to you by PressApps, an elite author, and ships with amazing features such as drag-and-drop post reordering, live search, breadcrumbs, multiple page layouts, voting system, shortcodes, responsive design, custom link colors, multi-lingual support and so much more.
The knowledge base plugin has all the features you need and none of those that you don’t. It’s easy to configure and just works. Super easy to train my clients to use it, so much so that they are excited for how much time they will save by having a KB on their site. Awesome stuff! – RenegadeEmpire.
Get the Knowledge Base Plugin
5. AH Tickets Helpdesk & Support WordPress Plugin
If there’s one thing that sold me on this WordPress helpdesk plugin is how easy it is to setup. No really, I am not kidding, and please don’t take my word for it. Just check out the AH Tickets installation video below. It’s just a minute long:
The second, third and fourth wins for yours truly must be the beautiful design, an impressive list of features and the outstanding buyer rating. What features? You ask. AH Tickets underlying architecture finds strength in the Bootstrap framework, meaning it’s future-proof and responsive from the word go.
Still on the features train, AH Tickets boast of browser and system notifications, a fully personalizable landing page, multi-lingual and RTL support, knowledge base, file attachments, an intuitive dashboard, Font Awesome icons, Google fonts, ratings, departments, multiple support agents, $12 bucks worth of plugins and so much more.
You can connect AH Tickets to Mailchimp to grow your mailing list and allow your visitors to login using their favorite social media account. This, indeed, is one of the greatest WordPress helpdesk plugins you can get your hands on.
Get AH Tickets
6. WordPress Live Chat Complete Plugin
A best seller in the customer service domain, WordPress Chat X is the ultimate live chat plugin for WordPress. If you haven’t had the chance, please read how to add live chat to your WordPress site to understand why live chat is of vital importance as far as instantaneous support goes.
Back to WordPress Chat X, it’s one of those WordPress helpdesk plugins you must try. Before you go into fits, I gave this baby a test drive and here comes a few details to support my outlandish proclamation.
To start with, this plugin looks cute in the design department. Plus you can customize your chat widget to your heart’s content, what with unlimited colors and what not.
100 Active Chats, Offline Mode & Emojis
At any given time, 100 users can chat on your site, and if you’re offline, the chat widget morphs into a contact form visitors can use to send you messages. If you like, you can even initiate chat with any of your site visitors. And if you’re in good moods, spice up your chat sessions with emojis.
WordPress Chat X is fast and lightweight and supports WPML, SSL encryption for security, WordPress 4.6+ and PHP 7. On top of that, you can add your social links at end of chat or when your operators are offline. As far as installation goes, the only prerequisite is a free Firebase account. The chat session runs on Firebase but chat history is stored on your servers for record keeping.
Get WordPress Live Chat Complete
7. WooCommerce Support Ticket System
If you run an e-commerce website using WooCommerce, here’s a WordPress helpdesk plugin made just for you. Built with love by Vanquish, an elite author who has 20+ WooCommerce extensions under the belt, this support ticket system works as advertised.
WooCommerce Support Ticket System plays well with WordPress and WooCommerce offering you a solid solution to support order and user tickets. What I mean is a user can submit a ticket about any issue they’re facing on your site, or a support ticket specific to a particular order.
Streamline Your Workflow
Your visitors submit tickets via the frontend while shopping, and you manage all queries using a special backend dashboard. Nothing too technical, it has the same WooCommerce feel. After all, the plugin simply extends WooCommerce.
You can customize WooCommerce Support Ticket System to suit any design needs, and using shortcodes, you can port the plugin anywhere on your site. That, plus the plugin add tabs to user and admin pages making it easily accessible.
As far as support tickets go, you can assign tickets to different agents, retrieve a great deal of information about each ticket, edit/delete tickets, gather customer information and so much more.
Get the WooCommerce Support Ticket System
8. Awesome Support Free WordPress Plugin
Let’s kick off this second section with a WordPress helpdesk plugin that stays true to its name. Awesome Support is a strong contender among many other WordPress helpdesk plugins – both free and premium. It’s designed to soften your work as far as customer support goes.
I tried it out on your behalf and was I impressed or what? I know, it’s just a WordPress plugin, but I bet big money you’d change your mind if you knew what this plugin can do. Handcrafted to perfection by Julien Liabeuf, SiamKreative and the Awesome Support Team, this plugin covers all your bases.
Installing the thing is easy since it’s available for free at WordPress.org. This just means you can install it right from your WordPress dashboard. After installing, you can’t miss it, as the plugin adds easy to spot menu ítems that take you a step closer to your support goals. There aren’t many settings, so that you get confused. No. Nothing of the sort. Everything is clean to a fault.
Ready Page Templates & Shortcodes
By default, the plugin adds Submit Ticket and My Tickets pages, but you can add your support system to any page you fancy using a shortcode. The settings give you absolute control over how your support system looks and functions.
Your visitors can easily create support accounts (to submit tickets) and track their ticket history. The submit ticket form is straightforward and features the familiar visual editor as well as file attachments. You, on the other hand, can track all tickets, assign tickets, prioritize any ticket and gather information about your visitors among other things.
Other notable features include email notifications, a responsive design, restricted access, support for multiple products and departments, a slew of free and premium extensions, agent collaboration and custom fields just to mention a few.
Awesome Support is a true reflection of what WordPress helpdesk plugins should aim to achieve.
9. WP Support Plus
With over 8k active installs at the time of writing, and a horde of features that will make your head spin, this plugin is making big waves in the WordPress helpdesk plugins arena. Authored by Pradeep Makone, an active contributor at WordPress.org, WP Support Plus offers you a ticketing system with a twist.
Thanks to the underlying Ajax technology and a responsive grid, your visitors can submit tickets easily and quickly from any device. This plugin allows you to submit an unlimited number of support tickets either via the admin or frontend. On top of that, users needn’t register on your site to submit a ticket, which shortens the whole process. What about spam bots working your forms senseless? Worry not, this plugin comes with a credible anti-spam feature.
Custom Fields & CSS
At your disposal, you have custom fields and CSS to build your ticket forms however you want. After building, place your forms on any page or post using a shortcode. This plugin ships with email templates as well as canned replies for frequent questions. Additionally, you can prioritize, categorize and set the status of any ticket easily from within the admin dashboard.
The settings panel is bursting with the best of features meaning nothing is holding you back from creating a support experience that is out of this world. You can task this plugin with all kinds of support functions and it won’t break.
Bonus: WordPress Helpdesk Plugins Honorable Mentions
Can you believe the list ends here? Well, the above WordPress helpdesk plugins offer you all the tools you need to provide the kind of support that actually works for you and your site visitors. The premium plugins deliver quite a punch, but don’t let the free options fool you; they are amazing too. Below, are a couple other WordPress helpdesk plugins & solutions worth checking out:
- Zendesk, which allows you to convert your comment section into a support system among other things
- Help Scout, which focuses on personalizing the support experience
- Support Ticket System that ships with great search functionality
- bbPress because forums make for great support systems too
Final Words on the Best WordPress Helpdesk Plugins
These and other WordPress helpdesk plugins offer your customers the chance to initiate contact and get help whenever and wherever they are stuck on your site. The same plugins offer you the chance to help out your site visitors more efficiently since it’s easier to create, manage and track support tickets right from within your admin dashboard.
Bottom line: WordPress helpdesk plugins help you to improve user experience and boost conversions while saving time. Whether you choose premium or go with a free helpdesk plugin, just ensure you reply to support tickets on time or you will earn yourself some bad rep.
Which is your favorite WordPress helpdesk plugin? Let us know in the comments. Cheers!
