In today’s world having a product is not enough to fully satisfy any user—you’ve got to back it up with a great product support system. If you are not supporting your product, no matter if it’s an online or offline product, you are missing a key step!

As a software company we also have a lot of experience in support desk solutions since we’ve used different support platforms in the past. We’ve tried private and public forums, chat and forums. Each has its own pros and cons, and they can be used in combination or separately. 

Private ticketing systems are helpful for letting clients keep their data private but are not the best for support staff because different clients are likely to ask the same questions, and since other customers won‘t be able to see answers to similar questions, you’ll end up having to answer a lot of repeat queries.

Online chat greatly increases customer satisfaction but it requires a lot of resources from support staff since you need to deal with both the chat and ticketing system at the same time, which requires a lot of manpower. The combination that works best for you will depend on your preferences and business model, but here I’m going to review the most popular WordPress support desk plugins, both free and paid, to get you started thinking about what might work for you.

In this article we have handpicked five of the best WordPress support desk plugins that will simplify your product support process. The goal is to offer the most comprehensive list of plugins so you have all the necessary information to pick the right plugin for your business.

Help Scout

Help Scout is one the most popular help desk and customer support tools available on the internet, used by both small and big enterprises. This tool is very simple to use and can be connected to your website within minutes.

Help Scout is actually a set of tools for customer support that can offer anything from A to Z when it comes to customer support. This tool is trusted by more than 10,000 businesses worldwide and has several components, including help desk, documentation, live chat, integration, and reporting, as well as an experimental product called Beacon, a help page option that allows your customers to get answers on their questions without leaving the page. This last feature is widely used and is very popular.

If you are looking for a support solution that can solve all your problems related to support and documentation handling—one that can be deployed in a short time—then Help Scout is just what you need.

Pricing: The premium plans start at $20.

Zendesk for WordPress

Zendesk is another very popular solution to handle support inquiries, It supports teams, products and documentation and works very well with WordPress sites. This is an old established support business, allowing you to scale from small to big business.

This plugin is widely used by software developers and companies. Zendesk claims that on average it improves customer loyalty by 25% and agent effectiveness by 30% for any scale business.

Zendesk has everything you need to provide the best support ever. Its dynamic interface supports many different web widgets to assemble a custom support page, and provides you with all the essential details about your customer. It’s a modern and easy to understand support system with different logics to simplify the redundant work of agents, plus it collects overall statistics regarding the support and satisfaction rate of agents. It’s also a breeze for your clients to use. It has a short form where your visitors can effectively submit their questions. This form can be placed anywhere on your website and, depending on the logic you select, it can be made visible for a particular group of customers.

Pricing: You can start with a free trial, but a basic plan starts from $19.

bbPress

If you are searching for a free, easy to use and easy to maintain solution, then bbPress is the right choice for you. Built on top of WordPress, this open source forum software can be deployed almost immediately and you will be able to accept customer questions in a matter of minutes.

If you decide to opt for bbPress, along with the default features like built-in notifications, forum features, user profile pages, you can extend functionality with extensions to make your support board even more powerful. Most of those extensions are also free to use and open source, so if you’re good at coding you will also be able to make some additional modifications.

bbPress was developed by the same people who created WordPress, so it has a similarly minimalistic design, principles and approach to user experience. Plus, this is a very lightweight solution with great extensibility options via third party extensions.

Pricing: bbPress is all free to use.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support is a feature-rich open source WordPress support desk plugin that, unlike Zendesk or Help Scout, runs on your WordPress dashboard. Basic functionality is available for free and in most cases this plan is sufficiently powerful to use as a help desk solution. However, if you want some extra features, the plugin can be easily extended using paid addons.

Simplicity of deployment allows you to install and configure Awesome Support in minutes. The task is managed by a startup wizard that will guide you after installation—in just five minute you will be ready to accept inquiries from your customers.

This great plugin provides a ticketing system, email notifications, user roles, files and media attachments to the ticket, along with restricted access. What is more interesting still is that you can add your own fields to the tickets using custom fields.

Pricing: Free on WordPress.org. The premium version starts from $149/Year.

WSDesk by ELEXtensions

The WSDesk – ELEX WordPress Help Desk & Customer Support Ticketing Plugin stands out as a dependable and feature-rich option for handling customer support requests in the realm of WordPress support desk plugins. This plugin is an excellent choice for businesses and individuals wishing to optimize their customer support operations since it provides various advanced features and a simple user interface.

The plugin allows you to handle requests via several channels, such as email and web-based help forms, all from a single dashboard. Additionally, for commonly asked questions, canned responses can be developed, allowing agents to respond quickly with pre-written answers.

Businesses may also track support KPIs and conduct data analysis using the WSDesk’s advanced reporting system. Reports displaying ticket volume, response times, agent performance, and other pertinent data may be generated.

These are just a few of the many features provided by the WSDesk plugin.

Pricing: The plugin is reasonably priced at $99 for a single site and $249 for up to 25 sites.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based help desk platform that delivers really effective customer service solutions. Like Zendesk, it also can be considered an all-in-one solution. Freshdesk provides different channels of communication, including email, phone, chat, social media, Whatsapp or website widgets that allow you to effortlessly communicate with your customers and solve their problems. You can use those channels one at a time or all at once.

Freshdesk offers many different features, including:

• Ticketing system where tickets can be prioritized, categorized and assigned to team members; 
• Collaboration where several team members can work together on one problem; 
• SelfService where customers will have a option to help themselve using knowledge base and forums;
• Analytics to identify problems using different metrics;
• and, last but not least, great options for Customization to customize workflow, customer portal, agent roles and many different parts of the agent or customers dashboard.

Pricing: Basic version of Freshdesk is free; The premium plan starts from $15.

Conclusion

Now that you have a list of good plugins to support your product, have you found one that meets your needs? I hope your answer is yes, but if it’s not you have nothing to worry about. There are many other alternatives on the web that can fit almost any need.

If you are interested in WordPress support desk plugins you may also be interested in our article about the 5 best WordPress knowledge base plugins, where we’ll cover answers to this question as well.

Still have questions? Shoot us a line or two below!