Customer support tools for WordPress are a dime a dozen nowadays. It’s very easy to get lost in the glitzy UIs and flashy feature lists of most customer support software. It is important to look past all that and put a software through a true litmus test to find whether it is worth using for WordPress business. That’s exactly what we’re here to do! Fluent Support and Awesome Support are two prominent WordPress plugins that offer solutions for key business aspects.
Choosing the right tool can be challenging, given the multitude of options available. To assist you in making an informed choice, we’ve prepared a comprehensive comparison of Fluent Support and Awesome Support. Both plugins have distinct features and functionalities.
Cet article de blog propose une analyse approfondie des deux plugins, couvrant les fonctionnalités, les prix, la facilité d'utilisation, les options d'intégration et bien plus encore. À la fin, vous disposerez des informations nécessaires pour choisir celui qui convient le mieux à votre entreprise.
Join us as we explore the strengths and weaknesses of Fluent Support vs Awesome Support, helping you make an educated decision to meet your business requirements.
Table des matières
Fluent Support vs Awesome Support at a Glance
Commençons par voir comment ils se comparent les uns aux autres en un coup d'œil
Fonctionnalité | Soutien à la fluidité | Un soutien formidable |
---|---|---|
Prix de départ | $77/an | $149/Year |
Caractéristiques principales | Billets illimités Nombre illimité d'utilisateurs Nombre illimité d'agents SLAs Macros Chat en direct | Billets illimités Nombre illimité d'utilisateurs Nombre illimité d'agents SLAs Macros AI-powered Smart Chat |
Facilité d'utilisation | Excellent | Bon |
Évaluation de WordPress | 4.6/5 | 3.5/5 |
Période d'essai | Pas de période d'essai | Pas de période d'essai |
Overview of Fluent Support
Fluent Support operates as your personal customer service aide seamlessly integrated into your WordPress environment. Its purpose is to enhance and optimize the way you manage customer inquiries, offering a comprehensive solution suitable for businesses of various sizes.
A standout characteristic of Fluent Support is its ticket management system, streamlining the creation, allocation, and monitoring of support tickets. Bid farewell to the confusion of scattered emails and messages – Fluent Support consolidates everything efficiently.
Moreover, Fluent Support provides customizable forms that allow you to gather specific customer information when they seek assistance, reducing unnecessary back-and-forth communication and expediting the support process for improved efficiency.
Fluent Support includes a customer portal feature with a knowledge base, but the knowledge base part is an integration (BetterDocs) rather than a native feature, allowing you to create and share informative articles to address common customer questions on a unified interface. You also have access to reporting and analytics tools, enabling you to assess your support team’s performance and measure customer satisfaction.
Overview of Awesome Support
Awesome Support stands out as a versatile WordPress helpdesk and support ticketing plugin, catering to the diverse needs of businesses. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, it offers a comprehensive platform for efficiently managing customer support inquiries.
Its standout feature is a top-tier ticket management system that simplifies creating, assigning, and tracking support tickets, centralizing all inquiries for organized management.
Custom forms in Awesome Support facilitate collecting specific information from customers, reducing back-and-forth communication for more efficient support. For those opting for a self-help approach, the plugin provides knowledge base functionality to create and share informative articles.
Robust reporting and analytics tools empower businesses to monitor support team performance, gauge customer satisfaction, and make data-driven decisions for enhanced service quality. Awesome Support is an indispensable tool for businesses aiming to elevate their customer support experiences.
Gestion des billets
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support takes the complexity out of ticket management through its user-centric design, putting businesses in the driver’s seat when it comes to traiter les demandes de renseignements des clients. This easy-to-use platform simplifies the process of creating, categorizing, and tailoring tickets, transforming customer support into a seamless and efficient operation.
For heightened efficiency, Fluent Support offers advanced filters and a robust search function, allowing for quick and effective ticket sorting. This streamlines response times and ensures your support agents can effortlessly manage their tasks. Additionally, the system provides a snapshot of your support desk’s status, offering clear visibility into ongoing and resolved inquiries.
Fluent Support doesn’t stop there; it introduces customizable ticket tags, giving you the freedom to label tickets according to your specific organizational preferences. This adaptable approach to ticket management allows you to align support operations with your unique style, enhancing control and simplifying the overall support process.
Un soutien formidable
Awesome Support empowers effective customer support operations through robust ticket management capabilities. The master ticket list serves as a centralized hub for tracking and managing support inquiries, offering comprehensive storage for extensive information, including hundreds of replies. Customizable sorting, filtering, and column options enable precise workflow tailoring.
The platform extends ticket management with powerful email functions. Users can effortlessly open tickets via email, and bidirectional correspondence is supported for users and agents. Flexible email notifications cover all ticket events, and options allow or deny reopening closed tickets via email. Rules and custom commands enhance email handling efficiency, preventing duplicates and facilitating ticket locking when needed. Other features include defining old tickets, searching by ID or title, and implementing custom colors and tags.
However, it’s worth noting that some key ticket management features, including bulk actions, merging, favorite lists, custom filters, and more, are exclusive to premium packages. This makes Awesome Support more suitable for established businesses rather than those in their initial stages.
Notre choix : Fluent Support. Key features are not hidden behind paywalls and add-on transactions as it is for Awesome Support.
Marketing par courriel et automatisation
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support offers a dedicated tool for email automation known as Fluent CRM. While it doesn’t come bundled with their support software, Fluent CRM delivers robust email marketing and marketing automation features.
You can create and send targeted email campaigns, monitor their performance, and establish automated email sequences. This integration, provided by Fluent Support, makes it an appealing choice for merging support ticket management with marketing capabilities.
It also provides some native workflow automation as well.
Un soutien formidable
Awesome Support lacks native email marketing or automation features, relying on Zapier integration to enable users to integrate various web applications and automate workflows seamlessly.
To compensate for the absence of these features, Awesome Support provides additional tools to elevate your email marketing efforts. These tools include a versatile landing page builder, integrations for email automation, personalized email features, and comprehensive email analytics. Together, these tools empower users to augment their email marketing strategies and enrich customer engagement.
Our pick: Fluent Support.
Chat en direct
Soutien à la fluidité
As a customer support software, Fluent Support lacks a chat en direct feature, which is a significant drawback for businesses seeking real-time engagement with their customers. Live chat has become an essential tool for instant customer support and issue resolution.
Its absence in Fluent Support’s offerings can result in missed opportunities for prompt and efficient communication with customers. This limitation may lead to customers’ frustration due to delayed responses, impacting their satisfaction and overall customer experience. Integrating a live chat feature for immediate support is essential to maintain a competitive edge in the customer support software market.
Un soutien formidable
Awesome Support doesn’t feature a traditional live chat; instead, it utilizes Smart Chat, powered by Google’s Dialogflow AI engine. This versatile tool responds to Facebook Messenger messages, chat widget queries, and even email tickets. However, it falls somewhere between human-to-human and human-to-conversational AI interactions.
While Smart Chat searches data stores to return links rather than well-formed answers, it lacks the warmth of human interaction and the comprehensive organization of human-to-AI engagement. This middle ground limits its capability to serve as a full live chat replacement for businesses.
Notre choix : Awesome Support. They don’t really provide a “Live chat”, rather a smart chat but something is better than nothing we suppose. We’re just picking the lesser evil at this point.
Rapports et analyses
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support excels in this realm by offering extensive reporting and analytics capabilities that provide in-depth insights into your team’s performance and overall business operations. It goes beyond basic statistics, delivering comprehensive data that enhances your understanding of your team’s dynamics. These reports include personal insights, agent performance metrics, individual agent summaries, hourly activity analysis, product-specific statistics, and comprehensive business performance reports.
Un soutien formidable
Awesome Support offers a suite of fonctions de rapport et d'analyse to enhance your understanding of customer support. The free core version allows you to view ticket counts by status in the main ticket list. However, advanced reporting, including 12 admin dashboard widgets and six core configurable reports, is reserved for the premium version.
The premium widgets enable you to chart open tickets by various categories, providing a customized view of your support landscape. Additionally, six advanced reports cover productivity, resolution, delay, distribution, and trend analysis. While these features offer valuable insights, their exclusivity to the premium version may pose budget constraints for smaller businesses, emphasizing the need to carefully consider the balance between benefits and costs.
Notre choix : Awesome Support has greater reporting and analytical capabilities but you might have to pay more.
Tarifs et plans
Soutien à la fluidité
Licence pour site unique | $77/an |
Licence de l'agence | $149/an |
Licence pour 50 sites | $239/an |
Un soutien formidable
Standard | $149/Year |
Pro | $229/Year |
Entreprise | $289/Year |
Agence | $409/Year |
Both Fluent Support and Awesome Support offer a variety of pricing plans to choose from.
Fluent Support offers a broad range of features, including advanced reporting, custom ticket forms, agent collaboration, SLAs, macros, audit logs, and security measures. Notably, Fluent Support offers a unique 50 Sites License plan, providing an advantage for businesses managing multiple websites. This makes Fluent Support a more comprehensive option for businesses with diverse online properties.
While Awesome Support’s pricing seems transparent with multiple tiers, there’s a hidden drawback. Additional add-ons come at extra costs, potentially increasing expenses and complicating the user experience. This approach may make the initial pricing tier insufficient, requiring businesses to manage multiple add-ons individually, introducing complexity and potential compatibility issues.
For smaller businesses with limited budgets, a help desk that can be an Awesome Support or Fluent Support alternative is ThriveDesk. Ils offrent des plans de tarification simples Conçue pour répondre aux divers besoins des entreprises, la formule à deux options seulement facilite la prise de décision des chefs d'entreprise en matière de tarification. Choisissez le plan qui correspond à vos besoins de support et à votre budget, que vous soyez une petite équipe ou une entreprise en pleine croissance.
Démarrage | $25/mois (4 sièges) |
Plus | $85/mois (10 sièges) |
Entreprise | $25/place par mois (Minimum 10 places) |
Notre choix : Fluent Support. Better price point and more transparent and inclusive pricing.
Facilité d'utilisation
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support is designed with user-friendliness in mind. It offers an intuitive interface that makes handling support tickets, email marketing, and marketing automation accessible to users of all skill levels. Setting up email campaigns and automated sequences is streamlined to enhance user productivity.
The Fluent Support team also offers robust documentation and support resources. If you’re new to CRM and support plugins, these resources can help you get started quickly and make the most of the tool.
Un soutien formidable
Awesome Support provides an intuitive and uncluttered interface tailored for both customers and support agents. The streamlined design, featuring clean sections and a straightforward list view, ensures efficient ticket management. Powerful search capabilities empower agents to locate specific tickets effortlessly.
Collaboration features, including ticket assignment and notes internes, facilitate seamless teamwork. Whether catering to customers or supporting agents, Awesome Support prioritizes a user-friendly experience, making it a feature-rich and easily navigable help desk solution.
Notre choix : Awesome Support. More robust set of features that allow for a lot of freedom and customization.
Options d'intégration
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support is designed to be more than just a support ticket management tool. It includes features for email marketing and marketing automation, which means it integrates with email marketing platforms and third-party services to provide a seamless experience.
Voici quelques-unes des intégrations qu'ils proposent :
- WooCommerce & EDD: Let customers open support tickets against orders and select store products for queries. View customer orders and purchase history from a ticket view.
- Membership Plugins: Integration with Restrict Content Pro, Paid Membership Pro, and Wishlist Member. View member’s membership information from a ticket view.
- Learning Management Systems (LMS): Integration with LearnDash, LifterLMS, and TutorLMS. View student details when supporting.
- BuddyPress / BuddyBoss: Get a detailed overview of community members from the ticket overview.
- Smart Automation: Leverage the power of workflows and saved replies for automated responses, internal notes, priority setting, and agent assignment on customer queries. Implement manual workflows for task automation on selected filtered tickets, making it easier to automate multiple tickets with a single click.
Un soutien formidable
Awesome Support provides most of their integration options through Zapier. Other than that, it doesn’t really have too many integration options.
Voici quelques-unes des intégrations qu'ils proposent :
- WooCommerce (paid add on): Let customers open support tickets against orders and select store products for queries. View customer orders and purchase history from a ticket view.
- Easy Digital Downloads: This integration allows synchronization of EDD products with the Awesome Support product list. Users can access EDD customer profiles directly from each ticket, enhancing support efficiency. The Premium EDD integration introduces the option to require a license key or a specific EDD product before allowing ticket submission. Moreover, it provides insights by displaying the lifetime value of a customer within each ticket.
- Envato: This integration offers a layer of security by requiring an Envato license key before permitting ticket submission, ensuring only authorized users seek support through your system.
- Intégrations CRM : Jetpack CRM, view support ticket details metabox directly inside their customer panel.
- Google’s Dialogflow Artificial Intelligence engine: Used on their Smart Chat system.
- Facebook Messenger: Integrate with Facebook Messenger.
- Intégration de Gravity Forms : Créez plusieurs formulaires de tickets en utilisant Gravity Forms.
Notre choix : Both plugins offer valuable integration options, but the extent and type of integration will depend on your specific business needs. Consider the tools and services you currently use or plan to implement, and evaluate which plugin’s integration options align better with your workflow and goals.
Assistance à la clientèle et documentation
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support is dedicated to providing reliable customer support as well. They offer multiple support channels, including email and a support forum and customer portal where users can seek help and advice. The Fluent Support team is responsive and strives to assist users in resolving their questions or concerns.
In terms of documentation, Fluent Support offers a comprehensive knowledge base that covers various aspects of using the plugin. This resource can be particularly useful for users who prefer to access information independently and troubleshoot any potential issues.
However one issue is that Fluent Support promotes itself as an all-in-one helpdesk with its embedded BetterDocs knowledge base integration. But some may argue reliance on a third-party software for such core functionality undercuts its “completeness” as a standalone platform.
Un soutien formidable
Awesome Support excels in providing extensive customer support and documentation solutions. The platform empowers users to effortlessly create and manage FAQs, establishing a self-service support hub for customers to address common queries. Categorized FAQs with automatic topic suggestions enhance the overall user experience. Robust documentation capabilities enable users to publish and customize comprehensive guides using pre-built templates.
Agents benefit from these resources when responding to tickets, improving response times and ensuring users receive accurate information. The platform allows users to close tickets while simultaneously creating related FAQs or documentation, streamlining workflows for maximum productivity and a well-organized knowledge base.
Whether setting up multiple FAQ pages, configuring documentation templates, or personalizing responses based on search results, Awesome Support provides a comprehensive solution for efficient customer support and informative documentation. It’s important to note that while the platform offers these robust features, some of them are part of premium packages, restricting access for free version users.
Notre choix : Awesome Support. Possesses greater resources and architecture when it comes to providing support.
Avis et témoignages d'utilisateurs
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support has received positive feedback for its versatility. Users appreciate its robust ticket management features, email marketing capabilities, and marketing automation, which provide a holistic solution for managing customer interactions.
Many users find Fluent Support to be a one-stop solution for customer support and marketing, which streamlines their workflow and simplifies communication with customers. It holds a modest 4.6/5 WordPress rating with user reviews such as
However, some users have mentioned that their customer support can be unresponsive for long periods, which creates problems for customers.
Un soutien formidable
For the most part Awesome Support received positive reviews from its customers such as
This goes to show that their customer support needs work. Customer support is not an area that software of Awesome Supports stature can afford to skim on.
Il est essentiel de lire les commentaires et les évaluations des utilisateurs pour comprendre comment chaque plugin fonctionne dans des scénarios réels. Ces informations peuvent vous aider à peser le pour et le contre et à déterminer quel plugin correspond le mieux aux besoins spécifiques de votre entreprise.
Our Pick: Fluent Support. Overall, less complaints from their users compared to Awesome Support.
Sécurité et confidentialité des données
Soutien à la fluidité
Fluent Support prioritizes data privacy and security. They collect personal information, including order details, and automatically gather device information as users interact with the site. To safeguard personal information, Fluent Support employs encryption and digital signatures for sensitive data exchanges.
They are transparent about data collection and usage, ensuring users understand how their information is processed and their rights to access, correct, or delete their data. Additionally, Fluent Support is actively working to implement General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) principles, demonstrating their commitment to staying compliant with evolving privacy regulations.
Un soutien formidable
Security and data privacy are paramount in Awesome Support’s design, emphasizing compliance with regulations like GDPR. Users can add GDPR-related disclosures upon registration and track consent for various items, whether mandatory or optional. The platform provides flexibility for users to request data deletion, while admins can remove consent when needed. This commitment to data privacy is demonstrated through integration with WordPress 4.9.6 privacy hooks and the ability to download ticket data.
Awesome Support boasts robust audit trail capabilities, logging all ticket and reply edits with options for summary and detailed audit levels. Users have control over who can edit tickets and replies, ensuring accountability. The platform extends document protection features, allowing the selection of roles that can delete attachments and enabling end users to manage attachments. With options to automatically delete attachments on ticket closure and user-agent overrides, Awesome Support prioritizes data protection and security for both users and administrators.
Notre choix : Both take equally extensive data security measures.
ThriveDesk: A Worthy Alternative
If you’re in search of a robust helpdesk solution that streamlines customer support, ThriveDesk has you covered. Designed with businesses in mind, ThriveDesk stands out as a powerful yet user-friendly live chat assistant tailored especially for eCommerce entrepreneurs as opposed to both Awesome Support and Fluent Support, which boasts no native or true live chat feature.
ThriveDesk caters to small businesses, providing the tools needed to manage real-time customer interactions effectively. Features like a boîte de réception partagée, quick replies, seamless file sharing through the chat widget, the convenience of emojis, customer satisfaction surveys, sales tracking reports for eCommerce,
What elevates ThriveDesk above most helpdesk software is that it provides a tailor-made customer service portal for WordPress users called Portail WP with built-in knowledge base functionality, which you can host directly on your WordPress site.
Another thing that puts it ahead is its live chat. It’s USP being that since it’s their own custom live chat, people using ThriveDesk do not have to juggle multiple interfaces to handle support tickets. All tickets are viewable under one unified dashboard, drastically reducing support time.
Worried about system performance? Don’t be. ThriveDesk boasts a lightweight and optimized design that ensures smooth website functionality without slowing it down. Our speedy agent interface guarantees swift responses and maximum efficiency while ensuring your website operates seamlessly.
Here are some of their key features:
- Portail libre-service (WPPortal)
- Intégrations de tiers
- Mesures de performance
- Chat en direct
- Gestion du flux de travail
- Alertes / escalade
- Gestion des billets
- Base de données clients
- Gestion des courriels
- Base de connaissances étendue
- Enquêtes et commentaires
- Le prix de ThriveDesk commence à partir de $25 par mois.
Pourquoi ThriveDesk est votre meilleur choix ?
When evaluating Helpdesk solutions for WordPress, some of the leading options are often ThriveDesk, Awesome Support, and Fluent Support. However, while all three plugins offer ticketing systems, ThriveDesk stands out
What defines a true Helpdesk solution? Built-in elements like knowledge bases, team workflows, self-service portals and automation. Let’s look at a comparison table to get a more clearer picture:
Fonctionnalité | ThriveDesk | Un soutien formidable | Soutien à la fluidité |
Base de connaissances | ✅ Intégré | ✅ Built in | ❌ Uniquement accessible par l'intégration d'une tierce partie |
Chat en direct | ✅ Intégré | 👀 Smart chat (Not a true live chat feature) | ❌ no live chat available |
IA d'assistance | ✅ Réponses intelligentes | ✅ Réponses intelligentes | ❌ Pas d'aide à l'IA disponible |
Portail en libre-service | ✅ Un portail de service à la clientèle à l'effigie de la marque | ✅ Un portail de service à la clientèle à l'effigie de la marque | ✅ Customer service portal available |
Public cible | Entreprises SaaS, entreprises WordPress, Agences, Consultants. Aucune limitation réelle. | WordPress dependant but also provides a standalone API | WordPress dependant |
Tarification | $25/mois | $149/Year | $77/an |
En centralisant les tickets, les documents, le chat, les portails et l'automatisation dans un seul plugin, ThriveDesk delivers an all-purpose Helpdesk for not just WordPress sites but also multiple types of businesses. Awesome Support and Fluent Support only offer subsets of these capabilities and are only the most effective in a WordPress environment.
For SaaS sites and busy support teams aiming to deliver 5-star customer service, ThriveDesk checks all the boxes as an all round high-level Helpdesk.
Lequel choisir pour votre entreprise ?
Soutien à la fluidité offers very support specific features, encompassing support ticket management, email marketing, live chat and marketing automation. While its feature set is versatile and suitable for businesses looking for a one-stop solution for support and marketing, it also places a high value on data privacy and security. Fluent Support is actively working to implement GDPR principles, showcasing its commitment to compliance with evolving privacy regulations.
But there are issues. Even though Fluent Support does provide a customer portal feature it still depends on third-party integrations to provide knowledge base functionality. It lacks a live chat feature and most of its integrations come as addons
D'autre part, Un soutien formidable is a user-friendly help desk software that simplifies customer support. It offers an overwhelming number of features, including advanced reporting and email marketing features.It remains a valuable choice for accessible support solutions.
The problem with Awesome support is their pointlessly complex pricing structure with premium add-ons and unnecessary paywalls which hide basic features from small to mid sized businesses. It also opts for a gimmicky “Smart chat” as opposed to a simple live chat feature. They add complexity where simplicity is common sense.
En fin de compte, la décision de choisir entre ces deux logiciels sera centrée sur les besoins de l'entreprise, mais si ces besoins se traduisent par de solides fonctions de billetterie, une interface utilisateur bien conçue, un service client de premier ordre et des prix abordables, alors... ThriveDesk devrait être votre référence.