What’s up, folks? It’s Dave here from Profitable Tools and we’ve got a very anticipated product to talk about today. Of course I am talking about fluent support. You already knew that when you clicked on the video. This is the latest fluent products from WP managed ninja.

Of course. They already have fluent CRM, fluent forms. Fluent SMTP. They love that word fluent. And what is this one?

It’s all about helpdesks. Think of it like Zendesk or help Scout. People can send in emails or fill out a form on your website, and then you can have support agents reply to them right from WordPress. You’ll be able to keep everything secure and running fast. So says the WP manage ninja team.

I’m going to test that in this video and show you how it all works. But I do know that we have to address this whole idea of having a support desk on WordPress before I really show you the application because a lot of people are going to leave comments. I promise you somebody go look right now. Unless you’re the first person to watch this, they’re going to say, why would you even want to put a support desk in WordPress? That’s a dumb idea.

Well, the folks at Fluent Support have already made Fluent CRM, so they’ve done email marketing inside of WordPress and they did so successfully. It works quite well. So there’s obviously the ability to do it. Now why would you want to, I guess is the real question. Well, it comes down to data, in my opinion.

Go down here and see some of their integrations. We have WooCommerce easy digital downloads, integrations with membership sites, LMS’s Learn, Dash, things like that. And then just kind of to throw this out there. You can also reply to tickets from things like Slack and Telegram, so that if you’re on your mobile phone, you don’t have to log into WordPress just to make things a little bit easier. So the reason is that the data is already on WordPress, right?

You’re already charging your customers on WordPress. They have all of their information stored there. You can see their progress in the course. Everything is already right there. Why wouldn’t you want your support to be there as well?

And the answer that a lot of people have to why you don’t want your support there is obviously it’ll slow down your website. But the way that they’ve approached this is to maximize efficiency. They throw some kind of technical information out here. If you’re not a developer, you might not know what this means, but it’s built with a superfast spa, meaning single page application. They’re using view JS and the rest API.

Now that’s all a lot of technical information to mean that they’re using the most modern technologies to build out this application that lives alongside WordPress. Now, it’s not using your WordPress database, so it’s not going to make your WordPress database loaded. It’s not going to slow down WordPress as a whole. It’s going to still utilize server resources. So the one thing that might happen sooner is that you need to upgrade your hosting as your site grows.

Now you do that eventually, especially if you’re already running a WooCommerce site or an LMS, but you might have to upgrade it a little bit sooner if you add support onto that same website. The upside to this is that it’s self hosted. All of your data is yours. You have unlimited resources. No one’s going to tell you how many agents you can add or anything like that.

So let’s go ahead and take a look at how this works. If you want to follow along with me, there is a free version of the plugin in the WordPress repository called Fluent Support. I’ve also got the Pro version installed, which is Fluent Support Pro. The difference here is that I’m going to have all of the third party integrations be able to create templates. It’s just everything you want from an actual support desk is going to be in Pro, but you can kind of get a taste for it inside of the free versions.

Now I’ve already been using this to kind of test it out. I was going to give you an initial impression as I set things up, but it’s actually fairly complicated. To wrap your head around how everything is working. I can do a better job of explaining it now that I’ve used it a little bit. Once you install the plugin, it does have a setup wizard.

It’s simply going to ask you to go ahead and create a business. Right over here. I’ve got what’s called business settings. Now what they refer to this later on is actually inboxes. And you can see here we’ve got business inboxes.

If I had to give one critique to WP Manage Ninja as a whole is that they do this fairly often where they’ll use terminology here that’s different than terminology here. And then later on they’ll even use different terminology where they just call it an inbox. So it would be nice to just say inboxes inboxes. And then later on on the next page I’ll show you also call that an inbox. But basically what we’re doing here is we’re setting up ways that people can communicate with us and we can also kind of segment it.

So right now I’ve just got my one default Profitable Tools type of inbox. This is going to be a web inbox. If I wanted to also receive emails, I’d have to add another inbox. So let’s go ahead and add a new business inbox and I’ll call this Profitable Emails and I’ll add my support inbox. Now the important step down here is that I choose an email based inbox.

I’m going to go ahead and choose that and let’s add the business inbox. Now you can see I get a big notification over here. This is another little theme of the plugin that I think needs to be optimized. This should really be a notification that ends right about here. It doesn’t need to COVID up my entire screen.

All right, let’s close that out. Remember, this is a brand new plugin, so I’m going to be pointing out all of the little bugs and tweaks I see along the way. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s bad. I just hope that they kind of tweak the interface as they go. Alright, so I’ve already got my web interface set up and I’m going to show you what that looks like.

Then we’ll come back here and set up the email piping so you can see how to get emails into your support desk. When I installed the plugin, it went ahead and created a support portal for me. Here. You can see it’s just a page inside of my WordPress website. If I view it right now, it’s going to give me this error.

It says the support portal is for customers only and you’re an administrator, so it’ll tell me where to log in as an administrator so I can actually answer my tickets. So let’s go ahead and open this in an incognito window so we can see what it looks like for our users. So here is the support portal page. When I visit it as a non logged in user, I just went to the actual URL that was created for me when I installed the plugin. Now I actually have some critiques even about the support portal page.

The login field itself I do have some issues with. First of all, if I enter in the wrong password, it actually takes me to the default WordPress login. Let me show you what I mean. So it takes me out of that user experience rather than just telling me on the page I was on, hey, you need to log in. Now, obviously I could customize this and make it look good, but why not just tell me on this page?

Why kick me out and go to another page? This is the global settings where I can actually configure that support login page that we just saw. Now, when I set up the plugin, there was actually a typo in their own shortcode. Now, I’m sure this will be fixed probably before you even have a chance to buy the plug in. But it was like this, right?

So it just said actually it was h. So the actual short code itself rendered on the page because it wasn’t accurate. So another just kind of little thing that they needed to tweak, and I’m only including that in the video to point out that, one, this product is brand new. Like literally, they’re still coding it right now. They’re adding features every day.

And two, if it does ship like this and you’re like, hey, what? It took me a good five minutes to figure out that they made that little typo. Hopefully that saves you the five minutes of wondering. All right, so I am logged in right now as a customer, and I’ve already gone ahead and created several tickets from this customer account, and I’ve actually found that it’s pretty usable, but there are some bugs that need to be tweaked. So let’s go ahead and these are the tickets that I’ve already created.

Let’s go ahead and make a brand new one. So you can see that there is a subject line just like you’d expect. I can go ahead and type what my question is or what help I need, but I’ve already gone ahead and integrated this with a Knowledge Base. Now, you don’t have to use a Knowledge Base plugin, and Fluent Support doesn’t come with one. You can actually just use any custom post type, so you could even use your blog if you want.

As I go ahead and say type in, I’m going to go ahead and add some Lauren Ipsum here, and what it’s going to do is actually look for similar articles and it’s going to find one with the exact same name right here. That’s because all of my support articles already have Lorem Ipsum as the names of the articles. I’ll show you what I’m talking about here on the back end. So I’m using Better Docs, which is a great knowledge based plug in. I actually think that Fluent Support might be using Better Docs on their own website, but you can see here that I’ve got a few different categories of support docs, and then I just went ahead and populated it with some fake data.

So as I write a support ticket about that, it’s going to go ahead and search and find those terms inside of several different articles here. The upside to this is obviously it’s going to cut down on the amount of tickets that you receive if people can read an article about the actual question they have before they submit it. Integrating this was really, really easy. Under Fluent Support, we’ll go to Settings, and then under the ticket form configuration, I’m going to click right here and I can choose which post type I want to reference for those search queries. I can choose multiple post types, so Better Docs is using this doc slug, but I could also just use like the regular post type, which would be your blog post.

So maybe you want to pull people over to existing content you already have. You don’t need to copy and paste everything over to a new Knowledge Base. I really think that this is the best way that Fluent Support could have possibly integrated this with their system. Not trying to do everything and just let you use WordPress how it was meant to be used, but it is not all sunshine and lollipops from here on out. I do have a few more issues with this support portal page.

First of all, we can enter in our text here. This is all laid out very nicely. Just the kind of standard WordPress editor. If you don’t want to allow the more rich text editing, you can disable this over in the settings. You can see it’s right here.

Just click this little button under the ticket form configuration, the same place we were before. Turn that off and people will not be able to add lists or links or anything like that. I’ll probably recommend leaving that on just to make the editing experience a little bit nicer for people. But here’s where my complaints begin. I’ve got these form labels down below.

So these are the different sections that people should be able to fill out when they are submitting a ticket. Now I can’t get some of them to show up, so I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but the two that I can’t get to show up are the priorities. I don’t see anywhere to edit the priority levels inside of settings, anywhere I have looked, but nothing springs up quite yet and it doesn’t show up on the form itself. I can see in the back end that there are actually default priorities, but no way to configure them. So I’m still trying to figure that out.

There’s no option for priority level right here and the next thing that is missing is this. The content help message. I don’t see anywhere to display that or really why it’s necessary when we have the form content heading with the ticket details. I’m not sure what the difference is between that. Now we can add custom fields here, which is strange that it’s not inside of the same screen.

But to add the custom fields, you can go right here to custom fields and we’ll just add new. We’ll do a select choice here, give it a label. We’ll add in some options and then hit add back over on the customer view. If I reload this form, I should see that show up, how are you feeling? And I can get some custom information added to the form so I can really customize it as much as I want.

However, the one thing I’m just really not seeing that seems important is the priority level. Okay, if that were it, I’d be okay with it. But there is still one more bug. Let’s go ahead and just submit this ticket. I’m going to go ahead and fill it out and I’m going to hit Create Ticket.

It’s going to give me a little spinning wheel. Takes me over to a screen where I can see all of the tickets that I have submitted. However, there is a problem. So I’m going to submit this new ticket. But I want to point out that I can add a file here.

I can add a photo, a CSV, a PDF, a Zip, or a JSON file with MX two megabytes in size. This is configurable, by the way. So if you don’t want to accept uploads. You could turn this off under Ticket form configuration, I can disable it right here altogether. Disable file uploads and under the global settings, I can actually choose which file types I want.

Kind of a weird organization. I’m not sure why that isn’t all on the same screen, but here it is. Why not just add the disable option right here? Then we can also change the amount. If we want to accept like five megabytes, we could do that.

Okay, so I’m not going to save this. We’ll go back over here, and what happens is when I upload an image, just went ahead and attached an image right here. When I try to upload this image and then submit the ticket, watch what happens. I just get a little spinning wheel and then nothing happens. It looks like the ticket is not submitted, so you might go ahead and hit it several times.

Well, each time I do this, it’s actually creating a new ticket for me on the back end. I can go ahead. If I check my tickets here under Fluent Support Tickets, I’m seeing that the ticket was submitted three times here ticket with image number 1112 and 13. This is all the same thing submitted just a few seconds ago. So that’s definitely a little bug.

These are not deal breakers, but definitely some rough edges to smooth out. Once this is fixed, it’s going to definitely be a really good experience. Everything on the user experience seems very nice and obvious familiar. If you’ve ever used a ticketing system with anybody else, it seems to work very, very similar. Okay, so while we’re in the ticket screen, I might as well show you around a little bit here.

There’s quite a few options in terms of bulk processing, tickets sorting, and just kind of making your life easier as a support person. So first, let’s talk about bulk processing. I can select as many tickets as I want from one screen. Of course, I don’t have to select them all. I could just grab a couple here and you’re going to see these options show up at the top of the screen.

This is to reply to multiple tickets at once. So if a bunch of questions come in about a specific error, maybe you know there’s something wrong with your site. You can select all of them and then reply all in one go. That’s really cool. Then we can also set up an agent to respond to a particular ticket.

I’m going to show you how to set up agents in a moment, so maybe we’ll come back to this. We can tag tickets that are all related to a similar subject. We can also close and delete tickets in bulk as well. So if you’re done with something and you just want to get them all off the screen, you can go ahead and do that. Now, as far as sorting, I think the options here on screen are pretty obvious.

We can sort by all tickets, my tickets, and unassigned tickets. We can also choose the status of tickets that we’d like to view, open, active, New, closed, or all we can sort by our inboxes. Remember I was talking about inboxes earlier? Well, here are our inboxes. So we have profitable tools.

This is the web form that we’re filling out. And then we have the email inbox that we haven’t quite configured yet. So this is what I was talking about over in the business settings, where we have multiple inboxes here, it’s called Business Settings. Here. It’s called business inboxes.

And then back over on the tickets page, it’s just called inbox. So, a little confusing, but once you connect the dots, it’s like, okay, that makes sense. The next option over is to sort by product. Now, right now I’ve got two products added in their web design and SEO. Now this is really just topic, right?

So we’re going to sort by topic. The way that’s configured is just under Settings and then go to Products here. And you can add in whatever topics you’d like emails to be sent in about. I actually think that the word Topics would be a much better name for this. You could have Inboxes for Support or Inboxes for Sales, or maybe separate products support for those products.

You can add as many as you like. That’s the beauty of having it hosted on your own platform. Just this Word products is a little bit confusing. All right, back over to tickets. And you can see as I’m moving around here, it’s responding pretty fast.

Even though I’ve already got some data in there, it’s pulling up very, very quickly. I am not on a powerful server right now. It’s like a bottom of the barrel, VPs, $5 a month type of server. So this is nothing to write home about in terms of the server power that I have. But the application is still responding very quickly.

The last two options over here are for priority and as I already mentioned, I can’t figure out how to assign priority as a customer. But the options are normal, medium, and critical. For administrator, it is the same. So there’s different options for administrator priority and customer priority. I don’t know that I’ve seen another application, a Helpdesk, that does that, but this one does, so that’s good to know.

So let’s see what it’s like to actually respond to a ticket. Let’s go ahead and open this one up. After we’re done with this, I’ll show you how to add your own staff members and what that looks like. So right here we’ve got a submission from a user named Profitable Dave and they said their thing is broke and it needs to be fixed. Now what I can do as a support staff is to actually go ahead and reply right from this message.

It will go ahead and email that customer. It just uses your normal WordPress transactional email configuration. I recommend using Fluent SMTP. I do have a video on how to configure that. We can go ahead and reply right here, add our message in and this will actually email them.

Now my options are just to add the reply, or I can reply and close. Of course, I can also add an upload here. Let’s go ahead and test out this upload to make sure it works here. Let’s add the reply and it looks like that’s sent just fine. Now, if I go under my tickets, I’m going to see the ticket that I just replied to, right?

So I’m sorting out all of the tickets that have not had replies yet and I can see only the ones I’m engaged with or assigned to. And I can see the reply here with the attachment. Now, there’s some other options, right? I can click on this little icon right here, which is a notebook. This will allow me to add notes that are internal to the ticket and other support staff will be able to see it.

So I could explain the problem in a little bit more detail. Let them know some history about the customer if they’re not aware. That way anybody who’s working can easily continue to provide support for people. The last option over here is the staff member that’s actually assigned to the ticket. So let’s say I’m working on this and my shift is going to end, but I really want someone to take over for me.

I can go ahead and click on my name and then choose the agent that I’d like to actually take over for me. Here we can update the priority levels. So this is the client priority level, whether it’s maybe it’s critical to them, but it’s just medium to you. You can go ahead and set that up and then we can go ahead and close out this ticket and then that way it will be removed from my available tickets. So this user experience really, really delightful.

Very, very clean and easy. Everything operates the way you’d expect. All right, we’re just going to do a few more things. I’m going to set up some new staff members right now. Let’s head over to settings and we’ll go to support staffs.

Now, I have to point this out that staff is a plural word, as is at least in American English. So there’s no reason to add an S to it. I actually don’t know if it’s like that across, you know, British English or maybe it’s just me and it’s actually correct, but it’s a little bit of an eyesore to me every time I see this support staffs. But anyway, without further ado, we can go ahead and add as many support members as we want here. Just click the Add New button, add their email address, their first name, last name and title.

Here the one catches they do need to already be a user on your WordPress website, so it can’t just be added directly here. They have to be a user on WordPress. So after you’ve added your user to WordPress and you’re setting them up inside of Fluent Support, I want to point out that you do have some pretty granular permissions here. So you can allow them ticket permissions, right? Whether they can view the dashboard, manage their own tickets, manage unassigned tickets so that’d be ones that come in and no one’s reply to yet, or manage others tickets or delete tickets.

So these last two things being a little bit more of an administrator’s job, someone you’d really trust to make sure that they’re going to do the right thing, they would have those options turned on. Workflows we’re going to talk about in a bit, but those are basically automations that you can set up. Then the last two headings here, settings and Reporting, are again going to be more administrative, whether they can manage the overall settings, access private data about customers, view activity logs and view reports. There’s a decent reporting section here that maybe we’ll take a look at in a minute. But yeah, those last options are going to be reserved more for administrators.

Of course, a lot of users of Fluent CRM are going to be interested in Fluent Support, so I should definitely mention that there’s a very simple integration. Simply check a box and now you can have a default list and tag added to someone when they go ahead and submit a support ticket. All right, next up we’re going to check out the reporting section right over here. It’s fairly simple, but it’s going to give you all of the information that you want to know. We can see the total number of replies that this is going to be my personal stats here.

Total number of replies, the number of interactions, and the number of closed tickets. Then if we go to the overall agents report, I’m going to get a little bit more of a broad view of everything that’s going on. Total number of tickets, number of active tickets, closed tickets, and responses. And then down below we can see each agent’s individual performance. There’s no data here right now, but you’d be able to see things like their responses, interactions, open tickets, closed tickets, and current overall status.

Of course, we can sort this by start date and end date. Right now we’re just looking at like the last month’s worth of data and I’ve only been using it for a day or so here. And the graph we’re actually looking at is the ticket stats. So how many tickets are coming in. You might want to see some other information like how many tickets are resolved and how many tickets get replies.

Those could be helpful, but I think another metric that people would really like to see is the time to response. It’d be great to see if we can get that on the reporting chart as well, and then maybe just some kind of export options so that if you wanted to send this around to people inside of your company, but they’re not going to be logging into WordPress, you have the option to do that. There’s not right now the ability to export into PDFs. All right, let’s go ahead and finish up our email Piping that we set up for this email inbox that we were configuring earlier in this video. So once again, this is under Business Settings, which is actually Business inboxes or inbox.

And let’s go ahead and configure this. We’ll click View Settings here and where we need to begin is at the bottom here where it says Email Piping. What they mean by email Piping is that you’re going to be sending email to one address and it’s going to go into our WordPress website, which is a little bit strange, but you’re Piping it somewhere else other than say, your Gmail inbox or your Amazon WorkMail inbox. So let’s go ahead and turn this on. We have to agree to their terms here and it gives us this email address right here, which is actually a Fluent Support email address.

So know that this is going to go through their server, but it’s actually going to get auto forwarded to our email address. So if there’s any sort of issues with confidentiality, well, you really can’t use this type of service on any platform then, because you’re going to always run into an issue with this on zendesk on helpscout. They’re going to always have you pipe it through their email address just to get it forwarded to you. I just went ahead and set up the Piping inside of my Gmail account. There are directions on exactly how to do this, depending on your email provider.

Over on the Fluent Support Documents page, I’ll link to this in the description of this video so you can go right to it, but basically you’re going to click on your email provider here and they’re going to walk you through the process of adding a forwarding address. So I’ve already went ahead and done that for the address that Fluent Support gave me over here, and let’s go ahead and test this out, see if it works. I’m going to click, I have done it. So heading over to Tickets here and sorting by the profitable emails inbox. Sure enough, I just sent a message from myself to the Support address and it shows up just fine inside of the inbox.

For some reason I didn’t see it when I clicked on the button to have it forward, but I think that has something to do with how I configured my Google Workspace groups to forward. So definitely follow along with the Fluent Support Docs if you have any trouble. But it did work for me when I just wrote an email myself, as long as I. Didn’t send it from the same email address. So don’t use the same email address.

It won’t forward. I think Google thinks, hey, you already got this. So it doesn’t seem to pass along that way, but otherwise everything is working great with the email piping. We have a few more settings to address over here inside of the configuration. This is going to be basically relevant whether you’re doing a web form or an email configuration.

We have some email settings. So this is going to be the emails that are sent to the people related to the inbox, right? So when we create tickets, is an email going to go out? So someone creates a ticket, do they get a reply back the customer? Do they get a reply back to say, hey, we’ve received your ticket.

If you want them to, you can set it up right here. This is the text that they would receive and then the other options are replied by an agent. So someone gets a message, replied to ticket closed, ticket created and replied to customer. All options right there. All right, we’ve already looked at email piping.

Inbox settings are basically you’re going to be fine leaving this alone as is. You can set up a footer here. If you want to ask people to leave a review or something like that, you can definitely do so. Should point out there’s no review services included in fluent support. But if you have a third party kind of collection of hey, how are we doing smiley face thing, you can definitely include a link to that.

The last feature we’re going to talk about in this video is called Workflows. This is going to allow you to automate a lot of the responses. So if you have certain procedures that you go through frequently, you can set them up as cartflows and will make your life easier. Let me show you what I’m talking about. I’m going to click on Add new Workflow and I can give this a name.

Let’s say it’s sales assignment. So what I’m going to do here is when a ticket comes in, I’m going to direct it over to our sales team and I’m also going to tag it appropriately. I can go ahead and create a manual workflow right here and hit continue. Now the first action that I might want to take is to assign this to an agent. So I know that my best salesperson is Johnny on the spot.

I’m going to go ahead and assign it to Johnny and then I can say assign to Johnny as the title and then I can go ahead and add another action. Maybe I want to add an internal note. Here is a sales lead. I don’t know why you’d want to do that, but it’s an option. I’m just trying to demonstrate the idea here.

Then we can add another action like maybe you want to reply to the customer and say I’m going to direct you over to Sales. Ginny will be right back with you. As soon as you can you get the point here. You can go ahead and set up these workflows so that when you’re in the heat of the battle answering a lot of support messages, you can click one button and all of these tasks will be accomplished for you. Let me show you how easy it is to use this.

I’m going to go ahead and pull this out of draft mode. And let’s go ahead and hit Update here just to be certain. It looks click like that is working properly. All right. Now let’s go ahead and answer a ticket.

So I’m going to go back to a ticket here. Here’s a test email. And then inside of this ticket, I should see that workflow right here. I did have to reload the page like it was cached. Even though I don’t have any caching on this page, if I click right here, I have the option to choose which workflow I want.

I’m going to click Sales Assignment and then it’s going to let me review the workflow and I’m going to go ahead and run it. Right now it’s just saying hand there a few times because I didn’t actually give those titles when I set them up, but otherwise it would show each of the steps and you can see that it added the notes, it replied to the person you’re going to go to our top salesperson, Johnny. And if I go over to look at Johnny’s tickets, let’s do that right now. Support staff should see that it is now assigned to him. So everything worked properly.

That’s pretty cool. Now we can also do the same thing, but automatically. So the example here is that when a subject line contains bug report, you can automatically tag it and so on and so forth. So let’s go ahead and do the same thing that we just did, but in a more automated approach. All right, so I’ve got a new workflow here titled Automatic Sales Assignments.

And the first thing I need to do is set up a trigger so we can do on Ticket Creation or on Customer Response. So on ticket creation, I’m going to go ahead and choose the ticket title contains, and then I can add anything here I want. I’m just going to write Buy. So someone’s expressing that they want to buy something, this probably is not a good idea. You would not necessarily want to do this because there’s lots of reasons people would use the word buy.

But I’m going to go ahead at that point, then assign it to my agent. And same thing we saw before. We can set up as many actions here as we want. All right, so I’ve just added a few steps here. First it’s going to add an agent and then it’s going write back a short message to the customer.

Okay, so I just published this workflow. Let’s go ahead and test it out behind the scenes. I’m going to send an email using the word buy in the subject line and hopefully it gets assigned to Johnny on the spot. Okay, so I just did that. Let’s head over to the tickets and I want to point out that my filters are staying in place.

So right now I’m only looking at Johnny on the spot. I’m going to go ahead and close this and I should see my other email here show up in a second. All right. And so here we go. The new email email just came in and it says, I want to buy a new website.

It’s already been assigned to Johnny a few seconds ago. So the automation is working correctly as far as I can tell here. So overall fluent support looks like it’s going to be an absolute beast of an inbox solution for people who need to handle WordPress based support. Now it’s also a work in progress, so I wouldn’t necessarily throw this to the wolves right away. As you can see, there’s a few things that need to be tweaked.

I’m sure there’s even more than what I’ve discovered inside of this video, but I bet if you give it a good three months or so, it’s going to be running really, really smoothly. Maybe even less than that. The folks at WP manage Ninja always tend to address things really, really quickly. They’re very fast to iterate on ideas and refine things. It’s one of the reasons that I’m so excited when they release a new plugin.

So that’s going to do it for this video. If you have any questions, make sure you leave me a comment down below. Again, I always have my social media links as well as links to my email newsletter down there as well. And you can always find some affiliate links if you want to buy this product. For example, I’ll have my link in the description.

You can help support the channel so I can make more videos like this one. It’s going to do it. I will see you in the next one. Stay profitable.

What’s going on? It’s Dave here from Profitable Tools, and this is my follow up video to my initial Fluent Support review. Now, I posted this just a few days ago to coincide with the release of Fluent Support. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go check out that video first. It’s going to be a lot more informative than this one.

So what’s the point of making a follow up video so soon after launch? Well, I wanted to do a few things that you guys have asked for. First of all, I’m going to go through the setup process because that wasn’t included in my initial review. I kind of skipped to already having it configured, so we’ll do that right away as soon as I get done with this introduction. The next thing I wanted to COVID was some of the third party integrations things like WooCommerce, Learn, Dash, so on and so forth.

And the last thing I wanted to address was the bugs that I found in my initial review. I found quite a few pretty big bugs, things that were really bothering me. And literally, by the time I had posted the video live to YouTube, the founder had commented on the YouTube video, saying, hey, we patched all of those as you’re uploading. So really great to see that. I want to check it out for myself, make sure that they’re all actually fixed.

He said they fixed most of them, so we’ll see which ones they didn’t grab. All right, without further ado, let’s just jump into this. I’ve got Fluent Support already installed on this website right here, but I have not activated it yet, so let’s go ahead and do that. All right, so here is my plug plugins page. You can see that Fluent Support is nestled amongst all of the other Fluent Plugins.

Let’s go ahead and activate this. All right, so the plugin is activated, and I get this notice here that I need to install another plugin, the Base Plugin, in order to use the Pro version. So I’m just going to click here, and it’s going to go ahead and install in the background. All right, the Base plugin is installed. Let’s go ahead and activate it.

All right, now that I’ve got both plugins activated, I am ready to go through the setup process. So the first time you click on Fluent Support, it’s going to ask you to set up your business details. So go ahead and enter your business name, your business email address, and then the Support Portal page you want to use. Now, if you don’t already have a page on your website that you want to use for the support portal, you can go ahead and check this box right here. And then Fluent Support will create a page for you and automatically insert this Fluent Underscore Support Underscore Portal shortcode on that page, which will make the Support portal appear on the page.

That is what I’m going to do here. I’m going to make sure this is checked and hit complete setup. All right, so it says, awesome, your support portal is ready to go. To go ahead and check out that page. Just head over to Pages, then scroll all the way down to the bottom probably, and you’re going to see the support portal page.

Let’s go ahead and view that. Now it’s going to tell you that you can’t see this page because you’re logged in as an administrator. So what I’m going to do here is just copy this URL and then opening it up in an incognito window paste in URL. Now, this does confirm that the first bug that I found has been fixed because if you remember early on in my video, I mentioned that they had an actual typo in their shortcode for embedding the login form on the page. So the way you found that was to go to Fluent Support and then go to Settings.

And under the general Settings, there is a short code that shows up on the support portal page. So it’s a short code inside of another short code and it was missing a t before. That has obviously been corrected here and everything is working great. Another error that I saw before was that the notifications were taking up the entire side of the screen. As I hit save here, you can see that it’s clearly working a lot better.

The notifications are showing up correctly. I might personally prefer them in the upper right hand corner as opposed to the lower right hand corner, but beggars can’t be choosers. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and make an account here as a user so I can submit a support ticket to see if they fix that issue with uploading images.

So here is the back end of the support portal. Now, I’m not styled it at all right now and I’m using the hello theme from Elementor, so I don’t even have any spacing at the bottom, so everything’s kind of butted up next to the footer. It doesn’t look great, but that’s something that I can easily tweak on the back end later on. For now, I want to try creating that new ticket because if you saw my first video, you’ll know that creating the ticket worked just great until you tried to upload an image, in which case the redirect didn’t work. So let’s go ahead and see if that’s fixed.

So here is my ticket and I do have that image uploaded. So I’m going to go ahead and send this ticket in. And now it is properly redirecting. So that is really good to see. Color me impressed, because WP manage Ninja has already fixed the major bugs that I found while initially testing this plug in, and they did it all within a few hours of me posting my video on YouTube.

So kudos to them. So next up, I want to test out that WooCommerce integration. I’ve got a product in my cart right now. I’m going to go ahead and make a purchase. And now my purchase is complete.

It’s important to note that I use the same account that I sent the initial upload, the support ticket that I did just a moment ago to actually make this purchase. So let’s go ahead and check out the back end and we can see that WooCommerce integration all right. Through the magic of editing, I’ve also went ahead and added the same user to a Learn Dash course. So now let’s head back to Fluent Support and let’s see their ticket that they’ve opened. In fact, I actually opened up a couple of tickets here just to demonstrate some more of the interface.

So here I’ve got my first initial ticket. I open this up and I can see over in the right hand sidebar here I’ve got my user, and I can see what purchases they have on WooCommerce. There’s a little eyeball right here and I can click that and will actually take me off to the WooCommerce purchase. So if I needed to issue a refund, I could do it from this screen. Now I also can see what Learned Dash courses they’re enrolled in, and I can also see any previous interactions or other interactions this customer has had.

So this right hand sidebar starts to get a lot more useful. You can see a lot more about the customer at a glance. Now, because I’m also using Fluent CRM, I could also tag them so that they’re added to some marketing automations, maybe based on our interactions here. So all of the integrations with Fluent Support from third party plugins are generally going to work in the exact same fashion that WooCommerce and Learn Dash did. Let’s say you’re using Restrict Content Pro or Buddy Boss in the right hand corner.

It’s going to show you their status so you can see where they’re at or what they’ve subscribed to with your business. Now, I will say that I think we’re missing out on a real opportunity to provide a better experience for our customers here if the Fluent Support folks would maybe just add in a little bit more customization. So what I’m talking about here is when you submit a support ticket, it sure would be great if a list of your transactions showed up. As an end user, I can say, hey, I have a question about this order specifically. You get a little drop down menu and you can choose the one.

Or maybe it just lists, it displays them kind of like Amazon does. When you go check your past orders, you can say, hey, I have a question about this order. And then you could start a ticket related to that specific order. Makes it very clear to the support person as well as the person submitting the ticket, that they’re going to be understood. The other little things that I think are missing, having used other software in this world is keyboard shortcuts, right?

So if I wanted to reply to this person rather than having to click on everything, I’d love to be able to just press one key to get the reply up. Same thing with things like the returns here. It would be really nice to be able to process a return right from this window rather than having to go all the way back to WooCommerce, find the right screen. Now, it is nice that all of the data is right here, but it would be a lot faster if you were processing this stuff on volume to not have to actually go into WooCommerce. Just one other thing I’d love to see, and that is some styling options.

So you can see right here, this is the portal page, and mostly it’s doing a good job of picking up on the style that my theme has set, but it’s not doing that all the time. For example, this active button right here is blue, but I don’t think that is a setting that I have on my theme. All the other colors seem accurate, so I’m not really sure. It could be somewhere deep buried within the theme, but it would be nice to just have maybe the options to configure these buttons stand alone in case you didn’t want to rely on your theme’s colors. So that’s going to do it for this video.

I hope you found it helpful to see how they’re patching the bugs and how the third party integrations work. If you want to know more about applications such as this, it’s it is Black Friday month. We’re going to be starting our Black Friday coverage here very, very shortly. You’ll definitely want to make sure to get subscribed to the channel if you haven’t done so already. I’ll have all my links down in the description, including a link to grab fluent support, as well as to find me on social media, join my newsletter, so on and so forth.

If you have any questions, leave me a comment down below. I try to get back to absolutely everybody and I’ll see you in the next review.