Handling your customer support through email is a recipe for disaster. For one thing, there’s always the chance that you’ll miss an important request because of an overzealous spam filter. Then there are the dreaded email threads that get increasingly confusing as they pile up. That can be a nightmare for both you and your customers.
And how do you loop in your team members? Forwarding those lengthy email threads makes things even more convoluted. On top of that, add in private email discussions with your support team and organization goes out the window.
The most efficient way to handle customer support is by using a ticketing system. But if you run a small business, developing and using a ticketing system can put a strain on your budget. Not to mention that running a full-fledged support ticketing system can significantly slow down your web server, and consequently your WordPress site.
The good news is that there is an affordable ticketing system for WordPress. It’s perfect for small businesses, and it scales. It’s a SaaS called Saladil.
The Saladil Ticketing System
Saladil is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) ticketing system that integrates with your WordPress site. Saladil doesn’t run on your server, so there’s virtually no slow-down on your website. Instead, the service runs on Saladil’s servers, freeing up yours to focus on hosting your website. The software allows you to handle customer support tickets using a clean and modern UI.
Using Saladil you can create a more effective conversational channel with your customers. You can jettison the email threads and make your customer support efficient — for you, your team, and your customers.
Easy to Use
Your customers get a super simple ticket form to fill out on your website. When logged in, they can create a new ticket and review the old tickets they’ve submitted. Submitting a ticket is as easy as typing in the Subject, selecting a Category and Priority, and adding a message. Customers can also add attachments, which can be helpful if you need to see a screenshot or read a log file.
For you and your support agents, Saladil’s user interface is simple and easy to scan at a glance. You can view tickets by agent, category, or status. Clicking on a ticket shows you all messages, attachments, priority, and even private notes that only you and your team can see.
Customizable
Every business has at least some unique aspects to its support. Saladil allows you to add custom data fields, categories, and custom ticket statuses. You can also create “Canned Responses” to help you update customers on their tickets quickly and without repeatedly writing the same messages.
Email Notification
No one wants to stare at a ticketing system interface all day waiting for support requests to pop up. Saladil immediately notifies customers and agents as soon as a ticket is received or updated. Customers can also respond directly to a notification email rather than logging back into the website.
WooCommerce-Ready
If you use WooCommerce, you can connect your store to Saladil and offer support on those WooCommerce products and services you offer.
How to Set Up an Affordable Ticketing System for Your WordPress Site
Saladil has a plugin to connect your WordPress site, but the heart of the system is the service you’ll use on the Saladil website. The first thing you need to do is set up an account with Saladil. I’ll cover pricing in a bit, but it’s free to start and you get a 21-day trial to test all the features.
Set Up Your Account
Head over to Saladil.com and click the Start for free button in the top right corner. Fill out your info, accept the terms, and you’re in.
The next step is a Welcome page with the plugin download and easy instructions on how to install Saladil on your WordPress site.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you need to enter an API key to connect to your Saladil account. You can grab the API key on the Saladil Welcome page where you downloaded the plugin.
Create Your Customer Support Ticket Form
Saladil makes it easy to create the customer-facing support ticket form. It’s ready to go out of the box. There are three steps:
- Copy the shortcode from the Saladil menu on your site:
[saladil_customer_area] - Create a new page.
- Embed the shortcode on the page.
Alternatively, you can place the shortcode on any existing page, but it may be more effective to have a special page designated for customer support.
When you have the shortcode embedded, the form appears — ready to be used.
The Customer Experience
When the customer submits their ticket, they get a popup confirming their entry. Then they’re taken to a page listing all tickets they’ve submitted.
At any time, your customers can view a ticket and see their original entry, its current status, and all messages between them and your agent(s). This all happens on your website — your customers don’t have to log in anywhere else or create a separate Saladil account.
If you’ve ever handled many support tickets, you probably know that a lot of customers hate being bounced around to various sites to get support. This is a valuable feature that creates better customer satisfaction.
Your customer also gets an email notification for each ticket submission, including a link to the ticket on your site.
That’s the customer side, let’s take a look at what the agent sees.
The Agent Experience
While your customers submit and interact with tickets on your WordPress site, you and your support team will work exclusively on the Saladil platform.
While the main dashboard page has some handy stats, you’ll mostly work in the Tickets menu.
You get a list of all tickets, sorted by the most recent activity. You can also search for tickets when the list gets longer. Using the left-side menu, you can look at all Unanswered tickets, tickets assigned only to you, and the latest replies. Additionally, you can click on any status and see all tickets that fall under it. Categories are another way to sort tickets, and I’ll cover that shortly.
In the full ticket table, you can see the message, who submitted it, who it’s assigned to, and the date/time of the last message.
When a customer submits a support ticket, you get a notification email. You can click the link in the email, or head directly to your Saladil account to see and interact with it. When you open a ticket, you can change the Status, Priority, and Category, or assign an agent.
There’s a message field with simple editing tools, and you can add hyperlinks and attachments. If you’ve created some, you can also reply using a Canned Response.
Saladil Features Rundown
I’ve covered the basics, but I’d also like to show you some features that stand out to me.
Guest Enquiries
You don’t have to limit the ticketing system to registered customers. If you’d like to accept tickets from guests, it’s easy to set up. You might want to do this to handle pre-sales questions, for example. Saladil gives you a special contact form that you can display on a page using a shortcode. When a guest submits a ticket, you’ll see it in your list along with the others, but flagged as “Guest Enquiry.”
Custom Ticket Fields
The default fields that come with the Saladil ticket submission form are fairly thorough. However, you can further customize the form with your own fields. This could be useful if you have a highly specialized product or service, or you’d just like to collect more info from your customers.
Canned Responses
As your customer support team gets busier, it can become tiresome to crank out the same replies for routine requests — or even to say, “Thanks for your patience.” Saladil allows you to create Canned Responses to handle those replies more efficiently.
Access Management
Particularly if you have a large support team, you likely have agents who can handle certain tickets but not others. With Access Management, you can limit tickets for a certain agent by category.
For example, say you run a WordPress support service. You might have agents that can get under the hood and tweak code or design and others who only upload content, like blog posts. You can assign those content support agents to that category only.
There are many more useful features in the Saladil service, and they’re worth checking out.
Pricing
As I mentioned earlier, you can start with a 21-day free trial. That’s plenty of time to test all the features and make sure it’s going to work for your team.
After that, pricing for Saladil is straightforward. There are no tiers or pricing tables, it’s just one annual subscription. At the time of this writing, it’s $8.25 per month.
That gets you:
- Unlimited Agents
- Unlimited Tickets
- Standard Saladil Support
Speaking of support, I did need to contact Saladil Support while I tested the plugin. They responded in just a few hours with a clear solution, and they were super friendly.
They also have an Enterprise solution for custom features, on-premise hosting, or large projects. You just need to contact them for details and pricing.
A Complete Ticketing System for WordPress You Can Afford
Saladil is easy to use, customizable, and won’t bog down your server. If you want to run a robust support ticketing system on your WordPress site, Saladil is an excellent choice.
