Awesome Support

Awesome Support is a support plugin for WordPress that is extremely rich in features and very versatile. It’s a free core plugin with multiple addons that enhance its functionality. Awesome Support offers as many as 21 addons spanning a wide range of functionalities. Therefore, preparing a comprehensive review is a mammoth task. Let’s zero in on the key ones and see how good Awesome Support really is.

Features:

As in other similar support plugins, Awesome Support helps you create tickets,

• Using front-end forms
• Manually via the backend
• By email piping

What makes Awesome Support stand out is how it gives you complete flexibility over how you can work with the front-end forms. Custom Fields: With Awesome Support, you can choose from a possible 11 different custom field types with advanced options like taxonomies and password fields. Apart from simply adding custom fields like other plugins let you to, Awesome Support offers more flexibility by letting you to-

• Add fields programmatically in 3rd party plugins easily
• Specify whether changes made to a field should be recorded in a ticket, a handy feature for auditing
• Set defaults for all the fields
• Set permissions for all the custom fields
• Specify whether a certain field can be viewed by the customers or the agents only
• Specify whether any field is needed or not
• Specify rules for validation (HTML 5 syntax-based)
• Control whether a field should be included in the main ticket list or if it should be used only to filter the main list

The only thing missing is conditional fields. However, what initially seems like an omission is more than made up for by Awesome Support offering something much more flexible, which is… Custom Forms: Awesome Support includes only one help desk form like the other support plugins with all the custom fields appearing on it. You might be under the impression that you can’t create other forms as in other plugins. Awesome Support goes one up on the others by syncing up with one of the most popular form builders- Gravity Forms. This connection helps you create as many custom tickets as may be necessary. What’s more, you can link the fields in the Gravity Forms to the custom fields you create on Awesome Support. You may also enjoy the added functionalities that come with Gravity Forms, like user registration, Zapier integrations, and more! Moreover, Gravity Forms’ sophisticated options for conditional processing and its ability to connect with WordPress API make it easy for you to control ticket assignments. Therefore, by connecting with Gravity Forms, Awesome Support offers much more flexibility than its other support plugin counterparts. Standard Forms: You still have enough control over the standard ticket form even though you aren’t using Gravity Forms. You are given the scope for-

• Adding custom fields
• Adding text at the top and bottom of the form
• Removing existing fields
• Changing the labels on the existing fields
• Hiding sections on the form you may not want with some simple CSS

Organization of Tickets: Most help desk plugins come with only one ticket assignment algorithm. On the other hand, Awesome Support gives you as many as five separate algorithms to determine how you assign the tickets. The tickets are assigned to the agent with the least number of them by default in other helpdesk plugins. The more advanced algorithms with Awesome Support allow you to-

• Assign specific working hours to certain agents
• Put any agent in a specific department
• Set aside certain products to be handled by certain agents

The data you get gives you the option to set algorithms like-

• Locate an agent who supports a specific product and is on duty currently
• In case no agent is located, look for any agent irrespective of product or department

You also have the option of filtering and organizing tickets after they are assigned by using parameters like-

• Products
• Tags
• Channels (where the ticket request originally came from, Facebook Messenger, for example)

You may also make any of the custom fields filterable, capable of being sorted, and let it be displayed as a column in your ticket listings screen. In effect, you, therefore, have complete control over every single column appearing on the ticket list. We encountered a few issues while testing Awesome Support though the overall experience was pretty good.