Providing great customer service can make all the difference in creating a brand that people trust. In a recent example of great customer service, online shoe retailer Zappos paid out $1.6m to customers for a mistake they made themselves. The move brought both great PR and an reaffirmed sense of loyalty and trust in the Zappos brand from their huge customer base. While we can all hope to avoid such a pricey bit of customer service, it’s important to recognize how vital it is to business.

Whatever size your online operation, you are going to need some sort of online support. If you’ve ever tried using plain old email for this, you’ll know how quickly it can get out of control. A far better solution is to use one of the many support and help desk apps around. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of ten support apps to browse and consider.

Here at Envato we use Kayako’s eSupport, which has proven to be an effective tool. It’s not super pretty, but it’s got a lot of functionality and if you buy the self-hosted version then you pay for it once and use it forever. This is a considerable price difference when compared to products like ZenDesk where you pay per user.

Kayako

Kayako

About Kayako: “Kayako is a well established provider of web-based support desk software and live chat solutions. We are a privately held company based in Punjab, India (as Kayako Infotech Ltd.) and Boise Idaho, United States of America (as Kayako Inc.).

The flexibility and ease of use of our software makes it popular amongst a broad audience – including small to medium businesses, enterprises, charities and government agencies. More than 30,000 organizations rely on our solutions to consolidate, streamline and improve not just their support front, but also their sales and general business operations.”

Zendesk

Zendesk

About Zendesk: “Zendesk extends good help desk karma to any company looking to offer professional-grade support service with very little effort. Using the benefits of Web-based communications and social media, it has helped companies of all sizes move their help desk and customer support operations to the Web. Companies such as Twitter, MSNBC, Scribd, IDEO, John Lewis, and Books-a-Million can attest to the fact that with Zendesk, the name of the game is simplification.

Zendesk is built upon the idea that help desk support doesn’t have to be complicated and cumbersome.”

Tender Support

Tender Support

About Tender Support: Tender Support is a hosted help desk solution that provides a community for users to discuss issues and even come up with their own solutions. However, users can also submit requests to your customer support staff. This help desk solution also offers knowledge base features and Lighthouse integration.

Cerberus Helpdesk

Cerberus Helpdesk

About Cerberus Helpdesk: “Cerb5 is a fast and flexible CRM toolkit. Remember anything about anybody, deftly reply to an e-mail flood, quarantine spam, capture organic feedback, track time, flag opportunities, share tasks, and otherwise collaborate efficiently. Built for one-person startups through Fortune 500 giants.”

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction

About Get Satisfaction: “It’s a social support application for engaging your customer community to reduce support costs, build buzz and collect feedback. Unify interactions across your Website, Facebook, Twitter, blog, and mobile apps. For companies of all sizes.”

Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk

About Vision Helpdesk: “In a nutshell Vision is about High Speed Performance, Security, Reliability, Scalability, Portability and User-Friendliness. Vision Helpdesk reflects the state of the art in web based helpdesk solutions. It well derives benefits of latest Web2.0 technology and equip support staff with fast, secure and user-friendly interface. It is extensively designed with PHP Ajax that offers user-experience improvement, decreasing user delay, decrease in bandwidth usage, high speed results and loads of features.”

osTicket

osTicket

About osTicket: “osTicket is a widely-used open source support ticket system. It seamlessly integrates inquiries created via email, phone and web-based forms into a simple easy-to-use multi-user web interface. Manage, organize and archive all your support requests and responses in one place while providing your customers with accountability and responsiveness they deserve.”

Helpdesk Pilot

Helpdesk Pilot

About Helpdesk Pilot: “Helpdesk Pilot allows you to manage your support services more efficiently, treating each and every incoming request as a unique, traceable ticket.

Collate support requests sent in via email, through the web or over the phone into a feature rich help desk solution that both empowers your support agents and reassures your end-users of quick, efficient and quality support.”

Mojo Helpdesk

Mojo Helpdesk

About Mojo Helpdesk: “Mojo Helpdesk is a hosted ticket tracking / on demand help desk service that allows organizations to centralize, assign and track user requests, whatever they might be. Use it to track customer and tech support requests, internal tasks management, or for anything that should not fall through the cracks. Mojo tracks requests till they get done.”

DeskPRO

DeskPRO

About DeskPRO: “DeskPRO is a customer relationship management system. The major components of the product include a ticket system with email integeration, knowledgebase, teamwork tools and extensive reports and statistics features.

DeskPRO has features that can be tailored to suit every business. You can create the perfect helpdesk using customizable categories, priorities, workflows and custom fields.”

Reviews? Did we miss any?

Which of these (or any you recommend below) apps would you most like to see reviewed? Please let us know in the comments. Thanks! If you know of any great support apps or resources we’ve missed, be sure to add them in the comments section below.