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.
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Providing great customer service can make all the difference in creating a brand that people trust. In a recent example of great customer ...
Providing great customer service can make all the difference in creating a brand that people trust. In a recent example of great customer ...
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My fav isn’t really a Help Desk App, more like a Live Chat Support. Maybe you guys could make a Top Live Chat Support Article!
Well I like Zopim, great features and just purely amazing!
http://www.zopim.com/
My fav feature is that you can reply by IM.
But GetSat is deff my favorite from your list. Thanks for the list!
I use RedMine. http://www.redmine.org/
Redmine is a great project management tool, but i dont like it for Help Desk.
We use Request Tracker (RT) from Best Practical (http://bestpractical.com/)
We are using Vision Helpdesk for 8 months now and its simply awesome ! Vision Helpdesk’s Satellite Helpdesk feature has helped us to manage support for our three companies at one place.
Further we are planning to go for Vision Helpdesk Unlimited Domain Version to offer End User Support to our Reseller Clients Clients..
We highly recommend Vision Helpdesk, First its Economical starts from $9.99 per month Second Feature Rich and Third Best Support offered by Vision Helpdesk Team.
Infrenion Networks
Thanks for the list. I will check out osTicket. I hope it’s better than http://otrs.org/
I think OTRS is the best Open Source option out there
Wonder why you didn’t told it in the post itself :S
IzzyHelp.com is missing, it’s a dynamic FAQ/Knowledgebase with Helpdesk, easy to install and use.
I’d be interested in a review of Cerberus
Kayako is pretty good. Some of these tools are very good for web hosting companies.
Would love to see you review kayako.com
I’m a bit impartial to http://Beetil.com – Great SaaS based implementation of ITIL
Hi,
I would recommend you to review Zoho Discussions, an online forums software that helps you to setup customer support forums, intranet communities, etc. It is feature-rich and cost effective!
You can evaluate the service at: http://discussions.zoho.com/home
—–
Sivaranjani
ps: I work for Zoho discussions
I use OggChat (http://www.oggchat.com) which is a live chat service that works with Gmail and Google Talk.
great addon to helpdesk system is http://nicereply.com – customers can rate responses of your helpdesk agents
We are looking for one to be used by HRstop.com .. lets see which one is viable for us.
I believe Assistly.com should be on the list. I’m actually researching on this for our start-up Flabell.com, and I am to choose between this and ZenDesk.
We’re using HP’s OpenView solution. But the tool is not so easy.
I believe help desk tools are not easy to suit for every company.
How did you guys missed TeamSupport.com? That is one of the most beautiful apps with a ton of great features. It is more of a “rich internet application” than your typical website format – and their support is the very best. You can call these guys, chat with them or submit a ticket.
I even spoke with their CEO once and he personally helped me.
Worthy is http://www.helpspot.com/ based on CodeIgniter.
Wonderful list. I suggest to add http://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/ to your list.
I use issuecentre and would recommend it, http://www.helpdeskcentre.co.uk
Free trial and free android app!
thanks to everyone for your info. You really helped me in my research.
Great list. Has any one used this http://helpdesk.bigwebapps.com/ ?
I use the versaSRS as they are very flexible and affordable with ITSM modules.
http://www.versasrs.com and my sporting club use this as well for free as it gives 1 Tech license for free.
Hot Help Desk is a free ticket management and100% web-based help desk system which can be accessed from any browser, with no plug-ins, no client maintenance and no client updates. Your customers can create and update tickets via online web based form or email easily, so you are able to track the history of support requests from inception to resolution, including routing, ownership and transfers . Hot Help Desk also provide powerful service modules like automatic email notification, searchable knowledge base, administrable download and reports analyzer, so you can offer your customers different options to help them get their issues resolved quickly. With a complete feature set and an affordable price tag, Hot Help Desk will improve the efficiency of your business. You can transform your cost center to a revenue center.
I’m also surprised that Service Cloud by SalesForce isn’t here (http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud)
It has Facebook and Twitter integration, along with their chatter app, it’s completely cloud based, and takes very little effort to move into.
That said, I’m interested in a comparison between Zendesk and Service Cloud – I want to know the difference between development, service and prices (it would just seem to me that Zendesk takes ages to develop and update important features – such as the Facebook ticket submission – which other services already have incorporated.)
Thanks for mentioning that. Truth be told, it’s been a while since I’ve looked into SalesForce’s offerings, and I should give them another try. Perhaps some SalesForce articles are in order?
Assistly would be a great addition to this list. The product is less than a year out of beta and it’s already garnered an A-list of customers, from 37 Signals to Pandora and Yelp. We’re the all-in-one customers tool that makes your team super-efficient.
And now you can get started for free, as every account includes a free Full Time Agent. And then you can add unlimited agents and only pay $1 per hour (or a flat $49/month/agent for full time, unlimited use).
Thanks for stopping by! I actually use Assistly daily in my work, and love the new features that have been added lately. Keep up the great work!
We released Freshdesk in June and in the short while have seen very encouraging feedback. The icing on the cake was Freshdesk winning the Microsoft Bizspark India Startup Challenge. Do check out http://www.freshdesk.com/ , we’d love to get your feedback/review too.
We chose Zendesk about 12 months ago and we are delighted with it.
A different HelpDesk app for the advanced tecnician – ControlUP
(It’s free)
We use zendesk. All emails sent into the system get converted to text and there is no method for viewing them at all. It is a deal killer for us and we are currently looking at other solutions.
You guys totally forgot about Desk.com (http://desk.com, formerly – Assistly) and LiveChat (http://livechatinc.com)!
Am I the only one missing “HESK” on the list?