We do have a "Beta feedback" process for all users (which is essentially a one-way communication for now) which allows us to gather their input. In addition to our Pirate analytics, we also use Mouseflow to observe user behavior. So we are gathering data both directly from users (although we could probably improve the beta feedback process) and from analytics, we just don't have a lot of extra time since we have other jobs at the moment.
Depends on the product. We sell our software to business owners who use it to manage the majority of their day to day operations. A well thought out support system was needed on day 1.
Is there really much to say about StatusCake ? I use it and I have to say that it seems too much simple (not enough alert terms, hasn't got hooks, too expensive)..
StatusCake does support web hooks, along with 10 other integrations including fully supporting advance alert routing. We also have all the features of major monitoring services as well as virus scanning, domain monitoring, SSL certificate monitoring and so many other features.
I mean, we also have a free plan that gives you monitoring (and hooks) along with a wide range of features for an unlimited amount of sites!
Groove is who I went with, after looking into this area. Very happy with it so far, the on-boarding was perfect with its step by step setup. Would certainly recommend.
We have used Groove and really liked the simplicity of the software. However as use cases matured we realised that doing SEO on the knowledge base articles is not possible.
We switched to Groove from Zendesk (which was awful). We're happy with it. I do wish it had better reporting. It also has occasional hiccups (missing emails, report numbers inconsistent).
We use Groove also. It works fine but we do wish it had any kind of mobile support. Even if the desktop site would just function in a mobile browser would be helpful. Two way Slack integration would be a dream (it has notification only now. You can't respond to tickets from slack).
None at Notebook.ai other than being active and responsive on social media and linking various Google Forms on-site for reporting bugs, requesting features, etc. Follow-up on those is by email. Since we're open source, we also invite anyone to create issues on GitHub as well, though it's usually the more technical crowd that do so.
Reasoning: 1) it's free, 2) quality customer service is free advertising when it's public, and 3) there's less friction to "get in touch" with us (and follow up quickly) when it's on a platform a user is already using.
Would definitely love to hear about a (free) quality customer service tool if there are any out there, though. I think we're starting to outgrow Forms/email, as some way to aggregate common requests together (without manually building a spreadsheet, like now) and sort/filter/rank them would be beneficial.
Olark really helped us with our customer service, we use both the live chat feature, and the 'email us' feature for when nobody is available on live chat.
We expected it would help us to respond to support requests better - which it did, but it also offered some advantages that we didn't expect:
- Users are way more likely to reach out in the first place due to the easy live chat/email widget on each page
- In some cases we have actually been able to use the data from Olark to determine the quality of our traffic and landing page (e.g. users are not understanding our message, or we are getting a lot of queries about something unrelated to our product [targeting issue])
We have just implemented Olark as well. We had a problem where a ton of our new users were signing up for our product and then radio silence. Wouldn't log in again, wouldn't respond to personal emails from myself. We implemented Olark to hopefully catch those people when they are signing up and get them engaged. It hasn't been long enough to tell if it's working or not, but we're hoping.
HelpScout (https://www.helpscout.net/). Brilliant piece of software built by a bunch of people that really care. Regular new features and improvements, an intelligent help desk that just gets out of the way, and docs for customer self-service (they have a private option for docs which we use for internal knowledgebases too)
We're not a startup, but we've had great success with Helpscout too. Our customer service team absolutely love it, to the point where it's difficult to convince them that Intercom is worth trying!
Helpscout is awesome. We use their API to put a "Summon Help" button in the footer of our app and auto generate help tickets that are pre-populated with all of contextual information that we need to then quickly solve the customer issues.
Another endorsement for HelpScout. Web app is great. iOS lacks features in a way that drives me crazy every day (team is well aware of them) but I still think it's the best available with fair pricing.
I think we've been with HelpScout for around 4 years at https://openexchangerates.org. The service is great, and they just seem like a really honest, switched-on team.
StatusGator uses Freshdesk on the free plan and it's adequate for our needs.
Freshdesk has worked flawlessly and beautifully handles triaging a few support requests and product feature suggestions every day. (Aside from a hiccup where I misconfigured notifications and inadvertently ignored dozens of tickets for a month... a PEBKAC issue.)
+1 for Freshdesk. Came over from Zendesk and at the time at least it was (much) lower cost and worked better for our small biz. Great API as well with good docs.
Front + Intercom is the same combination we use. We're happy with Front's Intercom integration.
We're still using Zendesk for Help Centre, but considering alternatives. Last time I checked, Intercom's help centre product was still lacking some features we needed, unfortunately.
I think a big opportunity for Front is to make it easier to source content from different knowledge base systems (like Zendesk) to include snippets/links in emails without leaving Front. Perhaps a search box that inserts linked titles for Help Centre articles.
Zendesk. We are thinking about switching to something else (currently looking at Freshdesk) as the service is getting disproportionally expensive with many users.
[EDIT] I intended to make this comment about Desk.com, not Zendesk. Sorry! I can't speak to Zendesk, it might be amazing.
[Original comment] Exporting your data when you leave is almost impossible. You'll need to keep paying even after you leave to keep your ticket history. I'd suggest moving sooner rather than later.
We just finished building our own customer support tool to save some money (we're a bootstrapped startup). We wanted live chat for customers that went straight to our Slack, since we already use it for so much. We couldn't find anything else that worked the way we wanted, so we built it.
This is such a startup thing to do :) Sounds like you might have another product pivot on your hands, would love to see what you've built! We've been dreaming of a slack + support integration that is more than just a stream of events.
That's very interesting. We use Slack a ton and just recently started on the Olark free plan (22 chats/month). I would love for chats to go to a separate slack channel instead of having to keep another tab open. Not to mention Olark doesn't have mobile support.
We keep track of ticketing, so whenever a customer has a support question, it opens a new Slack channel as a "ticket", and invites the people you want added to support conversations.
We've used Desk.com for the past 2 or so years. For the most part, it has met our needs. We built 3 separate knowledge bases for 3 separate products, used macros to speed up answering common questions, and integrated third party phone and chat apps so we can keep records all in one place. That being said, we're probably going to be switching away. A few reasons here. First, it seems like we encounter bugs, crashes, and more serious service-level disruptions too often. Second, it is pretty expensive compared to other products out there.
We came to Desk.com when we were really small. Our CTO was still the only dev we had so we were looking for an out of the box solution that could be customized by someone who was relatively non-technical. Desk can pretty much handle a lot of this customization but what results is something a bit clunky to use. This is not a criticism of Desk itself, more just an observation about tools that promise customization without dev resources.
Anyway, I think we'll switch to HelpScout. I like that HelpScout defaults to sending plain-text emails, where Desk emails look like they come from someone using support desk software. Plus, they have all of the essential features we're looking for at a better price.
Plus, I love HelpScout's content. I'm sure their marketers will love hearing this, but all their blog posts and resources give me the impression that they are a thoughtful company that understands customer support. It's always surprising to see how many customer support tools offer horrible customer support themselves. From my experience, that disconnect does not bode well for their product.
The benefit of open sources is that you can build deep integration to your processes and also grow it as your company grows. With closed tools, you will end up paying a lot and also lose the opportunity to drive more team productivity by being unable hack and extend your tools.
Self-plug alert. At Smooz we use... Smooz (https://www.smooz.io) to open 800+ shared Slack channels with each team who install the app in their Slack team. Obviously, not everyone answers, but these conversation provide 1) incredible insights into use case, unclear onboarding flow, etc 2) help convert prospects 3) help retain users
Shameless plug. We built a Voice of the Customer tool - https://insightstash.com Collect feedback from visitors directly on your site. Lots of features and customizations.
85 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadso far we've covered * Baremetrics * Quaderno
coming soon: * Statsbot * Hosted Graphite * StatusCake * TravisCI * Drip * TransferWise (not a SaaS service, but saves us a ton of money)
I mean, we also have a free plan that gives you monitoring (and hooks) along with a wide range of features for an unlimited amount of sites!
Kind Regards, Daniel.
Helpscout looks promising.
https://help.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topics/does-groove-...
Reasoning: 1) it's free, 2) quality customer service is free advertising when it's public, and 3) there's less friction to "get in touch" with us (and follow up quickly) when it's on a platform a user is already using.
Would definitely love to hear about a (free) quality customer service tool if there are any out there, though. I think we're starting to outgrow Forms/email, as some way to aggregate common requests together (without manually building a spreadsheet, like now) and sort/filter/rank them would be beneficial.
We expected it would help us to respond to support requests better - which it did, but it also offered some advantages that we didn't expect:
- Users are way more likely to reach out in the first place due to the easy live chat/email widget on each page
- In some cases we have actually been able to use the data from Olark to determine the quality of our traffic and landing page (e.g. users are not understanding our message, or we are getting a lot of queries about something unrelated to our product [targeting issue])
While Helpscout is good, it's very far from perfect.
Freshdesk has worked flawlessly and beautifully handles triaging a few support requests and product feature suggestions every day. (Aside from a hiccup where I misconfigured notifications and inadvertently ignored dozens of tickets for a month... a PEBKAC issue.)
We've had no real qualms with it.
We're still using Zendesk for Help Centre, but considering alternatives. Last time I checked, Intercom's help centre product was still lacking some features we needed, unfortunately.
I think a big opportunity for Front is to make it easier to source content from different knowledge base systems (like Zendesk) to include snippets/links in emails without leaving Front. Perhaps a search box that inserts linked titles for Help Centre articles.
[Original comment] Exporting your data when you leave is almost impossible. You'll need to keep paying even after you leave to keep your ticket history. I'd suggest moving sooner rather than later.
[0] https://www.help-desk-migration.com
We came to Desk.com when we were really small. Our CTO was still the only dev we had so we were looking for an out of the box solution that could be customized by someone who was relatively non-technical. Desk can pretty much handle a lot of this customization but what results is something a bit clunky to use. This is not a criticism of Desk itself, more just an observation about tools that promise customization without dev resources.
Anyway, I think we'll switch to HelpScout. I like that HelpScout defaults to sending plain-text emails, where Desk emails look like they come from someone using support desk software. Plus, they have all of the essential features we're looking for at a better price.
Plus, I love HelpScout's content. I'm sure their marketers will love hearing this, but all their blog posts and resources give me the impression that they are a thoughtful company that understands customer support. It's always surprising to see how many customer support tools offer horrible customer support themselves. From my experience, that disconnect does not bode well for their product.
The benefit of open sources is that you can build deep integration to your processes and also grow it as your company grows. With closed tools, you will end up paying a lot and also lose the opportunity to drive more team productivity by being unable hack and extend your tools.
Intercom for chat
And we dogfood getkookoo for phone support