Ask HN: What would make a great customer support tool?
I keep seeing posts on HN about customer support (email support) tools. We have been using Fogbugz for a couple of years now and I know that there can be a better solution. I have looked at a few other solutions (for example zendesk and RT) but I am wondering what a great customer support tool for a small team should be like. I have a few ideas
* Ability to reply/close/assign and do other stuff through email (RT does some of this but its extremely hard to setup)
* A very simple and usable web and mobile interface with a clean API
* Pricing based on number of tickets and not number of users (not all developers are support agents but you still want a login for them to see/respond to some tickets)
* Hooks to provide more information about the user, making it easier to provide a more personalized response. Basically making it easier to wow people who write to you.
I feel a lot of solutions out there are pretty complex (in terms of features, integrations etc) and quite costly for small teams. Do you think there is scope for a new product here? What would you want to see in it? I am going to start working on something very soon and would appreciate any feedback or ideas. Also, would love to find some beta testers :)
Thanks!
18 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 62.3 ms ] threadI'm looking forward to see some comments from people that are more into this topic!
I'm more interested in seeing some out of the box thinking.
For example, build in some AI to preselect/recommend a base response from a pool of previous responses. That doesn't mean it'll be perfect (and still needs to be personalized), but it's better than starting from scratch or scraping through your wiki looking for a previous response.
Also, I want a view that watches an email support queue, public forums and possibly chats. That way my support reps can take the next available request no matter where it comes from.
Just a thought! (as someone who finds nested threads difficult to read because of funky word - wrap and believes a shaded color bar is the solution to srting replies from OP / sub posters and has never seen it on any forum) 'nuf of my griping, but shout out who you mean!
Also we joked that if a company want to make a user happy we can setup an engine that will send emails randomly from around 100 different templates assuring user that people are working on his case ;)
How about you get really intimate with what they use, how they use it, and work on simplifying workflow UI, readability, all the human factors stuff which seems to be overlooked once a project gets rolled out because the painful bit of codifying processes too all the budget?
I mean, work out what you could overlay as a benefit, in a drop - in app. Ignore bling, save where used to flag data that needs working on urgently, and think about that old hullabaloo of the 70's consultant with clipboard: time and motion. Think how many times a UI context switch is required. Take away frustrations.
Obviously i've no idea if what yu're working on is the slightest bit suitable fr this treatment. But if i had a nickel for every time i've seen a support rep slam down their phone (i was going to say smashed, but we're all enlightened PC people now!) because of something as dumb as having to hit the fourth button on their machine to transfer a call, i'd be doing pretty good.
It's not fair of me to keep using phone use analogies, but i don't se enough info as to what other people ar trying to solve here, hope you get my drift anyhow.
Can you write "helper app"? Remember multifinder or i forget the name but whatever it was on early macs which allowed you to copy and paste to a stack? Id there something functionally simple like that you can offer which doesn't mess with the underlying interfaces, but which still requires some pretty neat writing and likely a fairly deep understanding of the existing apps to make work consistently and without snarling anything?
Whenever i get private project time, increasingly rare sadly, i keep sketching out UI models for a desk phone which would be complimentary to the tracking / contact apps i use, not be a awful ugly alterntive. Things like flipping a contact window from the list on the handset to my main monitor. The hard bit isn't so much now i have to work out a way to communicate that from phone to PC, because one way would be to loop the phone data to the PC and use the new USB screen driver tech. The hard bit is working out what you want to really happen. Is that, you finger flip a contact towards your main screen, and you get a fully expanded list of the discussions you've had with them? Can drag and drop work with this in a kind of wacom tablet way, so then hw does movement on the obviously smaller touchscreen translate to your main monitor? If, say, i've a preference for greyscale display on anything which cannot be usefully colored to convey real information, does the "flipped" window stay greyscale? Do i want the flipped window to be large, float or be even a normal window, or do i want it "brought back" / closed by a gesture on the phone screen? How could i do that from a cell phone?
That's pretty pie in the sky for a solo project, but whilst there remains good utility from desk bound objects (my favourite gripe is i can dial important customer numbers from memory faster than i can bring their entry up on my very latest processor Nokia) and these objects, like everything else, wear out, and are now nicely converging to voip protocols which are mature enough there's no reason to go for a proprietary type such as cisco, theres a market for these things.
Making any of this elegant is no small ambition. But consider this thought, that i remember new employees getting "phone training" because they needed to know how to handle the butt ugly interfaces of pbx attached phones which to this day are not often much better than a bunch of soft keys and if you're lucky those keys are customisable but still very basic features. Why can't i drag and drop a call with my finger whilst i'm on another call? The other thing is with the iphone we really have a lot of people finding new ways to use a telephone, and hat idiom i think will spread to the desk phone. Suddenly it may not be necessary to train someone how to put a call on hold, transfer and pick up the next incoming without muffing it with fat f...
Apart from pricing, what's better than FogBugz, in terms of your decision? I can't find a straight features page, though straight to API faq so that's good.Seems to be Ruby, whilst Fog has XML and presumably, being .net a few other interfaces.
What confuses me is that OP wanted or hinted at a desire for a expanded feature set that Fog doesn't apparently have. Which are they that Tender gives? (I got the API point, that's good, but Fog being based on the CLR would give more ways to extend it if you took the site licensed version instead of the hosted version.
Also nitpicking, but Fog for the site install prices much more nicely than the on-demand version if you've >5 users.
I'm just utterly confused as to what was the OP's question was - it's so utterly vague - and led me to ramble off in different directions above. So what's the comparative benefit?
I'm a fan of Joel Spolsky's writing, and have evaluated Fog online, from POV of whether it would be useable by non programmer staff as comfortably as i'd like.
but i'm not yet a customer as you might guess from my above psts i've interest to do things which aren't standard for a code shop. Basically, i know the value i get is in much deeper planning and i'd have to write a lot of what's desired by my company, meanwhile Fog looks robust enough to use it as a way of pulling together a few things which aren;t totally out of its design intent. Outlook integration is a useful thing not so much for management but for syncing nicely with the cell phones we use, e.g.
I mean i'm not shilling for Fog, i just don't know what the criticism is except price. What is the OP disliking about the Fog APIs e.g.? If i put my cynical hat on, i'd just say this has been a "Ask /." kind of experience. I'm interested enough in the subject to engage, but have no way of really replying. Was the Q really "what's not Fogbugz out there are cheaper?" I genuinely don't know, nor can i (presently) find any links to older HN discussion which might be useful.
All this management software, whether for bug tracking or whether you make it front of house or anywhere in between is so useful to any helf - evolved business of any size, i seem to remember IBM paying a pretty penny to get ahold of Lotus who sussed the business pitch in the 90s.
I suppose that what i'd like is a discussion as to what's state of the art, what companies or systems are really pushing the limits and getting things good and affordable, not a mere comparison with FogCreek which is very well written up for a company of any size.
I'll post separately with my confusion points, so please understand i'm probably just missing the point here.
best to all.
Being able to manage the system solely over email, at least for basic interactions, I think is really important for my team. I really liked some of the features of Email Center Pro (http://www.emailcenterpro.com/features/) but found their UI a bit too clunky and the inability to do basic management directly in the email client was a killer. A streamlined/updated version of that plus email integration similar to RT would work really well for us, I think. If you want to chat more, please email me scott AT apartmenttherapy.com.
Idea could be summed up as "Quora for support with CRM integration".
It's a nice idea you have there. But it's 20 years since i first experienced customer receptions declining to give any info as to employees, even for specific roles / names. I've no idea how legal in a big corp would think, about even using FB personal data to approach or manage contacts with employees. That said, the first thing i learned about sales, which is still an essential component of your job, i'd say particularly so if you're coding to fix a customer problem or desire, is to verbally map out common contacts with the first person you speak with. That's not far from what FB actually does, but you're doing it in person, albeit down a phone call often as not, and so concerns as to privacy can be finely guaged if you learn to listen.
The kind of data we pull in for any company we'd like to wok with is theses, lectures, of who we think pays attention to what we do, even if not "decision maker" then we delve deeper to try to understand the scope of a department influence - are they a skunkworks, with board support, are they mavericks, are they hard pressed ops guys? Sometimes just because who you communicate with might be classified as one of those types, you may be doing a lot of help by widening your contacts outside, because for big corps it's not a given teams talk to teams talk to the right management layers all the time.
What i'm on about i think works for any company you work with above 50 employees, and requires a lot of discretion. I don't have any "hard sell" function in where i work, but it's good to learn off experienced sales guys, and quite often they've worked "hard sell" before. My definition of "hard sell" is to just be absolutely direct about what you want to convey, waste the least time of any party, and haggle price especially if your bit of the project can give longer term or wider benefits. My own experience is you're lucky if you an pitch a technical project at a senior manager and get two way conversation, so the idea is you mix...
Our product is currently in closed beta as we squash bugs, but we hit every bullet point on your feature list, plus a few more that we've uncovered as our customers use the system.
Of course, we use this for all of our bug-tracking and customer support as well, and it's amazing what having a good support system does for your workflow.
So, we're competitors, but don't let that stop you. After all, competition is the crucible in which truly amazing products are formed. :)
My view is that the field is over-populated.
Probelm is often definition of what's wanted. You end up with overlap between issue tracking and CRM, and if you add in a few outlier requirements you've described half the commercial software i see, from email installs to business automation, ERP and even EDI.
That's quite an exaggerated generalization of mine there, but the list of comercial and non-commercial software which can be put to use as you describe is enormous.
What are you really missing from FogBugz? I'm not clear why you're having to look elsewhere.
Mobile apps integration is simply not mature, or rather elegant, for any product i've seen. Zimbra, Lotus Sametime, come to mind as rather half hearted efforts requiring expensive additional licenses. Developer business sales groups really should wise up to the idea that a good mobile app is the thing small companies (mode 100 employees) i know want to have better systems, it's not a mere extra for new installs, it's the driver.
I forget when i first heard about "unified communications" but it wasn't even in the last decade. That promise seems to have been eternal. I feel we are inching closer, though, yet there's nothing breakout good in any category which i've encountered.
What i want is products with common rules engines, or something which can overlay that via apis. Smetimes i'd just like a regex to flag a string in an email as signifying a task is done and update a conversation thread. Sometimes i'd like a proper transaction written back to a sals DB. Sometimes i'd like to know my updates are delivered, with a message broker or transaction manager.It's applying consistency to that which makes me want a common interface to software as varied as voive, shceduling, management accounting (e.g. for that last one where there's a showstopper ticket, i want the revenue forecast to be dropped right away for that customer) Right now even trying for that flexibility requires some big bloat installs and a lot of work, some of it pretty low level.
As to scope for a new product, i don't think you can design a product out of the box for a large proportion of users in your situation. I believe ther attempt with XML and XSLT to find a common interface for data munging was a good try, but it turned out the only thing more verbose than the XML was the acronym dictionary. And a lot of XML i see is serializing ASN or whatever talks to the outside world of suppliers, basically a patch, not a consistent code base, so you are doing mapping schema for more than just your primary DB.
Sure, i'm being very opinionated / hand - waving. But maybe the best anser is to say you should think hard how important your support process is. Is it something which can really make you stand - out? If so, maybe you should invest in time and coding effort to get what you want. There really is no shortage of systems, apps and tools. Just nothing i see which can hook diverse office systems together. Example of this is getting desk phones to be useful. The best i've seen so far is the XMPP calls which SipExec and Aastra kit supports, but still you need some glue, and a lot of thought what you want delivered and why.
I'm emphasising voice in my post because no atter how i type, there are so many times a quick call really sorts out a problem in a fraction of the time. In my integration nirvana, i'd have the phone logs transcribed and appended automatically to the ticket. I'd have my desk phone call up the subject last discussed when i dial a number, preferably on the desk phone itself, so my concurrent work windows can be left alone.
If there's an opportunity to introduce a new product, i think the hurdle is the mind boggling variety of things any successful product would be wished to work with, and you'll bloat at the end of the day.
I doubt that what you want couldn't be done fairly simply on the data front. But UI on mobile devices is a good challenge to put it mildly.
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1 area that I do not feel has been explored or taken advantage of is desktop software. I tried a while ago to create a desktop app that would sit in the system tray, receiving status updates and messages from a central system.
It would allow customers to stay up to date with system status without visiting a website and it could be used to notify of support replies, which should then reduce the "I didnt get a reply" issue.