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As someone who (a) has tried most help desk services and (b) owns a company that has a really strong reputation for good customer support, I've come to the foll

As someone who (a) has tried most help desk services and (b) owns a company that has a really strong reputation for good customer support, I've come to the following conclusions: 1. No tool/service has every feature we need and we always end up compromising somewhere. 2. I personally think most of them are over-priced, especially for new/small startups. We used an in-house Rails app for support for a long time (it's open-sourced here: https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help/ https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help/) and now we use ZenDesk. This tool looks cool but they all sort of lock you in because my support staff doesn't feel like re-writing/pasting FAQs, canned responses, etc. Overall, I just feel like this is a weird space that has no clear winner. I don't see anything compelling with UserVoice that would get me to switch. I think there's clearly room for a competitor with better pricing though. I almost feel like this is an ideal space for a good open-source project (so firms can customize and deploy) that has a commercial hosting side (ala WordPress).

rrwhite 16y ago
Getting data into and out of applications is a big issue in the era of SaaS. We've built data export into every single (non-free) plan we have (Though clearly there is a data translation issue. Anyone want to setup a company that helps you move your data between services for a cut of the service providers fees because I'd totally pay for that). We've focused on doing less but doing it really well. We already had a lot of startups using us for feedback and using email for support. For $5/mo they can now get both. We hope that's workable for the 2 guys and a dog eating ramen crowd and if not we're open to feedback.
bmelton 16y ago
What really hooked me on programming is when I wrote what later became the Enterprise Knowledge Base of a Fortune 50 company. I was working on their help desk at the time, and the existing knowledge tools sucked, and had HUGE gaps between them. I wrote something new, and specifically tailored to their process. This was over 10 years ago, and they still use it to this day, and have established a team of people to support it. I'll spare you the feature set (of which I'm quite proud), but the main thing that made it so intrinsic to their process was that it was written FOR their process. It was completely bespoke. It interfaced with their particular phone systems, their calendaring, their ticket tracking system, etc. It was truly an enterprise-class tool, but for the fact that there weren't any layers of abstraction. The abstraction you usually have to put in to support a variety of databases, or a variety of phone systems, or a variety of calendaring tools because, the market for enterprise customers with MS-SQL + Avaya phone servers + Lotus Domino calendaring is crazy small. Had it been re-engineered to work for all those systems, then it would truly have sucked. That is, I think the problem with tools like this -- you either conform to the process of the tool, or conform the tool to your process, and it's really hard to get right and stay lean. Maybe impossible.
dpcan 16y ago
It turns out the pricing for this full service product isn't directly under the "Pricing" button at the top, but under the Pricing button under the prices on the Pricing page. So, the prices for the full service product definitely seem a lot lower than the "Feedback" product.
- rrwhite 16y ago
  We just spent the last half hour hurriedly changing our marketing site nav based on feedback :) The prices are lower because their per admin. One of our goals wast to make the entry level price points more accessible.

rrwhite 16y ago

Getting data into and out of applications is a big issue in the era of SaaS. We've built data export into every single (non-free) plan we have (Though clearly there is a data translation issue. Anyone want to setup a company that helps you move your data between services for a cut of the service providers fees because I'd totally pay for that). We've focused on doing less but doing it really well. We already had a lot of startups using us for feedback and using email for support. For $5/mo they can now get both. We hope that's workable for the 2 guys and a dog eating ramen crowd and if not we're open to feedback.

bmelton 16y ago

What really hooked me on programming is when I wrote what later became the Enterprise Knowledge Base of a Fortune 50 company. I was working on their help desk at the time, and the existing knowledge tools sucked, and had HUGE gaps between them. I wrote something new, and specifically tailored to their process. This was over 10 years ago, and they still use it to this day, and have established a team of people to support it. I'll spare you the feature set (of which I'm quite proud), but the main thing that made it so intrinsic to their process was that it was written FOR their process. It was completely bespoke. It interfaced with their particular phone systems, their calendaring, their ticket tracking system, etc. It was truly an enterprise-class tool, but for the fact that there weren't any layers of abstraction. The abstraction you usually have to put in to support a variety of databases, or a variety of phone systems, or a variety of calendaring tools because, the market for enterprise customers with MS-SQL + Avaya phone servers + Lotus Domino calendaring is crazy small. Had it been re-engineered to work for all those systems, then it would truly have sucked. That is, I think the problem with tools like this -- you either conform to the process of the tool, or conform the tool to your process, and it's really hard to get right and stay lean. Maybe impossible.

dpcan 16y ago

It turns out the pricing for this full service product isn't directly under the "Pricing" button at the top, but under the Pricing button under the prices on the Pricing page. So, the prices for the full service product definitely seem a lot lower than the "Feedback" product.

rrwhite 16y ago
We just spent the last half hour hurriedly changing our marketing site nav based on feedback :) The prices are lower because their per admin. One of our goals wast to make the entry level price points more accessible.