HelpScout (<a href="https://www.helpscout.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.helpscout.net/</a>). 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 build all our tools from customer support, CRM, billing, payroll to accounting -> <a href="https://erpnext.com" rel="nofollow">https://erpnext.com</a>. Its also open source, and would love more startups to use it. <a href="https://github.com/frappe/erpnext" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/frappe/erpnext</a><p>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.
We have started doing blog posts reviewing the various SaaS services we use: <a href="http://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/toolsweuse" rel="nofollow">http://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/toolsweuse</a><p>so far we've covered
* Baremetrics
* Quaderno<p>coming soon:
* Statsbot
* Hosted Graphite
* StatusCake
* TravisCI
* Drip
* TransferWise (not a SaaS service, but saves us a ton of money)
StatusGator uses Freshdesk on the free plan and it's adequate for our needs.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
For <a href="https://snapcx.io" rel="nofollow">https://snapcx.io</a> , I have been experimenting with freshdesk, zendesk and zoho too. In end, as we are simple startup, I decided to stick with<p><pre><code> - Straight email support
- asciidoc generated html pages for documentation https://snapcx.io/docs
- self hosted contact us form. (it sends email to support)
- free zendesk chat. (as of today, it's one or two chat request, which sends email to support email)
- As we are selling API subscription, I am hosting swagger based api explorer. (simple html page)
- https://snapcx.io/addressValidationAPI
</code></pre>
My current gap is more intuitive documentation, which has search functionality and also in-built api explorer. I believe readme.io has both but no customer support features.
Groove (<a href="https://www.groovehq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.groovehq.com/</a>) only. We're super happy with it!
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.<p>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:<p>- Users are way more likely to reach out in the first place due to the easy live chat/email widget on each page<p>- 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])
Self-Plug. We use our own product (<a href="http://www.enchant.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.enchant.com</a>) to support our customers .. It covers email support, a knowledge base website, live chat widget for the marketing site (i.e. sales), and an in-app widget that offers both live chat and an embedded knowledge base.<p>Try it out - it's faster than gmail :)
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.
Plug: we are in private beta with Feedback[1], the customer support version of BugReplay[2]. We integrate with Zendesk aside from our standard custom JavaScript integration.<p>In short, it's a product for Web development teams to collect perfect no-hassle bug reports from their users with all the details (video, network traffic, js logs) required to analyze and reproduce a problem.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.bugreplay.com/feedback-by-bugreplay" rel="nofollow">https://www.bugreplay.com/feedback-by-bugreplay</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.bugreplay.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.bugreplay.com</a>
At viurdata.com we use Live Chat <a href="https://www.livechatinc.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.livechatinc.com/</a>
Good piece of software and we also take advantage of their ticket system
This has been interesting to read and raises an interesting question: it appears lots of you are leaving Zendesk and now using something else...<p>1) We still Zendesk here, what inspired you to leave?<p>2) What do you like about where you landed?
Zendesk. We are thinking about switching to something else (currently looking at Freshdesk) as the service is getting disproportionally expensive with many users.
HelpSpot for HelpDesk <a href="https://helpspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://helpspot.com/</a>
Discourse for public discussion <a href="https://www.discourse.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.discourse.org/</a><p>Both can be self-hosted or SaaS which provides some nice flexibility.
Helpmonks (<a href="https://helpmonks.com" rel="nofollow">https://helpmonks.com</a>) is being used by a lot of startups. One of the main reasons is because the price is based on mailbox(es) and not on users.
At <a href="http://formbit.co" rel="nofollow">http://formbit.co</a>, I use UserDeck. It has Guides (knowledge base) and Mailboxes, which serves our purpose. I looked at some other mentioned in this thread, but this works well for me.
Shameless plug. We built a Voice of the Customer tool - <a href="https://insightstash.com" rel="nofollow">https://insightstash.com</a> Collect feedback from visitors directly on your site. Lots of features and customizations.
We're using our own service for customer feedback, crowdsourcing and also bug tracking: <a href="https://www.stomt.com/stomt" rel="nofollow">https://www.stomt.com/stomt</a>
<a href="https://liveformhq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://liveformhq.com/</a> uses Mixpanel for tracking behavior to improve our product. We also used Zendesk for a while.
For customer communication... at AuthorityLabs we're using:<p>1) Intercom for chat and notifications<p>2) PagePilot (pagepilot.io) for the knowledgebase<p>3) G Suite for support@<p>4) Campaign Monitor for mass emails<p>Note: PagePilot is a new project of ours. Looking for beta testers :)
Using Tidio Chat. Seems okay so far. - <a href="http://tidiochat.com" rel="nofollow">http://tidiochat.com</a><p>Edit: Misread the question.
Self-plug alert. At Smooz we use... Smooz (<a href="https://www.smooz.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.smooz.io</a>) 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