Customer support system with easy integration?

Question

I'm one of the main developers on a complex web application. As we start to gain more users, we need a better method of managing customer support. Currently, we just have a support email box that someone goes through and answers questions, or forwards them off to other team members who can help. But it's getting too big to manage.

Ideally, we'd like some kind of system that still allows users to get help via email if they want, but on our end we should have some kind of web app to manage it all. Another thing which would be nice is if it were easy for us to integrate with our existing website and user system.

Does anyone have any experience / suggestions on a system of this type?

Answer 1

you're probably best of developing your own little support ticket system.

should take longer than 2 workdays to get it up and running.

Answer 2

I personally use HelpSpot (www.userscape.com) and it's great. It can pull in emails via POP3 (and IMAP?) and turn them into support requests. When you reply via the web interface, an email is sent back to the user. The whole correspondance is kept together -- very nice.

I haven't played with the integration bit, but I know it has some support for external user validation, and apparently an API is coming/here.

Also has a built-in forum and knowledge base, although I don't use those features so I can't comment.

Answer 3

FogBugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZ/) has support for converting incoming e-mails to tasks and keeps tracks of replies as long as you use the web interface to reply. It also has hosted mode, which allows to set it up in minutes. Only requires a POP3 account on your side.

Answer 4

BugTracker.NET at http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html functions very well as a support system that takes input from the outside via email and is web-based on the inside.

Don't let the word "bug" scare you off. You can easily customize the name and "branding" of the application, the word bug to "ticket", or whatever.

BugTracker.NET is free and open source. You didn't specify the technology of your existing infrastructure, so I don't know about how to integrate it, but BugTracker.NET is an ASP.NET / SQL Server application. It supports LDAP/Active Directory authentication too.

Answer 5

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned RT: Request Tracker yet. It is a great ticketing system, able to be used solely via an email interface, if desired, and it also comes with a full-featured web front-end.

Integration into an existing web site is possible via its APIs. You should be able to authenticate into RT via an external source (though I've not done that, it's been available for years), and with CSS change the look and feel of RT to be more similar with your existing site. If need be, you can even bypass the RT web front end completely and just use the fairly simple APIs to list tickets and what not, but that would be a lot of work, because you'd essentially be re-writing the existing front end.

RT can be up and running in an hour or so, or you can spend weeks customizing it. I chose the latter approach and found a nice balance between modeling our existing work-flow and adopting new practices that a new tool allowed us to. There is an existing book that can help you learn all about RT (a bit outdated but still very relevant) and it has great community support via a mailing list and wiki.

Answer 6

We eneded up going with Kayako's eSupport. It works very nicely, has lots of features. For now, we took the lazy way out: customers never see the eSupport UI, all their interaction is done through email (and to make it slightly easier, in our webapp we added a form where they can fill in a question/bug report/etc and it emails it into the eSupport inbox, using their email as the From:). This way we don't have to worry about customizing the UI, since only staff members ever see it.

Answer 7

We had the same issue here, with a shared "IT Support" inbox gradually becoming too big to manage, and we went with Kayako's eSupport, as mentioned by davr.

It's incredibly customisable to suit any environment. And since it uses MySQL, we've built an entire reporting system on top of it.

Kayako have really good user forums.

Also, if you haven't yet, check out this Wiki article.