Comments on Business, Innovation and Ideas: Customer Support, helpdesk, knowledge bases and co...

Some further definitions for those who asked: De...

2011-08-09T11:00:15.398-07:00

Some further definitions for those who asked:

Definitions for the below:
Customer = Your customers who are looking for help and support
Agent = Your staff who are answering tickets
App = The main application which your customers have paid you to use, and need help with

- Instant Access to Support Articles
Means Agent can put some kind of help tab that opens a lightbox in my own application so that the Customer can instantly access the knowledge base without leaving the App and coming back.

- Ask a question as an admin
This is a bit specific - basically can Agent filter the type of Customers who can ask questions (i.e. only super users or account administrators)

- Ask a public question
As a Customer, can I ask a question that can be answered publicly by another member of the community OR an Agent. And that will remain available to answer future users with the same issue.

- Suggested answers during ticket
As a Customer, does the app give me suggested articles which might answer my question as I type the content of my support ticket? If so, how annoying / useful is the implementation?

- Ticket Feedback from CMR
As a Customer, can I give feedback on the quality of the ticket response?

- Contact to extend acct.
Again specific. as a Customer, can I make contact with the support team for commercial rather than support queries and have my request forwarded automatically (or manually by an Agent) to the right people.

Hi Richard, Indeed the UI is great - but you'...

2011-05-17T00:44:40.752-07:00

Hi Richard,

Indeed the UI is great - but you're still missing uploadable screenshots in knowledgebase articles, and SLAs through SSO. :)

Best,
James

Hi Jeff, Thank you very much for commenting on my...

2011-05-17T00:27:39.451-07:00

Hi Jeff,

Thank you very much for commenting on my article. The reason that Get Satisfaction was included in the comparison is simply that it is a great product.

As a result - I was trying to imagine a scenario where a business could use it exclusively - encouraging customers or taking all feedback publicly, and answering publicly too.
Questions work like knowledgebase articles, Ideas are obviously feature requests, Problems (effectively public versions of tickets), and Praise - a bonus!

http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint - Is clearly an example of a brilliant Get Satisfaction use case, where the customer is able to move to a separate private ticketing system by clicking "contact us" when required.

Best,
James

James, I appreciate you including Get Satisfactio...

2011-05-16T20:02:04.372-07:00

James,

I appreciate you including Get Satisfaction in your analysis, however we are not a help desk app, as evidenced by the fact that we offer integration connectors for Zendesk, Parature, Assistly, and Salesforce Service Cloud.

Get Satisfaction is a platform for branded company-to-customer communities, think of it as a solid foundation for comprehensive social CRM initiatives. We bring distributed community efforts (Facebook, widgets, Twitter, APIs) together to provide companies large and small with a proven framework for engaging customers to improve their products, answer their questions, capture positive feedback, and yes, resolve problems when they arise.

We have consciously avoided going down the help desk path because it is a very crowded market with many solid products and our customers typically already have a help desk that they wish to integrate with, or in the case of the many startups that we work with they prefer to adopt a best of breed approach that brings customer community and help desk system together through integration.

Our customers rely on us to engage their customers for marketing and sales objectives, as well as service and support. Point in fact, only 1 in 3 topics posted in Get Satisfaction communities are problems, the majority of topics are questions and ideas, both of which have a very different lifecycle than a help desk ticket.

Please feel free to contact me directly at jeff at getsatisfaction dot com.

Hi James, Excellent write-up. We've put a *lo...

2011-05-16T16:31:15.921-07:00

Hi James,

Excellent write-up. We've put a *lot* of work into making a great UserVoice a great user experience for agents and users alike so we were pleased to see you giving us the only 10 in you grid for the speed of our UI and a 9 for the simplicity of it. Thanks!

PS We're currently beta testing manual ticket creation. It should be out in a few weeks :)

Richard White
CEO, UserVoice.com

Hi Anon, Thanks for the feedback - I've never...

2011-05-16T14:17:18.094-07:00

Hi Anon,

Thanks for the feedback - I've never had to open a manual ticket and Uservoice lets users create tickets from a handy lightbox - so not too bad?. However I concede that SLAs missing is definitely an important issue for some businesses.

Regards,

James

I think your assessment of Assistly and ZenDesk ar...

2011-05-16T13:37:49.444-07:00

I think your assessment of Assistly and ZenDesk are good but you give UserVoice too much credit at this point. While the potential is there it is lacking code features such as the ability to open a manual ticket! It only supports email ticket creation. Also missing the ability to do service level agreements and other critical features.

One I would add to your list to review, TenderApp.

Thanks for the blog article.

Thanks, James, for sharing your results. Very inte...

2011-05-16T12:02:47.577-07:00

Thanks, James, for sharing your results. Very interesting and lots of food for thought.