General Consultant Discussion

Has anyone used Assistly as a help desk? Anyone using anything else that is 100% web based (ie Zendesk) that they like?

I haven't.

I'm starting to run into customers who claim they don't receive an email reply. So much of our support is repetitive and can easily (and efficiently) be handled via email. I'm looking for a way to just formalize the case management. How I'm doing it now by email works in about 90% of the instances. I would, for example, like to send back to not only the customer but maybe their supervisor an update on the issue and let them tell me whether it's resolved or not. And if they fail to say ""hey you fixed it"" have them get a reminder. At least when that small percent of customers comes back in a year and says ""hey remember that error 47 you never fixed"" -- you can then have some type of formal documentation on exactly what occurred - as well as an indication that you made a good faith effort to followup to make sure it was resolved to their satisfaction.

I've been seeing a lot of non spam messages hitting spam filters of late, so they may not be getting them. It's a good model. We're using Zen at one organization I'm involved with and it works well enough, even if 1980 wants it's interface back. ;) The ipad app works well enough too. It's not where I really want to be though.

I was not really impressed with ZenDesk. The big drawback for me with Assistly is that Salesforce owns them and I'm afraid that their model of one free user may go away at some point.

Yeah, I know this guy, we'll call him @PeterWolf. He sells this CRM software. It does this thing. It's a web portal. Looks like it works really well.

Case Management and Sage CRM go together like a bullet in a gun.

These are both 100% web based, right?

Sage CRM offers non-licensed accessed two different ways: the Portal module (officially called Self-Service) or via web services. Both are 100% web based. Both require some fine-tuning to fit the specific need. Web Services is just a programming layer and would require the most work. The Portal module allows you to display CRM screens, lists, other stuff through a web site. It costs $5K roughly but as partners, I think we could swing a trial copy to showcase it to prospects that would use it to record cases.