You would think that finding a good web based Help desk for a company is not that big of a deal. You Google on "Support Help Desk Web Application" and you get enough results that could take up the entire week in research for finding the one that really works.
Well, I made the mistake of choosing a good product from a bad company few months ago. I researched for nearly a month seven different companies and their products to satisfy our needs at Falafel Software in having a simple ticket based support system on the web that also has a simple knowledgebase system that can help our customers and users find and request help quickly and easily. Not too much to ask, right?
First of all, I installed all seven products and played with each one for at least 2 to 4 hours. For some reason the Help Desk industry fell in love with PHP and MySQL long time ago that it is difficult to find a Help Desk out there that is not based on these technologies. I have nothing against PHP or MySQL, if the product works, great!, I am ready to install and go for it.
I installed PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5, very easy to do especially if you know you way around config files and command line screens.
The truth of the matter is that for $500 I was able to purchase the FULL SupportSuite from Kayako (www.kayako.com) that looked, felt and behaved as the winner between all the products that I researched. The company is based in India and the product is pretty mature in its third revision. I implemented the support system for Falafel and released it on the site. It looked good, worked well and I needed less than 8 hours of work to customize it and configure for the entire staff to go live which is less than I expected.
The problems started to occur when we started using the product. It was very apparent to the team here that this product is not ready for prime time and that the team in India has never heard of the term "Quality Assurance" based on the reported bugs and forum messages that you could see for yourself at their company's site.
The final experience was 3 weeks ago when Kayako released a new "Stable" update called 3.11 where they broke the product and caused our support system to stop working on the Live Site. We opened a support ticket with their team as "Critical" and it took a week of ridiculous answers on their system to finally admit that the update has a major problem. Then a second week to come up with a solution, which fixed the original problem and killed the system notification subsystem and corrupted the database. That of course, includes about 25 discussion threads with their team that could not get them to understand the urgency of the matter. They concluded that the issue was based on my configuration, which was awkward especially after seeing how many people on the forums were having the same problem.
Anyway, the essence of this post is not really to bash any company, that is not my intent, it is however my intent to share with you the fact that it is not enough to look for a good product when you need one, it is also important to spend some time on that company's web site, forums, discussion groups to see how they treat their customers and how they release products and revisions.
For us, we decided that this product is not at par with what we need to support our customers best.
So I ask you, do you know of a product that would allow submission of Support tickets online and also allow for a Knowledgebase based on categories and finally it must have a good notification system for staff and customers.
Thanks for any input