Help Desk

May 15, 2013

⬢ buildings

Boris wrote a post on “What Support / Feedback Service Should You Use for Your Small Company” back in Dec 2011, with some updates in April 2012. When you’re just launching your app (and even pre-launch), we 100% recommend Intercom for everything from support to feature requests. The answer as you grow and need things like support SLAs, knowledge bases and so on gets more complicated. Check below for our list of tools & articles »

One of the things we’ve seen evolve is that early stage companies are no longer littering their site with links to offsite feature request or support systems. This is as it should be: the biggest thing you need for your product is feedback from early customers and potential customers.

That being said, your product may very well need to handle support requests, especially for B2B or B2D apps, or start building out a larger knowledge base.

More: * Desk.com - current top pick for all-in-one social media support, email support, and a great knowledge base. Overlaps with Intercom, but even just as social media and knowledge base, a great choice, especially with small business friendly pricing at $36 per year for everything you need. * Tender Support - our initial top pick before we fell in love with Intercom, great email-focused support flows, discussion forums, and knowledge base * UserVoice - originally “just” a feature voting system, now does full support, and their new touch point toolkit has some similar in-app features to Intercom. Use it when you’ve got a large user base you want to get involved in feature discussions. * Zendesk - we love the people at Zendesk, but the vast majority of web apps don’t need ticket-based support. If you do, then use Zendesk. * Kalv wrote a great blog post on just using email at the early stages: “Forget Tender, Get satisfaction, is an email address enough?” - Boris leaves a comment that piping that email into Intercom is better than “bare” email * In the exact opposite direction of tools, this 37signals article talks about getting the support team writing their knowledge base with Jekyll, Git, and Markdown: Teaching the Support team how to fish