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January 14, 2013 By Chase Livingston 12 Comments

If you haven’t noticed yet, we’re pretty fanatical about support. When it comes to the tools we use to support our customers, we’ve tried a lot. Being the sharing types that we are, customer support tool reviews seemed a natural thing to do.

A little background before we begin. I work at Canonical providing customer support for users of Ubuntu One. Since being hired, I’ve been working on finding and transitioning our support to a newer, more robust application. While doing the research, I was talking with Chase quite a bit. He suggested that maybe I should write a few posts on the tools I looked into and why we ended up deciding on the one that we did.

What follows is by no means an exhaustive review of each tool, but I hope these reviews will at least get you started if you’re looking to implement something for the first time, or you’re not satisfied with your current tool. The list below is in no particular order except that I’m saving the one we went with for the end. Enjoy, and feel free to hit me up on Twitter with any comments/questions.

The Customer Support Apps

These are the ones I focused on in the hunt.

  1. Tender
  2. Desk
  3. UserVoice
  4. HelpSpot
  5. Snappy
  6. Zendesk

Bonus Reviews

  1. The other Chase’s review of Desk, an app that he’s been using for over a year.
  2. Luke talks about using SupportBee for his team.
  3. The other Chase takes a look at Help Scout.

If you use one that’s not listed here, I’d love to add your review to the list. Just get in touch with us here.

Now on to the reviews!

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Comments

  1. msalciccia says

    January 16, 2013 at 3:39 pm

    I’d love to hear more about what folks like and dislike about Desk. We use Zendesk, and are pretty happy with it, but am curious to know folks’ thoughts on Desk in particular, especially if they’ve switched from Zendesk to Desk.

    Reply
    • Chase Clemons says

      January 17, 2013 at 9:05 pm

      Agreed! The 37signals team is using Desk so I’m ready to chirp in on that one.

      Reply
      • Andrew says

        January 21, 2013 at 4:46 am

        Hi Chase, are you happy with Desk at 37signals? We’re using it at Resource Guru but wondering if Zendesk might be a better bet.

        Reply
        • Chase Clemons says

          January 21, 2013 at 10:35 am

          Overall, we’re pretty happy with it at 37signals. I’ll be adding my own thoughts on it once Chase L. posts his review of it. I like seeing it from a person new to it first. 🙂

          Reply
          • Andrew says

            January 21, 2013 at 12:47 pm

            OK, great – looking forward to seeing your comments. I’m finding the default email templates to be pretty ugly and not exactly easy to change. There are also a couple of other things that haven’t been great. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s made the switch from one to the other to see which they prefer.

  2. Ethan says

    January 18, 2013 at 3:08 pm

    I’d like to see what you think about Groove. Looks interesting to me.

    Reply
    • Chase Clemons says

      January 21, 2013 at 10:34 am

      I’ll try to get that one on the list!

      Reply
  3. lauraglu says

    January 28, 2013 at 6:09 pm

    Could these reviews include the limitations? Or why you didn’t go with them?

    Reply
    • Chase Livingston says

      January 29, 2013 at 7:44 am

      Hi! I can definitely try to include those, though they’re probably not as exciting as you might think. Zendesk and Desk were very close for us, and we chose Zendesk because of some specific API features it offers, as well as some familiarity some of our team had with it.

      Reply
    • Chase Clemons says

      January 29, 2013 at 9:07 am

      And I’ll definitely include the limitations of the apps I’ve worked with. https://supportops.mystagingwebsite.com/using-desk-everyday/ has the companion article to Chase’s Desk review.

      Reply
  4. michale says

    April 28, 2014 at 1:26 am

    Happyfox is intuitively designed help desk which is a viable alternative of Zendesk. Check out the Comparison of Happyfox vs desk here https://www.happyfox.com/desk-alternative/

    Reply
  5. Niraj Ranjan Rout says

    October 16, 2014 at 12:54 am

    Try out Mailflo – turns your Gmail into a customer support tool. Incredibly easy to use, super intuitive, and there’s nothing new to learn! http://mailflo.io

    Reply

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