What's the best customer service or help desk ticket software available?

May 21, 2010 5:22 PM

What is the best customer service tracking (help ticket) type software out there right now?

My organization is growing enough that we need to start tracking our customer service issues. What software have you used at your company? How has it worked for you?

Free and open-source would be preferred, but we will absolutely pay for the BEST solution. We currently have about a dozen support reps, and several support email boxes. Automatic ticket creation through email (with an autoresponder) is essential.

I reviewed previous questions already, but they were all a bit dated. RT was recommended... is it still a great solution? Or is there something better out there?

posted by eleyna to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Zendesk is a hosted solution that is really nice. It's certainly not free, but also reasonable considering you've already invested in a sizeable staff. You can customize it pretty nicely, map it to your domain, and customize it in all sorts of ways.
posted by iamscott at 5:27 PM on May 21, 2010

My company uses Autotask. Geared towards IT support issue tracking, but if that's your thing it's really fantastic.
posted by csimpkins at 5:39 PM on May 21, 2010

You should have someone who knows Perl on-hand to customize and tweak RT as needed if you go with it. RT is very powerful but I wouldn't recommend it to a Windows-only shop. It is also not geared towards "boss pages" of pie charts and summary stats of time worked per ticket, if that matters to you.
posted by benzenedream at 6:01 PM on May 21, 2010

We're recently switched to OTRS and while we've only been using it for a few weeks, it's really turned around our whole support department.
posted by friedrice at 6:05 PM on May 21, 2010

I don't do customer service and neither does my company in a formal... form, but the cool kids all use Get Satisfaction.
posted by tmcw at 6:09 PM on May 21, 2010

Oh, and Tender.
posted by tmcw at 6:10 PM on May 21, 2010

Good and difficult question: I second OTRS as a good approach, but SysAid is quite good, despite not being know very well. It has two versions: lite and full. The lite one is free and it can kick start your ticket management system, allowing you to upgrade to the full version if you consider it necessary.

One final word of advice: consider carefully if you only want to register tickets or to grow to a more mature Service Management cycle. Not all tools are created equal!
posted by Matrod at 1:42 AM on May 22, 2010

We use trellis desk, self-hosted php (it had to be free, in our case). It's not the most complicated job ticket system, but it works for us. Mostly, we use it for incoming unknown user email->ticket creation and tracking. It can assign an email address to a 'department', with help desk agents (with their own mailboxes) being a member of as many departments as needed. (incoming email is via pipe or pop checking). Also has a news section and knowledge base, but we don't use that - our users aren't too hot on reading webpages, especially if they need to login, but they can handle sending email ok, they get back a receipt with link to the followup, and any replies we post in the admin side also go out by email. It's even smart enough to handle email replies as belonging to the same ticket.

The only tweak I made to the (open source) code was to allow through emails with blank subjects or contents, which are ignored by default, though I've not had the chance to test v2 yet where they have made a bunch of improvements supposedly.
posted by ArkhanJG at 3:14 AM on May 22, 2010

Seconding Tender, which handles e-mail particularly well.
posted by sachinag at 7:12 AM on May 22, 2010

Response by poster: Thank you all for your suggestions. Will try each of these & let you know how it goes.
posted by eleyna at 9:16 PM on May 25, 2010