The best customer support software?

I work for a small early stage start up and our customer service is getting overwhelming (good sign!). We've been splitting email and phone duties but it's distracting us from anything else. We're currently just using gmail, and it's working just fine, but we want to hire someone in the Philippines to help out, and we figured it's time to switch to some more serious software.

What software do people recommend? We need a way to organize the emails, track communication with customers, build a bunch of canned messages, etc. We'd like a way to divide responsibilities with our Philippine help (e.g., they take the standard emails and we take the bug reports).

I've checked out salesforce but it seems too heavy duty. I've also heard good things about zendesk. What else is out there? What are the pros and cons?

Major thanks for any input.