Show HN: Use Trello as a Helpdesk
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Re: the price point, it's certainly cheaper than a full-fledged offering like Freshdesk, but honestly if there's one thing most businesses are probably comfortable paying for, it's tools to keep their customers happy. So I'm not sure competing on being much lower-priced is a win here.
About 80% of our email that comes in is answered with a canned response. I would make that your number one feature to add (unless it's already in, in which case I would highlight it on the homepage).
The other thing I would consider a must-have is the ability to move a card from the "Completed" list back to the "Active" list if the customer re-responds. I think a very typical workflow for this type of system is to answer the email and then consider the case "closed" unless you hear back again from the customer, in which case you want it to be moved back onto your active list.
Finally, it's not super-important to us, but I know that reporting is big in this space as well -- knowing who is responding to what and how quickly the average email is getting answered, for example. That might be the type of thing you could sell as an add-on, where you keep track of that on your end and then allow them to access a report on your site.
Overall though it's a very neat idea. I might swing back by in a few months and see where it's at and consider it for my next project.
Canned responses are not possible to implement because all the action happens inside Trello, and I can't modify the Trello UI to add new things. I've thought about using some dark magic tricks for this task, but users would not understand.
I have considered offering addons that would provide reporting and canned responses also, but those should come after I have a bigger customer base.
Anyway, thank you very much for your feedback.
At 15$ per month i use Reamaze (https://www.reamaze.com) for my consultancy and it serves as a full featured help desk with slack and github integration as well and i hear they do have a trello in the works, last I asked. Not sure if there are ones out there with a trello integration though.
Good stuff!
Provides threaded email ticketing. Knowledge base will be there soon.
Can you address how the board scales when your list of archived/answered problems reaches 100 items? 1000? 10,000?
It seems like you need something beyond the UI shown in the gif to cope with help-desk-sized email volume.
You might need a database to map the In-Reply-To header to a Trello story if the customer replies to their own message but DynamoDB on AWS would let you do this for pretty munch free.
AWS Lambda is actually absurdly powerful when combined with other AWS products. Think IFTTT only with custom code. I am 100% sure there is nothing this product does that can't be done with Lambda, SES, and AWS API Gateway from a technical standpoint.
Granted by the time you are done it would cost enough to pay for over a year of this service. Which is why I didn't say I would write it myself. Even if it takes a weekend the break even is too long. Bit if someone wants to open source it ;)
That's a strange thing to say. How many products are there that cannot be done with Lambda, SES and AWS API Gateway?
Lambda is good for stateless APIs and event processing but is not good for anything that requires persistence.
SES is an email product so it's usage is niche but it is surprisingly powerful. Example: firing a lambda function when an email bounces or is received.
I didn't list a database in there. I'm assuming Trello can be used like a database (and looking at their API it seems it can in this case).
So to answer your question:
- Any app that requires state
- Any app that requires persistent connections
- Any app where a unit of work can take more than 6 seconds
- Any front-ends [1]
- Apps where local cache is needed to provide any sort of reasonable performance
- Apps that need a database
Cannot be made with just those three tools.
[1] It is possible to make a front-end with API gateway and Lambda. API gateway can return different mime types, including HTML. But it would be a huge hack and also not likely cost effective. A static site generated and hosted on S3 with Cloud Front in-front of it is very cost effective but requires the client use javascript. If noscript is a requirement you're stuck with a server.
Worked as a great lo-fi solution for me, since you can just have all the support team download the Trello app and they'll get a push notification whenever something comes in.
That's what these guys do: http://www.bluepensoftware.com/