Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

124 pointssedzia82 comments

HelpScout (https://www.helpscout.net/). Brilliant piece of software built by a bunch of people that really care. Regular new features and improvements, an intelligent help desk that just gets out of the way, and docs for customer self-service (they have a private option for docs which we use for internal knowledgebases too)

We're not a startup, but we've had great success with Helpscout too. Our customer service team absolutely love it, to the point where it's difficult to convince them that Intercom is worth trying!

Helpscout is awesome. We use their API to put a "Summon Help" button in the footer of our app and auto generate help tickets that are pre-populated with all of contextual information that we need to then quickly solve the customer issues.

Yes, I can't approve of HelpScout enough, used them on the very generous fee tier. Was easy to use and the web app is pretty damn snappy.

How does HelpScout compare with Zendesk ?

Another endorsement for HelpScout. Web app is great. iOS lacks features in a way that drives me crazy every day (team is well aware of them) but I still think it's the best available with fair pricing.

I think we've been with HelpScout for around 4 years at https://openexchangerates.org. The service is great, and they just seem like a really honest, switched-on team.

Love their service. Also love their new pricing even as an old customer. The iOS app needs serious improvement though :)

I feel the need to temper all the praise Helpscout is getting in this thread.

While Helpscout is good, it's very far from perfect.

Do you know any competitors?

We build all our tools from customer support, CRM, billing, payroll to accounting -> https://erpnext.com. Its also open source, and would love more startups to use it. https://github.com/frappe/erpnext

The benefit of open sources is that you can build deep integration to your processes and also grow it as your company grows. With closed tools, you will end up paying a lot and also lose the opportunity to drive more team productivity by being unable hack and extend your tools.

We have started doing blog posts reviewing the various SaaS services we use: http://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/toolsweuse

so far we've covered * Baremetrics * Quaderno

coming soon: * Statsbot * Hosted Graphite * StatusCake * TravisCI * Drip * TransferWise (not a SaaS service, but saves us a ton of money)

Is there really much to say about StatusCake ? I use it and I have to say that it seems too much simple (not enough alert terms, hasn't got hooks, too expensive)..

StatusCake does support web hooks, along with 10 other integrations including fully supporting advance alert routing. We also have all the features of major monitoring services as well as virus scanning, domain monitoring, SSL certificate monitoring and so many other features.

I mean, we also have a free plan that gives you monitoring (and hooks) along with a wide range of features for an unlimited amount of sites!

Kind Regards, Daniel.

StatusGator uses Freshdesk on the free plan and it's adequate for our needs.

Freshdesk has worked flawlessly and beautifully handles triaging a few support requests and product feature suggestions every day. (Aside from a hiccup where I misconfigured notifications and inadvertently ignored dozens of tickets for a month... a PEBKAC issue.)

+1 for Freshdesk. Came over from Zendesk and at the time at least it was (much) lower cost and worked better for our small biz. Great API as well with good docs.

We've used Desk.com for the past 2 or so years. For the most part, it has met our needs. We built 3 separate knowledge bases for 3 separate products, used macros to speed up answering common questions, and integrated third party phone and chat apps so we can keep records all in one place. That being said, we're probably going to be switching away. A few reasons here. First, it seems like we encounter bugs, crashes, and more serious service-level disruptions too often. Second, it is pretty expensive compared to other products out there.

We came to Desk.com when we were really small. Our CTO was still the only dev we had so we were looking for an out of the box solution that could be customized by someone who was relatively non-technical. Desk can pretty much handle a lot of this customization but what results is something a bit clunky to use. This is not a criticism of Desk itself, more just an observation about tools that promise customization without dev resources.

Anyway, I think we'll switch to HelpScout. I like that HelpScout defaults to sending plain-text emails, where Desk emails look like they come from someone using support desk software. Plus, they have all of the essential features we're looking for at a better price.

Plus, I love HelpScout's content. I'm sure their marketers will love hearing this, but all their blog posts and resources give me the impression that they are a thoughtful company that understands customer support. It's always surprising to see how many customer support tools offer horrible customer support themselves. From my experience, that disconnect does not bode well for their product.

For https://ipinfo.io I use:

    - helpscout
    - chartmougal
    - fastmail
    - github
    - Travis
    - hookfeed
    - AWS

None at Notebook.ai other than being active and responsive on social media and linking various Google Forms on-site for reporting bugs, requesting features, etc. Follow-up on those is by email. Since we're open source, we also invite anyone to create issues on GitHub as well, though it's usually the more technical crowd that do so.

Reasoning: 1) it's free, 2) quality customer service is free advertising when it's public, and 3) there's less friction to "get in touch" with us (and follow up quickly) when it's on a platform a user is already using.

Would definitely love to hear about a (free) quality customer service tool if there are any out there, though. I think we're starting to outgrow Forms/email, as some way to aggregate common requests together (without manually building a spreadsheet, like now) and sort/filter/rank them would be beneficial.

For https://snapcx.io , I have been experimenting with freshdesk, zendesk and zoho too. In end, as we are simple startup, I decided to stick with

  - Straight email support 
  - asciidoc generated html pages for documentation https://snapcx.io/docs
  - self hosted contact us form. (it sends email to support)
  - free zendesk chat. (as of today, it's one or two chat request, which sends email to support email)
  - As we are selling API subscription, I am hosting swagger based api explorer. (simple html page) 
  - https://snapcx.io/addressValidationAPI

My current gap is more intuitive documentation, which has search functionality and also in-built api explorer. I believe readme.io has both but no customer support features.

love the minimal approach but your quoted text is elongating horizontally. I don't know why the default behavior is like this for quoted text.

Hi Ajainy!

Engineer from ReadMe here. We do have a support forum that you can enable[0] for your users. Is that the kind of customer support you were talking about? If not, I'd be curious to know what you meant!

>[0] https://readme.readme.io/docs/submit-a-question

I was talking about support ticket etc.

Ah I see, we also have Zendesk integration so you can add the Zendesk widget to your ReadMe site.

> https://readme.readme.io/docs/zendesk

Groove (https://www.groovehq.com/) only. We're super happy with it!

Groove is who I went with, after looking into this area. Very happy with it so far, the on-boarding was perfect with its step by step setup. Would certainly recommend.

We have used Groove and really liked the simplicity of the software. However as use cases matured we realised that doing SEO on the knowledge base articles is not possible.

We switched to Groove from Zendesk (which was awful). We're happy with it. I do wish it had better reporting. It also has occasional hiccups (missing emails, report numbers inconsistent).

Helpscout looks promising.

oops. We migrated from Desk.com, not Zendesk and it's too late to edit this comment. Zendesk could be an amazing product.

We use Groove also. It works fine but we do wish it had any kind of mobile support. Even if the desktop site would just function in a mobile browser would be helpful. Two way Slack integration would be a dream (it has notification only now. You can't respond to tickets from slack).

it looks like Groove will be releasing a mobile app any day now (expected release early March 2017).

https://help.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topics/does-groove-...

I really hope they do, but be aware that this date keeps changing. The last time I checked this page, it was spring 2016.

FYI, we have a mobile app https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drift-messaging-for-sales/id... and a two-way Slack integration at Drift. http://www.drift.com/

Drift has worked pretty well for me so far. Use Zendesk for another product and I'm not a big fan.

Second on http://Drift.com. Pleasantly surprised how many great conversations it drives for us at https://DNSFilter.com

Drift is a great tool. Simple and effective way to get started w/ direct support.

Currently playing with drift. The app left a very good impression. Wanted to check intercom too, but their pricing confuses me :)

Olark really helped us with our customer service, we use both the live chat feature, and the 'email us' feature for when nobody is available on live chat.

We expected it would help us to respond to support requests better - which it did, but it also offered some advantages that we didn't expect:

- Users are way more likely to reach out in the first place due to the easy live chat/email widget on each page

- In some cases we have actually been able to use the data from Olark to determine the quality of our traffic and landing page (e.g. users are not understanding our message, or we are getting a lot of queries about something unrelated to our product [targeting issue])

We have just implemented Olark as well. We had a problem where a ton of our new users were signing up for our product and then radio silence. Wouldn't log in again, wouldn't respond to personal emails from myself. We implemented Olark to hopefully catch those people when they are signing up and get them engaged. It hasn't been long enough to tell if it's working or not, but we're hoping.

Self-Plug. We use our own product (http://www.enchant.com) to support our customers .. It covers email support, a knowledge base website, live chat widget for the marketing site (i.e. sales), and an in-app widget that offers both live chat and an embedded knowledge base.

Try it out - it's faster than gmail :)

I'm a very happy paying customer of Enchant. We tested Intercom (much broader scope than we wanted), Helpscout (among other things, no Markdown support), and a handful of other tools. Enchant does what we need, nothing we don't, and stays out of the way.

We just finished building our own customer support tool to save some money (we're a bootstrapped startup). We wanted live chat for customers that went straight to our Slack, since we already use it for so much. We couldn't find anything else that worked the way we wanted, so we built it.

This is such a startup thing to do :) Sounds like you might have another product pivot on your hands, would love to see what you've built! We've been dreaming of a slack + support integration that is more than just a stream of events.

We're planning on extracting it in the near future so others can use it. Will definitely be posting it as a ShowHN when it's ready!

You could actually be living in a dream with Drift. https://www.drift.com/slack/

That's very interesting. We use Slack a ton and just recently started on the Olark free plan (22 chats/month). I would love for chats to go to a separate slack channel instead of having to keep another tab open. Not to mention Olark doesn't have mobile support.

We keep track of ticketing, so whenever a customer has a support question, it opens a new Slack channel as a "ticket", and invites the people you want added to support conversations.

We had the same desire, that is why we built Chatlio a few years ago. https://chatlio.com/

Looks great! Thanks for sharing the link.

Drift https://www.drift.com

Plug: we are in private beta with Feedback[1], the customer support version of BugReplay[2]. We integrate with Zendesk aside from our standard custom JavaScript integration.

In short, it's a product for Web development teams to collect perfect no-hassle bug reports from their users with all the details (video, network traffic, js logs) required to analyze and reproduce a problem.

[1]: https://www.bugreplay.com/feedback-by-bugreplay

[2]: https://www.bugreplay.com

At viurdata.com we use Live Chat https://www.livechatinc.com/ Good piece of software and we also take advantage of their ticket system

This has been interesting to read and raises an interesting question: it appears lots of you are leaving Zendesk and now using something else...

1) We still Zendesk here, what inspired you to leave?

2) What do you like about where you landed?

We moved to Zendesk from Intercom for support. We still use Intercom, but just for product outreach and triggered messages.

We have two former Zendeskers on our team, which is part of the reason we made the switch. But also because Zendesk has things that Intercom doesn't/didn't have at the time, like a help desk.

You can also customize Zendesk with integrations pretty easily, such as by adding widgets[1]. Building and maintaining a Zendesk widget is a great developer experience.

[1] https://www.zendesk.com/embeddables/

None. Reason: Capacity and focus on product. Are we doing it wrong?

Do you have a feedback channel? How do you know your product is on track to meet customer needs?

We do have a "Beta feedback" process for all users (which is essentially a one-way communication for now) which allows us to gather their input. In addition to our Pirate analytics, we also use Mouseflow to observe user behavior. So we are gathering data both directly from users (although we could probably improve the beta feedback process) and from analytics, we just don't have a lot of extra time since we have other jobs at the moment.

Depends on the product. We sell our software to business owners who use it to manage the majority of their day to day operations. A well thought out support system was needed on day 1.

Zendesk. We are thinking about switching to something else (currently looking at Freshdesk) as the service is getting disproportionally expensive with many users.

Intercom is where it's at.

[EDIT] I intended to make this comment about Desk.com, not Zendesk. Sorry! I can't speak to Zendesk, it might be amazing.

[Original comment] Exporting your data when you leave is almost impossible. You'll need to keep paying even after you leave to keep your ticket history. I'd suggest moving sooner rather than later.

I came across this[0] yesterday on HN. Apparently they can migrate ticket history, knowledge base, etc between Zendesk and Freshdesk.

[0] https://www.help-desk-migration.com

HelpSpot for HelpDesk https://helpspot.com/ Discourse for public discussion https://www.discourse.org/

Both can be self-hosted or SaaS which provides some nice flexibility.

Front + Intercom which gives us an email-based help desk, in-app chat and messaging, and a self-service FAQ help desk.

Front + Intercom is the same combination we use. We're happy with Front's Intercom integration.

We're still using Zendesk for Help Centre, but considering alternatives. Last time I checked, Intercom's help centre product was still lacking some features we needed, unfortunately.

I think a big opportunity for Front is to make it easier to source content from different knowledge base systems (like Zendesk) to include snippets/links in emails without leaving Front. Perhaps a search box that inserts linked titles for Help Centre articles.

Helpmonks (https://helpmonks.com) is being used by a lot of startups. One of the main reasons is because the price is based on mailbox(es) and not on users.

At http://formbit.co, I use UserDeck. It has Guides (knowledge base) and Mailboxes, which serves our purpose. I looked at some other mentioned in this thread, but this works well for me.

Shameless plug. We built a Voice of the Customer tool - https://insightstash.com Collect feedback from visitors directly on your site. Lots of features and customizations.

We're using our own service for customer feedback, crowdsourcing and also bug tracking: https://www.stomt.com/stomt

https://liveformhq.com/ uses Mixpanel for tracking behavior to improve our product. We also used Zendesk for a while.

For customer communication... at AuthorityLabs we're using:

1) Intercom for chat and notifications

2) PagePilot (pagepilot.io) for the knowledgebase

3) G Suite for support@

4) Campaign Monitor for mass emails

Note: PagePilot is a new project of ours. Looking for beta testers :)

At LogRocket we use

- Intercom for chat / email

- Readme for docs

- ...LogRocket for issue reproduction

Using Tidio Chat. Seems okay so far. - http://tidiochat.com

Edit: Misread the question.

Gingr (gingrapp.com) uses Freshdesk for ticketing, live chat, and knowledge base. Recently hit ticket #20000 and we are very happy with it.

At ScreenSquid (https://screensquid.com), we're using:

- Zoho Suite (CRM, Subscriptions, Books, Campaigns)

- Loggly

- Heroku

- S3

- Mixpanel Free

- New Relic

- Compose.io

- Mandrill

How do you find Zoho? I didn't know they offered recurring billing.

It's awesome how the CRM, support, billing, campaigns, and accounting software all works together. The price is great, because you're getting full featured apps for only $60/seat.

However, the way you connect the services is kinda janky, and I find myself wishing for more modern features sometimes. There's also competing products within the same ecosystem (social, email campaigns, and now recurring billing).

The support is great and it's been great to start. I can see us growing out of it but it's doing the job for now.

Zendesk for email

Intercom for chat

And we dogfood getkookoo for phone support

Self-plug alert. At Smooz we use... Smooz (https://www.smooz.io) to open 800+ shared Slack channels with each team who install the app in their Slack team. Obviously, not everyone answers, but these conversation provide 1) incredible insights into use case, unclear onboarding flow, etc 2) help convert prospects 3) help retain users

Cachet and StyleCI use Helpscout.

We've had no real qualms with it.

Intercom for in-app chat and email messaging.

Freshdesk at Gozoomo.

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