Ask HN: A completely e-mail based support helpdesk
Reading the recent thread about the launch of Freshdesk from a HN comment made me go back and read that entire HN thread. While thinking about what a better helpdesk system would be like, I remembered a line in a recent post from Paras Chopra of Visual Website Optimizer, wondering how to cut time on support.
So here's my theory: Early stage startups typically can't afford to have dedicated support guys, so they usually have one of the founders or the developers doing support also. Also, a founder/developer (in such a startup) typically has much better ways to spend his time, than answering support requests. So what if there is a support helpdesk which acts entirely through email?
Imagine: When a support request is sent to support@foo.baz, the email is read, automatically categorized depending on predefined categories, tagged, indexed, and then assigned to a particular person depending on predefined criteria. An email is then fired off to that person with it's content being the original text of the support request, a list of 5 similar support requests previously handled (numbered 1 to 5), and the actions performed and responses given to those previous requests.
The developer can then simply reply with a command verb such as 'reply 3' to tell the support desk that the same response as the third request in the suggested list should be sent back to the user. Or, if none of the suggested responses match, they can simply type out a new response to that request. Or, if they are working on some crazy awesome new feature, they could simply reply with 'reassign' and the system would reassign the request to another person and send them the same email. The responses are then indexed and tagged and sent back out to the user who first asked the question.
This way developers/founders answering support don't have to deal with clunky interfaces, and they can save time by quickly responding to a query without having to search through a knowledge base or something similar. I realise that this is probably not the way you would want to handle support as your company grows, so there would be easy ways to export all your data for use with some other service too.
So what do you guys think of such a system? Does it already exist? If not, is there a good reason it doesn't already exist? Most importantly, would you use such a service? Why or why not? Also, how much would you be willing to pay for such a service on a monthly basis?
Regards,
chaosprophet