How We Chose Our New Help Desk Software

Our experience trying out SupportBee, Enchant, Groove, Reamaze and many others in our quest for the perfect help desk application.

Photo by Matthias Ripp is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We have been users of SupportBee for our customer support at Vocation City since January 2013 to June 2014. SupportBee is a really nice application. But we recently decided to have another look at the competition because we needed more.

We tried many products. Some were new to us, others were already tested in January 2013 but we wanted to try out their new features.

Enchant: Our Winner

We eventually settled on adopting Enchant (previously known as SupportFu) as our new help desk software. This is a really great product, extraordinary well thought, the kind of product that beautifully illustrates the idiom “the devil is in the details”. When we had a first look at Enchant more than one year ago, we didn’t choose it because the product was still young and some features essential to us were missing. But the attention to details and the desire to add features without compromising the overall simplicity was already visible.

Enchant, compared to our previous solution, brings us a lot:

• One inbox per support channel — We receive messages on two email addresses: one is low-traffic high-priority, the other is high-traffic low-priority. It’s important for us to have a ticket queue dedicated to each.
• Can view the email headers (From, To, Subject, etc.) associated to each message by clicking the “view detail” link (this is similar to Gmail)
• Can view the “raw” email (headers and body) — SupportBee can do this but only for the first message and during 30 days
• Excellent keyboard shortcuts
• Define macros/workflows
• Bulk replies
• Merge tickets
• Edit contact name
• Merge contacts
• Associate multiple email addresses to a contact
• Keep notes for a contact
• Standardized signature for the whole company (not per user)
• The email address and the signature used for replies are based on the team assigned to the ticket instead of the inbound channel, which is handy when a ticket is transferred from one team to another
• Twitter integration
• Add a sidebar on the ticket screen displaying customer details dynamically extracted from your app or CRM (and secured with a HMAC signature)

In exchange for all this useful stuff, there is a small price to pay:

• The user interface is very effective, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s less attractive than Groove or Reamaze
• No spam filter (but we were already living without it in SupportBee, and it looks like most Enchant customers use Google Apps or Gmail and can rely on Gmail spam filter)
• Cannot render HTML email
• No lightbox image preview (image is opened in another tab)

I should add that Enchant’s customer support is absolutely amazing, one of the best I have ever received.

Groove: “The Simple Alternative to Zendesk”

Groove offers a really nice interface, and they delivered a lot of improvements during the last year, but we still miss a lot for our use case:

• Cannot view the “raw” email (headers and body)
• No spam filter
• Cannot merge contacts
• No keyboard shortcuts (but they are planned for June 2014!)
• Cannot view HTML email
• No rich formatting at all (but it is planned for June 2014 too)
• Cannot associate multiple email addresses to a contact
• Autocomplete when creating a ticket only shows the customer name, not his/her email
• No macros
• No bulk replies
• Beware when you invite a user to not use the wrong email address, because once the invitation email was sent, you cannot cancel it.

Reamaze: “Customer Support Made Amazing”

Reamaze offers a beautiful application, very nice to use, a “view original email” link useful to view an HTML email, HTML5 desktop notifications, and the possibility to define “workflows” (automated sequences of actions) and apply them to many tickets at once.

They also have a very useful “Support Lightbox”. The customer can not only send a message through a web form, he can also get a list of all the pending tickets with a complete history, in a modal dialog easily integrable into your website. We would have liked to use it, but it’s English only, unlike our application which is available in other languages.

Update: It looks like Reamaze Lightboxes now support multiple languages, according to Marvin Strauss’ comment at the beginning of this article.

Despite these interesting features, we haven’t chosen Reamaze because:

• It feels slow — Reamaze looks like a single page application but actually a full page is obtained from the server after each action and only the relevant part is injected into the DOM (like PJAX).
• Cannot view raw email (headers and body)
• Cannot create a ticket without sending an email to the customer (for example to log a phone call)
• Cannot forward a ticket to someone
• Cannot merge contacts
• Cannot merge tickets
• No standardized signature
• Reamaze has a “Contacts” tab. This made me think the contact management features were strong. They’re not. You can’t edit the contact name, email address, or add notes.

Other Solutions

Help Scout is a really nice solution but suffers from a critical drawback in my opinion: it’s not a single page application, which means the entire page is reloaded after each action. This makes the application significantly slower than the ones described above. Help Scout says they plan to work on a new user interface later this year.

Firehose, Respondly, Bornevia and apoio pride simplicity as a virtue, and I agree with them on that, but they are too much simple for what we need. Enchant makes a better job at being simple while staying powerful.

Zendesk, Desk.com, UserVoice, Freshdesk, Deskero (very nice website by the way), HappyFox and Casengo feels too much complex, closer to SAP than Gmail. It’s not the kind of software we want to use in our small agile team.

Disclosure: We have nothing to disclose because we aren’t affiliated in any way with any of the companies mentioned in this post. We were a happy customer of SupportBee and are now a happy customer of Enchant. If you are one the providers mentioned above and have identified a mistake, please comment the article.