Helperoo: World's Simplest Help Desk
Support can be a tricky thing for web workers who sell software. On the one extreme, you can try to handle all of your support activities through your regular email and telephone calls, and not treat them any different from other customer contacts. On the other extreme, you can buy and configure a full-blown support system (there are many choices) that handles customer and ticket tracking, workflow, and more.
Helperoo offers a solution in the middle ground. It’s an online hosted system for handling email support, so it tracks all of your support activities in a single place. But it is stripped down to just the essential features, so you can focus on handling support mail instead of trying to manage a one-man show with a tool intended for large teams.
After signing up with Helperoo, you get a login-protected subdomain of your own (something like MyCompany.helperoo.com) and a secret email address. To finish setting things up, create a support account on your own mail server and forward it to your secret address. At that point, any mail sent to your support account will show up on your Helperoo page.
Helperoo handles email notifications (telling customers that their requests have been received, and telling you that there’s something new to look at). Once you open an email online, you can forward it, reply to it, or mark the case open or closed. That’s about it – but that should be enough for a tiny ISV who wants to make sure support messages go to a dedicated address and don’t fall through the cracks.
Helperoo’s basic level is free. For $12 per month you can upgrade to Helperoo Pro, giving you SSL connections, unlimited email (the free level is limited to 200 emails per month), and removing the “Powered by Helperoo” line at the bottom of your support emails.
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Great program, used it for about 6 months. There was a couple of quirky things about it but overall a good program. Couple of things I didn’t like was…
1. Being a user of OTRS in the past I really liked the snips they would include in the notification emails. It allowed me to decipher if I needed to answer the email immediately or if it could wait. As a small shop I use my blackberry a lot and it would be nice to have part of the email in the notification in case it was something urgent.
2. When you replied to emails it never included the original message in it when sending. Sometimes people want to see what you are responding about in case they didn’t use the subject line correctly and sent in a couple of tickets.
Other then that you can’t beat the price for a one user ticket management/email system.