Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes
Support systems for websites are becoming mandatory these days. Commercial sites or even personal blogs need to have effective communication channels prominently displayed on their pages where readers or visitors can reach other than some plain old contact forms. Chat buttons or links work perfectly well but in some instances, emails or written communication complements the need of a more detailed inquiry thus, a Help Desk Software installation will suffice.
Websites using MySQL or PHP language can take advantage of today’s increasing demand for ticket supported sites where users have the ability to send inquiries relevant to the site such as technical issues, bug reporting, site functionality, written articles, and advertising among countless things.
Acquiring a Hosted Help Desk service nowadays can be costly. Although startup businesses may appreciate the use of a Help Desk Demo for a period of time, once the trial has ended, companies have to pay the recurring fees involved not including maintaining the service in case they decided not to seek third-party personnel to make it work.
Using free help desk software for PHP/MySQL powered sites however have a lot advantages primarily because it’s cost-effective, readily available and most of time they are easy to use or implement. Although dedicated support is not available compared to hosted ones, majority of free software have massive users wherein you can easily find support from countless forums and blogs.
There are drawbacks however on free software in terms of security however this issue is often times addressed through consistent script updates from developers which means that webmasters using free PHP software on a self-hosted site must always be prepared to handle minimal site backups during upgrades and are keen enough in terms of securing their sites.
In-house customer support via ticketing system works wonders but along with it comes the challenge of keeping it up if tons of questions start pouring in while at the same time maintaining the quality of the answers and consistently making the website work for what it’s for.
Not even Hesk’s Free PHP Help Desk software can resolve your business’ issues if you can’t even handle them yourself.
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James Moralde
Francis
LittleDanniel
Nathaniel Ong
Paul
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I remember one client (that the company I worked for provided live support for) using Kayako, a paid support software. It was a very robust application and I was really fascinated by its working features. However, the client soon scrapped it because it contained several bugs that Kayako could not resolve promptly.
If a paid support app could be buggy, I wonder how Hesk’s Free PHP Help Desk software fares in the bug field. As usual, there’s only one way to find out. I noticed you got a Live Help box up there in your sidebar. How’s it going Math?
James Moralde´s last blog ..H-a-ck-ed!
Hi James,
The “help” button on the sidebar was powered by SnapABug visual customer service platform (Pro account). I haven’t reviewed it though but it was one of the sponsors on last year’s holiday giveaway wherein they gave out one Pro account to a lucky winner.
SnapABug returns are great and inquiries are consistently pouring in.
As for Hesk’s Free PHP Help Desk software, I have it installed here just today and if you haven’t noticed, a link to my support help desk comes after the social sharing buttons after each post.
I still can’t vouch for Hesk as I’m still testing it. As for buggy paid support systems, it doesn’t mean that paid services are always perfect for what it’s for and it doesn’t mean as well that free services are also seamless. Minimal bugs are inevitable. WordPress is sometimes buggy but as you can see, it’s the most widely used content management platform.
I double that. In fact, free systems are often less buggy and many times get issues fixed faster because they are usually backed up by a community. And having open source means such systems can have their code reviewed by a lot of people thus spotting and fixing any issues faster.
Ok. I am all for community-built free stuff.
I do see this ’submit a support ticket’ link after the social sharing buttons. And there’s this green ‘help’ tab fixed on the rightmost edge of the browser. Cool.
James Moralde´s last blog ..H-a-ck-ed!