Top 3 Online Support Apps

Application Support is one of the crucial segments of any application which plays a major role in customer satisfaction and overall application quality. Reports show that an application with efficient and reliable support sells more as compared to applications that lack good support even though they offer more functionality. With various online support applications available, it is difficult to choose which one fits our needs the best. Below is a list of few well known support applications along with the features that each of them offer.

Features	Zendesk	Kayako	Freshdesk
Customer Communication: 1)     Emails 2)     Phone 3)     Website 4)     Chat 5)     Facebook 6)     Twitter
	ü	ü	ü
	ü	ü	ü
	ü	ü	ü
	ü	ü	ü
	ü	û	ü
	ü	û	ü
Categories and custom field tagging	ü	ü	ü
Organized view (All tickets from one person in one place)	ü	ü	û
Functionality to automate activities like route tasks, complete tasks, etc	ü	ü	ü
Search option	ü		ü
Community for customers to assist each other	ü	ü	ü
Portable on devices: 1)     Android 2)     iPad 3)     Blackberry 4)     Windows
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Collaborate with external partners/third party	ü	û	û
Custom reports	ü	ü	ü
Analytics	ü	ü	ü
Record Customer Feedback / Survey / Rating	ü	ü	ü
Macros to answer commonly asked questions	ü	ü	û
Live chat	û	ü	û
Knowledge base for self-service (find instant answers)	ü	ü	ü
Step-by-step troubleshooters for self-diagnosis	û	ü	û
Update customers by posting summary of new features on the homepage	û	ü	û
Tie tickets to organizations	û	ü	û
Internal quality checks and peer reviews	ü	ü	ü
Easy product customizations	û	ü	ü
Organized team inbox	û	ü	ü
Time-tracking for each ticket	û	ü	ü
Agent Collision Detection	ü	ü	ü
Multiple SLA Policies and Escalations	û	ü	ü
Complete Portal Customization	û	ü	ü
Games for refreshment	û	û	ü
Customers	L’Oreal, Adobe, Lonely Planet, Sony Music, Vodafone, Disney	NASA, MTV, Pearson, Toshiba	Stanford, truecaller, goodreads, MakeMyTrip, naukri.com
Price	Free trial for 30 days. Paid plans available ranging from $1/agent/month to $195/agent/month	Free trial for 30 days. Paid plans available at $29/month and $49/month	Available for free, for 3 agents $15/month. Paid plans available ranging from $16/agent/month to $40/agent/month

Review:

1. Zendesk
   Zendesk offers a colorful and easy-to-use interface. Though it has many useful features, it lacks some of the important aspects like live chat, time tracking, etc. Product customization is not very effective and SLA’s for ticket types cannot be defined. Cost wise, the range looks pretty good, however if Zendesk has to be utilized throughout the enterprise, it might turn out to be very expensive.
2. Kayako
   Kayako is an efficient service desk offering most of the necessary features. The only thing missing is portability on different devices and linkage to Facebook and Twitter. The live chat feature is a plus point here. Also, there are some additional features like linking tickets to organization, troubleshooting for self help and posting product updates on the dashboard which are not available in the other two tools. However, cost wise this may look expensive for small and mid size companies as the plans start from $29.
3. Freshdesk
   Freshdesk is a decent tool. It lacks features like live chat and macros to answer commonly asked questions. The interface of this service desk looks a bit confusing and may not be very easy to use. This tool is available for free with limited features and there are different paid plans available.

The selection of online support app depends on the requirement of the company and the features they wish to use. Based on our review of the 3 apps, the kind of tool used depends upon the requirement. However, Kayako does offer more features and is reasonably priced.

About Author:

Kintu Racca is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at kintu.r@spluspl.com