Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#41

Post by polysaturate » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 3:29 PM UTC

yalooze wrote: post #10

HelpScout ( https://www.helpscout.net/ ). Brilliant piece of software built by a bunch of people that really care. Regular new features and improvements, an intelligent help desk that just gets out of the way, and docs for customer self-service (they have a private option for docs which we use for internal knowledgebases too)

Yes, I can't approve of HelpScout enough, used them on the very generous fee tier. Was easy to use and the web app is pretty damn snappy.

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#42

Post by Faaak » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

freyfogle wrote: post #3

We have started doing blog posts reviewing the various SaaS services we use: http://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/toolsweuse so far we've covered * Baremetrics * Quaderno coming soon: * Statsbot * Hosted Graphite * StatusCake * TravisCI * Drip * TransferWise (not a SaaS service, but saves us a ton of money)

Is there really much to say about StatusCake ? I use it and I have to say that it seems too much simple (not enough alert terms, hasn't got hooks, too expensive)..

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#43

Post by rushabh » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 3:51 PM UTC

We build all our tools from customer support, CRM, billing, payroll to accounting -> https://erpnext.com. Its also open source, and would love more startups to use it. https://github.com/frappe/erpnext

The benefit of open sources is that you can build deep integration to your processes and also grow it as your company grows. With closed tools, you will end up paying a lot and also lose the opportunity to drive more team productivity by being unable hack and extend your tools.

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#44

Post by donmatito » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

Self-plug alert. At Smooz we use... Smooz (https://www.smooz.io) to open 800+ shared Slack channels with each team who install the app in their Slack team. Obviously, not everyone answers, but these conversation provide 1) incredible insights into use case, unclear onboarding flow, etc 2) help convert prospects 3) help retain users

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#45

Post by coderholic » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:18 PM UTC

For https://ipinfo.io I use:

    - helpscout
    - chartmougal
    - fastmail
    - github
    - Travis
    - hookfeed
    - AWS

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#46

Post by nutanc » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:21 PM UTC

Zendesk for email

Intercom for chat

And we dogfood getkookoo for phone support

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#47

Post by pelmenept » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

Shameless plug. We built a Voice of the Customer tool - https://insightstash.com Collect feedback from visitors directly on your site. Lots of features and customizations.

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#48

Post by arbesfeld » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

At LogRocket we use

- Intercom for chat / email

- Readme for docs

- ...LogRocket for issue reproduction

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#49

Post by ajainy » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:28 PM UTC

For https://snapcx.io , I have been experimenting with freshdesk, zendesk and zoho too. In end, as we are simple startup, I decided to stick with

  - Straight email support 
  - asciidoc generated html pages for documentation https://snapcx.io/docs
  - self hosted contact us form. (it sends email to support)
  - free zendesk chat. (as of today, it's one or two chat request, which sends email to support email)
  - As we are selling API subscription, I am hosting swagger based api explorer. (simple html page) 
  - https://snapcx.io/addressValidationAPI

My current gap is more intuitive documentation, which has search functionality and also in-built api explorer. I believe readme.io has both but no customer support features.

Re: Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?

#50

Post by niel » Fri, Mar 10, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

nwenzel wrote: post #16

Front + Intercom which gives us an email-based help desk, in-app chat and messaging, and a self-service FAQ help desk.

Front + Intercom is the same combination we use. We're happy with Front's Intercom integration.

We're still using Zendesk for Help Centre, but considering alternatives. Last time I checked, Intercom's help centre product was still lacking some features we needed, unfortunately.

I think a big opportunity for Front is to make it easier to source content from different knowledge base systems (like Zendesk) to include snippets/links in emails without leaving Front. Perhaps a search box that inserts linked titles for Help Centre articles.