Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tool(s) does your startup use?

[mitchellwfox]

I am selecting a customer service workflow tool to help manage inbound customer communications. A small group of employees will be logged into this tool to receive questions via email, social media posts, and (probably) live chat from prospective and existing customers. The goal is to help maintain a record of all communications, ensure no messages "fall through the cracks", and help us measure our responsiveness, efficiency, and productivity as a service organization. The tool we select should ideally also help us generate and manage a knowledge base / FAQ site.

The candidates I have identified so far:

Desk.com (formerly Assist.ly) - $49/user/month ZenDesk - $20 - $49/user/month UserVoice - $15 - $35/user/month FreshDesk - $9 - $25/user/month

Does anyone have experience using these? Your suggestions and feedback are appreciated.

[skrish]

We use Freshdesk. We need to pay for 3 instead of 4 of us, as first agent is free. For a SAAS startup that is just getting started this fits our needs perfectly - support tickets that are captured via mail and listens to conversations on twitter, facebook and converts into tickets. Saves plenty of time. All the other features you mentioned are all covered - like knowledge base, feature requests etc.,

Disclosure: We are friends of Freshdesk team - Zoho alumni network. :)

[swastik]

I've used Assistly (for about an year) for this, and they are extremely good for all that you have mentioned. I've never used them for live chat (do they even have that function?) so I can't say anything. I loved the UI; it's extremely easy to use.

From the outside, Freshdesk and Zendesk look good too.

[amarcus]

You could try Zoho Support ($12/user/month) - this will provide you with a help desk including social media monitoring.

In terms of live chat, you will need to find a service that integrates with Zoho (i've seen a few of them around but, can't recall any right now).