Basecamp vs. ProProfs Help Desk

Basecamp is a wonderful tool for teams of varying degrees of technical knowledge, teams managing lots of different types of "agifall" and waterfall projects, and teams that are remotely distributed. It's probably less useful for more strictly agile-focused development teams, compared to other more flexible software applications like Jira and Asana.

Incentivized

As this tool is an affordable option, this help desk software is best suited for startups to deal with their customer base and build customer-centric brand value. This helps in not only helped me increase customer loyalty but also ensured customer retention, increasing my company’s profits substantially. But, this tool does have a few minor drawbacks. The most important feature, for me, that is missing from this tool is skill-based routing. Without this feature, our agents lose a lot of time in replying to just one customer question. Sometimes, the ticket needs to be reassigned to a specialized agent - and until they are available, the ticket remains open.

• Task management - It is very easy to add, organize and discuss tasks within Basecamp's interface.
• The "Campfire" function is great for communicating when you just have a quick question for someone on the team.
• Notifications - Basecamp lets you decide how often and about what you'd like to be notified. The ability to respond to messages in Basecamp directly via email saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

• Sometimes customers ask questions that require more than one agent to look into the matter. For such situations, ProProfs Help Desk has the “child ticket” feature. This literally made my life so so easy! Whenever I was in this situation, all I had to do was create a child ticket and assign it to another agent and give him a heads up on what has been going on. Answering a customer’s question accurately becomes really easy with this feature.
• Our entire team’s performance was always static. We never knew how anyone was performing or was anyone making any difference in the overall company’s value. With this tool, it became easy to see how every agent is performing and whether there was any positive impact on both - the company and our current customer base.

• High Learning Curve. It's true that it can be easy to use, but to use well and effectively takes some time to learn. It's recommended to have an agreed-upon system in your team of what tools to use and when.
• Notification Overload. If people aren't careful they could send a notification to everyone when only a couple people were meant to be prompted. And since emails are sent by default, you could have your mailbox overloaded with unnecessary updates. This is where it takes a bit of training in your team to have an agreed-upon system.
• Lack of organization with Archived Projects. I will often need to reference an archived project to make a new one, but there is only a list of archived projects in alphabetical order, with no way to organize by archive date, or even search.

Incentivized

• This tool does route tickets, but the one drawback is that the tickets are;t assigned to a specialized agent. It is randomly assigned to any available agent, and if he doesn’t have expertise in terms of the customer question, it becomes hard to give an accurate answer.
• Giving automatic responses to customers makes our life easy, but we can’t personalize these messages. This sometimes makes our customers feel that they are talking to a bot, making it difficult to answer their questions without them having a hostile reaction to the automated answers.

When I bring new people onto a project, it's immediately obvious how to use Basecamp. I don't have to worry about teaching them the features or walking them through it, it's just incredibly user-friendly. For this reason, I'll continue to renew my subscription even as new people are brought onto production jobs or the client changes.

It is easy to use, even for clients who have no experience with the platform. It can only get a little cumbersome to ensure that a client can't see certain documents you might want to keep in the Docs & Files folders. And sometimes, getting a client to actually use an unfamiliar platform can be a challenge.

Incentivized

I've never experienced downtime while using Basecamp, or been unable to access it when I needed it. That's not to say they've never had downtime, but I've been lucky enough not to encounter any, and I work odd hours, including late nights when maintenance is often undertaken.

Incentivized

For the many reasons I've given, Basecamp is a very strong program. There are a few features I can imagine that might make it even better, but I don't have a basis for comparison to be able to say that there is definitely a better one out there. I've noticed that Basecamp has evolved a bit from the time I started using it until now, so that makes me think that the producer of this program values it and believes in continuous improvement. If you could use the features offered by Basecamp, I would think you could use it with confidence.

Incentivized

Decide the process before implementation - i.e. when it's due 8/9 does that mean 8am, noon, 5pm, 11:59pm? Check your to-do list frequently Set-up templates - just not with the dates (they can be funky)

Pretty good, but [Basecamp] has its drawbacks. Honestly I find the interface non-intuitive and sometimes have trouble figuring out how to change the status of a task. Perhaps it has something to do with the way it was originally set up by the admin, but I'm not sure. I liked Jira's drag and drop obvious functionality, but the project management side of the software was lacking. Smartsheet has excellent project management functionality, but the task management isn't as good.

Incentivized

I shifted from Kayako to ProProfs Help Desk for mainly two reasons, UI and features. ProProfs Help Desk definitely has a more user-friendly interface and the features offered by this tool are also more compared to Kayako. A few features that aren’t available in Kayako but are available in ProProfs Help Desk are multiple shared inboxes, private notes, and email ticketing.

• It has saved me time when having to get the same message out to multiple restaurants
• It has helped us make smarter operational decisions because we can all collaborate on an answer in a shorter amount of time (instead of calling a meeting!!!)
• The calendar function allows us to plot out our marketing agenda for the month and add/change it together as needed. The chef will post his recipe, the managers will cost it out, the social media manager will post pictures on it, and ultimately we will get that information out on an info sheet to the staff by printing the page.

Incentivized

• High customer retention.
• Optimized average response time.