ConnectWise PSA (formerly Manage) is a business management platform for companies that sell, service, and support technology. The platform is cloud-based and integrates automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management, and business analytics. It is the hub of the ConnectWise suite.
$35
Per Tech Per Month
HappyFox Help Desk
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
HappyFox is a web based customer support ticketing system hosted in the cloud. It helps track and manage all customer support requests across multiple channels like email, chats, social media and phone in a centralized ticket support system. It provides integration with other web apps like CRM, live-chats, voice and bug tracking apps. Community forums feature help customers help each other and connect. Mobile versions of Happyfox provide support on the move.
You absolutely need a full time individual on this program to manage it properly. It is likely a powerful application. However, you have to know how all the disparate parts interact with the other content in the application. How they actually interface with your businesses operation applications (really check this one out as it only seems to play nice with Microsoft suites based on our experience.) and decide how much time and additional money you are willing to bury into this. Figure at least 2x over CW cost your initial period of out-of-pocket costs
Happy Fox works well in companies that want a full look at all of their tickets in one place. It may be better suited to smaller companies who can check or double check their tickets and have the time to spare. For bigger companies, I think there are better, more robust solutions.
Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.
Smart Rules - Easily create triggers that run based on a variety of criteria. This allows for easily moving tickets through our process. An awesome example is our manager's ability to assign tickets to technicians right from their email simply by responding to the ticket in a certain way. This prevents the opening of a web browser or the mobile app to complete basic functions. Removing one step from the process has already saved us countless hours.
Easy to use and clean interfaces all around. Whether it's the web interface, mobile web interface, or one of the mobile apps, HappyFox is all around intuitive. Plenty of things can be made to be updated in two or fewer clicks (Assigned to, due date, priority).
HappyFox allows our users to easily create tickets on behalf of customers. Any person who has previously contacted the Help Desk is stored as a contact and can be referenced again quickly.
While the portal they provide is basic, it can be quite heavily customized with color schemes and logos. Ours ended up looking better than almost anything else we host both internally and externally. It's clean, simple and provides an easy way for users to input a ticket.
Between the Smart Rules and SLAs it's easy to make sure every ticket gets the attention it deserves. Automatic reminders can be sent to technicians based on criteria. Reports can be run to ensure that service levels are being met. These two things alone have greatly increased the quality of service.
I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
Better Knowledge base section.
We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.
There are a few features that I would hope to be standard that are not yet accessible. For instance, having different time zones isn't a choice, and clients aren't able to create their own reports, only staff can. So, my staff is required to run those reports for our clients.
ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.
The way we have our implementation customized has allowed us to tailor the application to exactly how we would like to use it. We didn't have to change our procedures and fear the potential of poor adoption. Instead we customized the application to be used the way we already ran our help desk. From there on out we reaped the benefits of quicker resolutions, increased transparency, and much happier end users. After setting up Smart Rules, HappyFox does a lot of thinking for us. Tickets go where they need to go, close when they are supposed to close and even remind techs of inactivity. This removes the necessity for micromanagement, which is appreciated by our employees and managers alike
I have been using ConnectWise since 2004 and I am impressed with the progress they have made. However, there are still bugs that don't work quite like they should. If I were to run reports and get consistent answers along with a couple other annoyances, then I would score CW as a 10
We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.
Some tab for certain areas load speeds could be better. Dashboards can load slowly when they reference multiple reports. Some reports can load slowly based on the tables and views they are accessing. At times the SQL queries being performed in the background can actually timeout and a tab or screen will fail to load.
The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."
We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.
Rather than letting them sell you a block of time for implementation, create a list of things that must be completed do declare the implementation complete. The implementer will have the discretion on what they set up and in what order. They will be trying to end their services in as little time as possible and may not get things set up right. You are best advised to hire a third-party wizard that has done many of these setups. Record the audio and video of all of your implementation sessions.
ConnectWise, does more than one function well for a CRM, it enables managed service providers to place all of their services into a single solution, that helps smooth the running of the business. Now we don't have to have 4+ different software packages to provide customer tickets, account information, sales pipeline, and HR.
HappyFox delivered a more cost effective solution and asset management had no limit. The main problem I saw with the various other services I demoed, was the up charges. The pricing seems manageable until you see that they charge for every 100 or so of this and 100 of that. HappyFox is truly a one-stop shop for us.
ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.
