[Discourse is by] far the best online forum platform in the industry. It may be a little pricey for people looking for a cheap option for their hobby forum, but for any type of business that relies on a forum, the pricing is more than fair.
Zoho Desk is a great customer service tool. It is very easy to track the ability to receive tickets and send responses in Zoho Desk. There are lots of options for customization. The knowledge base feature is very extensive and powerful. It makes creating internal and external FAQs easy.
User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.
The biggest drawback that I am facing while using the platform is that their ticketing system is not that great [in my opinion]. It does not give us the option to add sales tax and other charges in the invoices which leads to a big problem for us.
I give [Zoho Desk] [an] overall usability score of 9. This is partly due to the search functionality needs improvement. There are several times where I am left unable to find a ticket and have to generate a new one. I am hoping in the future that they will make some changes!
As Zoho Support is based in a different timezone to ours it can be an issue that we cannot get an immediate response to an issue. But I will say that once their Support is in the office they are fairly good to respond. they have resolved almost all issues I have told them about, but Zoho have also made system changes and not communicated these beforehand which means we are faced with something new and cannot get support on this until their support team is in the office
Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.
We selected Zoho Desk as we needed a platform that was going to allow the business to grow through both usage and staffing numbers. We wanted something cost-effective but still offered standard features in an effective cloud-delivered solution but would still allow customization by our internal dev team, to derive better value from the service where it natively didn't do what we needed it to. FreeAgent was okay for a while, but Zoho Desk has allowed a vast improvement in our service offering to end customers.
Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger.
It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.
Zoho Desk has created an organised sytem of support which alows me to help my customers more efficiently.
By saving resolutions as articles, Zoho Desk has provided a training resource for current customers and support staff as part of solving problems.
All new customers become part of a database of customers who continue to receive support and education from forums created by the articles and customer questions.
