Hiver is a customer service platform that brings together communication channels, apps, and data to improve customer support operations. Hiver enables real-time collaboration across every customer communication channel, offering AI and automation to resolve issues and help teams work faster. Hiver states that over 10,000 teams of all shapes and sizes globally from Flexport to Harvard University, Vacasa, and Epic Games rely on Hiver to deliver support that wins…
$24
per month per user
osTicket
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
osTicket is an open-source help desk / ticketing platform that can create inquiries online, through email, and through phone calls.
Any work environment where more than one team member is able to address certain customer requests. We used to use Groups, but then it was confusing as to whether or not someone responded, and we needed more transparency between team members. Another example is a person emailing with a billing question. We used to reply and add the billing department's email address or forward the email to billing, but with Hiver, simply assigning it to the billing HIVER Inbox allows anyone to reply directly to the customer without the issue of either the customer or team member remembering to reply all or accidentally replying only to the team member forwarding the email.
For beginning smaller companies that are in need of partially automating their incoming requests this product is easy to set up and will assist in structuring these request[s]. These requests can come in via email/phone or web portal. For companies that are beginning to streamline their support procedures, this tool can be a first step into automating part of these processes. This is also how user[s] should see it. It is merely a tool that can assist in structuring the incoming request flow the rest still has to be fit into business processes.
osTicket is extremely user friendly for end users and support agents. It's very easy for new end users to put in a service request. This aspect of simplicity is important because we don't have to train new users on how to put in service requests.
Feature wise osTicket has everything you need without being overly complicated or cluttered. This is important for us because it allows for faster support times and happier end users.
Lightweight and very reliable, osTicket uses PHP and MySQL. Setup is easy and it can be hosted internally or externally web hosed. Also, since it relies on PHP it gives you flexibility to use Apache, Nginx , Lighttpd , IIS, etc.
Thriving community: the community behind osTicket is feature-wise. Which is very helpful if you have any questions.
Best of all, osTicket is completely free and open source. While they do offer pair tier cloud-hosting and enterprise support. The free version offers all the features of the paid tiers (minus hosing and support).
I am familiar with osTicket and this allow me to teach all the staff and support them whenever they have any concern regarding the usability and following processes.
True ticketing solutions are certainly more robust in that you can typically manage social media channels and phones, etc. But, in my opinion, when you don't have a team solely responsible for managing a ticketing system they can be complicated to implement. With HIVER, we're already all accustomed to managing our own G-Suite inbox, so it was simply a matter of teaching the team how to utilize the solution.
osTicket has proven to be a very useful tool for the team to help support the business. Open-source was the right price point and self-hosting as mentioned was quite important (however I believe that osTicket does have a hosting solution available if needed). Jitbit was a close contender but didn't like how it doesn't separate people submitting tickets from users acting as agents. So all in quite happy with the choice.
The ROI on showing how many emails are being received and addressed in a timely manner are great for KPIs
the ability to search and ensure emails are not being deleted as an automatic report is sent out the following day saying if any emails were deleted by whom
the ability to automate who gets assigned what emails from specific vendors per entity
When we had a hosted version of osTicket, we were saving some time by having them work on our setup, but we were spending a lot. Switching to our own osTicket build from their open sourcing not only saved us money upfront but we actually spent LESS time developing because we knew our ideas and didn't have to explain them to another (unrelated) party.
Creating our own ticketing infrastructure for institutional data requests has been a game changer for us. We have been able to interface with our enterprise email client and create a level of customization that meets our existing informational technology culture.