osTicket is an open-source help desk / ticketing platform that can create inquiries online, through email, and through phone calls.
$9
per month
ProProfs Help Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
ProProfs Help Desk is a customer support tool that promises to help agents track and resolve customer-care-related issues. The cloud-based software aims to enable businesses to deliver a delightful customer experience. This becomes possible with faster and effective ticket resolution. Key benefits and capabilities include: Timely resolution of customer queries: Customers feel delighted with timely responses. ProProfs help desk ticketing system allows managers and system…
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
