Item: HappyFox Help Desk
Rating: 10
Author: Lee Howley

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HappyFox is taking the place of our old, broken, and ill-managed Help Desk solution for our IT department. Any of our company's 200+ employees can access the easy to use portal to report IT related issues to our team. HappyFox has provided a considerable increase in transparency that lets us more accurately track a ticket and any correspondence between staff and customers. Most importantly, this solution works the way we do, by email and is entirely device agnostic via it's beautiful web interface.

Pros and Cons

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.

Making changes on the mobile apps could be easier (Assigning a technician or providing a due date). It currently must be done through a ticket update which is not intuitive after having used the full web interface where the fields can be updated simply by clicking on the desired field.
Reporting can be a little tricky to get the hang of. More over it would be better if it was possible to customize from the ground up rather than having to use some semblance of what they have provided. However, the reports are still very useful and easy to read. They have already helped us more than justify the cost of the software.

Return on Investment

Reduced time to assign and resolve tickets.
Increase in transparency as far as when and what employees are working on.
Potential to reduce ticket volume via the self help portal for common issues.
Extremely high user adoption.
Great integration with other major players (Jira, Salesforce, ect.)

Alternatives Considered

HappyFox's only true competitor of those listed above was Zendesk. Mojo and Spiceworks each had major letdowns. Mojo was not as intuitive and lacked the ability to customize and trigger things. Spiceworks was limited to windows as far as client use. Both of these options cost less money (Spiceworks is free) but just couldn't compete on ease of use and features.

HappyFox won out on price compared to Zendesk while being more feature rich in the areas we needed. Smart Rules has allowed us to basically run our help desk through emails alone. There are plenty of features in both Zendesk and HappyFox that we simply don't need or use, so it's hard to which has the upper hand in overall feature set. For us, HappyFox came out on top with its easy to use device agnostic platform with a huge emphasis on email.

Likelihood to Renew

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

The biggest factor in my selection of this product was how our techs wanted to use a Help Desk. Everyone was already accustomed to email because that's how everything was done in the past. More than that, people often responded to inquiries on their phones via email. I needed a help desk software that could be used almost entirely by email. After demoing HappyFox, I knew I had found what I was looking for.

Tickets, based on what department they are for, arrive in the appropriate tech's inbox. Techs can respond and HappyFox will forward their reply to the customer. All conversations are logged on the site so that they can be reviewed later, by us or the customer. With Smart Rules we could begin to get creative and open up even more options to allowing our techs to work solely through email. For example our managers have the ability to assign tickets to employees purely through email based on the text they enter. We also have the ability to respond to an email and close it. This speeds up resolution times by allowing everything to be handled through email. For everything else the web interface is a breeze to use.

An Absolutely Stellar Easy To Use Help Desk Software

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with HappyFox