Item: TeamSupport
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Pros and Cons

Team collaboration via Watercooler ( kind of threaded discussion tool that allows support agents to make comments that can be linked to a ticket, user, customer, or group. Only users or group members can see these comments. This is really useful collaboration tool
ORGANIZES collaboration on issues. Organizing was the key problem we were trying to solve with this system. If an issue is reported by a customer, we want to ensure the whole team has access to trying to solve that problem. Maybe one user takes a call from a customer, but that user doesn't have the skills or resources to properly answer the question. Rather than forwarding emails around to everyone, they can log all the info in TeamSupport and assign it to someone else, or collaborate with someone on how to best solve the problem. Secondly, we're also using the system to track development requests, bug reports, and product repairs. In this fashion we always have one go to place where we can see all bugs, repairs, or feature requests. As features sometimes require discussion, now any user can log in and add comments when time allows. Alternatively maybe a bug report comes in that requires a specific user to test.
The system provides great tools to track serial numbers, customers issues/reports, repairs, software versions, team reports, and more. There are huge numbers of customization options in order to create a system catered towards a company's needs.
Nicely laid out web based app.

Not very much granular control of email notifications. The issue here is the sheer volume of email notifications that are generated. Logging an Action to a ticket can trigger an email depending on the user setting. If a customer emails the support address, TeamSupport can be setup to notify a whole group, or a user. If a user logs an action it'll email either the customer and/or a user. Any time a customer replies to a ticket it logs an action and can trigger an email. A user basically has an option to turn all notifications on or off, and also Group notifications on or off.Basically for a busy support desk, this can lead to a lot of email notifications. If a user wants to be a part of two Groups, but only receive notifications for one Group, there's no way to specify this. It's either all or nothing.We've been working with TeamSupport on ideas and they're very receptive, thus I have confidence this will change one day.
Customer database is not very feature rich for an individual contact, only feature rich for organizations:The Customer/contact database is organized by Customer, then Contact. Contacts are required to live within a Customer name (aka organization). We have many single Contacts that work for themselves, and thus we're required to create a Company name for each of them. I wish a single Contact somehow automatically acted like a Customer until a second Contact was added.Alternatively we support some very large organizations with lots of Contacts, and features TeamSupport has implemented for Customers don't exist for the Contact itself. We have to separate Contacts into multiple duplicated Customer names in order to take advantage of some features available to Customers and not Contacts.There's no limit to the number of custom fields you can have for a Customer or Contact, but Features like Watercooler, Notes, and ticket organizing tabs are only available per Customer, not per individual Contact.

Zoho
Zendesk
Sysaid
Freshdesk
Spiceworks
Kayako
Gotoassist
Jiru
Salesforce
so many more....

We took our time and looked at many solutions on the marketplace. Some failed due to lack of mobile support. Some failed due to lack of email support. We preferred a web based solution, but didn't want to throw out the idea of alternates. Pricing was always a concern. The first quarter of the evaluation process was spent trying to learn what features exist in any help desk. As we started learning what was available we added them to a list. Each feature was listed as a "Must have," "Would be nice to have," and "Not Needed."

TeamSupport ranked best in our evaluations overall . It was high on our list in the beginning, but failed due to the slow interface. Before committing, six months later we took a look at it again and the interface speed had been significantly improved. We also noticed many features had been added, which were way more than any competitors.

TeamSupport ultimately offered the best feature set for the price, was web based, and we liked the idea of a small team in Texas being dedicated to developing the product. We still see them continuing to work towards improving the product, and really like their willingness to listen to the customer. Their support was on par with what we offer to our customers, their features were customizable to our needs, and TeamSupport has some powerful features not offered by any other help desk.