A Better Way To Provide Customer Support
How do we support our customers? The answer of this question is an essential part of any successful business strategy. You can attract many people to purchase your products or sign up for your services and to become customers, but without proper support they will not stay with your company. So one of the key questions is how to organize customer support. A good solution that works fine for millions of small business around the world is to use online help desk support system.
Online help desks (ticketing systems) are software applications which enable customers of any business to communicate with their provider on various issues. These issues usually include sales and billing questions, technical support, purchase/order tracking and etc. Each of them can be well organized with any web based customer support system.
Web based support works for any kind of business - from local grocery store which sends to its customers emails about promotions and coupons, to companies that provide dot-com services and producs. The main advantage of web based support is that it records the process of communication between a business and its customers. This helps companies to better serve customers and to improve their experience.
There are many customer support management systems. Today we will present one of them - osTicket. It is the latest software application added to Host Color shared hosting plans.
The Structure of osTicket
It is quite popular software with 94,000 search results in google on “osTicket” search term. I’ll start with the only disadvantage of this ticketing system. At this time it works with versions of PHP 4 and above but not with PHP 5.0. We however work on to make the system functional with PHP 5.
osTicket offers integrattion of tickets created via email and web based forms into a simple and elegant multi-user web interface. It has 4 main sections - “Tickets”, “Knowledgebase”, “Directory”, and “My Account”. “Tickets” collects information about all correspondence between company and its customers. There are 2 subcategories “Open tickets” and “Closed tickets”. They collect history of the emails and messages.
“Knowledbase” is a nice feature which enables any business to organize “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) and to provide various useful information to its customers. The company can add “Premade replies” to database and its customers can use a search form to find answers on any questions they have.
“Directory” is a place to add profiles of the company representatives by departments and to make “Who’s who” section.
Section “My Account” has 3 subcategories - “Account profile”, “Preferences” and “Passwords”. Preferences can be set by time zone and the number of tickets account holder want to see in their start page.
osTicket in Powertools
The subscribes of this hosting blog and our readers know that Host Color maintains branded autoinstaller software library - Powertools. It enables our hosting customers to deploy more than 20 useful software applications with a single click in their control panels. osTickes has become the latest applications to PowerTools. It is now a part of 3 of Host Color’s web hosting plans - Max Pack, Business Hosting (Mega) and Multi Domain Hosting.
I hope it will help you to better organize customer support and to strengthen business relations ship with your clients.