Cloud Based Service Desk Software

pjansell

pjansell

pjansell

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warwickshire
Can anyone recommend or give a recommendation through personal experience of any decent web based service desk software? I have inherited a small team of 10 aftersales service engineers who are using an old, out of the box sharepoint template site for raising tickets and task escalation via phone (customer) contact only.

I don't have the resource to bespoke new features or to further integrate sharepoint into our existing systems so I want to break out of that and move them to a cloud based architecture so they can access cases/tickets while out on the road and back at base, and also provide a customer self-service portal area where customers can check the status of their service requests.

I've looked at brightpearl and salesforce's service cloud but they are quite expensive, SF's service cloud has a nice CMS style knowledge base feature which would be expecially useful if we could make it a chargable access feature to our customers.

Are you using similiar software, perhaps you can make a recommendation, if so i'd appreciate your thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks
 
Kayako was the cheapest

It depends what you want and how far down the ITIL route you want to wander
 
sidethink said:
And Service Now is the bestest. Though its not cheap!
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Cant say I have used service now, but I was more impressed with ICCM as it uses highly customisable BPM architecture that syncs with SharePoint through webparts. I wouldn't call them cheap though!

As mentioned take a look at what you want in terms of ITIL compliance and the number of users you are talking about.

Also typically licences are determined by number of service desk staff.
 
Guys, thanks for your input - i hadn't come across ICCM, Service Now or Kayako before, hopefully if i get time today i'll have a look at those. We're a small company, ITIL compliance isn't a priority for us. Is anyone familiar with OpenCRX? Sldsmkd what didn't you like particularly about Kayako?
 
Well, we had a video conference with Kayako on Wednesday as a service desk solution it works well, although it's let down by the lack of reporting features -it's something they stressed is in the works and should be available in a month or two but that isn't solid enough for us, it's a shame really as apart from that it's a decent service desk system.

This morning we had a video conference with ICCM, as POD pointed out its very scalable and it's architecture seems flexible enough to grow with us although it is costly. The SaaS model is charged not only on a per staff basis, but also on your customers access to your system as well - something to think about.

We have some more demos next week with Saleforce (servicecloud) and Sevice Now so i'll let you know how those go. Have a good weekend.
 
Spiceworks is meant to have this in it, we briefly looked at it when our TrackIt renewal came up.

It looked ok though didn't seem man enough for what we needed it for

Kimbie
 
ICCM is bloody useless.

We have had it for about a year. Flakey software, very limited once installed. Requires a lot of coding to get it to how you feel. Very expensive and support isn't the best. Spent over 100k on the software and now looking for alternatives.
 
pjansell said:
Well, we had a video conference with Kayako on Wednesday as a service desk solution it works well, although it's let down by the lack of reporting features -it's something they stressed is in the works and should be available in a month or two but that isn't solid enough for us, it's a shame really as apart from that it's a decent service desk system.

This morning we had a video conference with ICCM, as POD pointed out its very scalable and it's architecture seems flexible enough to grow with us although it is costly. The SaaS model is charged not only on a per staff basis, but also on your customers access to your system as well - something to think about.

We have some more demos next week with Saleforce (servicecloud) and Sevice Now so i'll let you know how those go. Have a good weekend.
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Any updates on this? We're looking at similar packages..
 
Bit late to post I know - but we are currently implementing easyCMDB.

I am not sure what it is like compared to the others mentioned, as I have not used them, but so far I have been very happy with what it has to offer, also the support from the vendors has been great, they have supplied us with patches in a matter of days to fix any issues.

It can also be tailored to what you require and once you have it you can customize it further.

In the past I have used Nethelpdesk, HP Openview and Supportworks - but none of these were cloud based.
 
We are now using Salesforce for our customer service desk and Spiceworks for our technical service desk.

Spiceworks absolutely blows Kayako out of the water, so I am very glad to have been forced into using it.
 
I'd be wary of depending on a cloud-based service if you don't have a rock-solid backup internet connection available.

I once managed the service operations at an ASP, and if the internet connection to the live services went down, our phones would ring off the hook, so having a cloud-based fault logging system would not have been any help.
 
As far as I know Salesforce is one of the best service desks for non IT professionals. Although if you have a real development team and time then you want MS Dynamics, but cost is a major issue with this (it also like most MS products, links with things like SharePoint nicely)

These types of service desks are useful to getting your differing teams such as sales and marketing talking to your suppliers and getting actions for these staff allocated back to the end user.


For a technical service desk for an internal service environment however you 100% want Spiceworks; it uses very little system resources and all you need is a webserver to host it externally, BUT... it has rubbish authentication outside of using the AD, so as an external facing Service desk it is not so great, although you can use it to simply capture emails requests.

Kayako is a great cheaper alternative for external customers, but has very rare updates and as mentioned has extremely poor updates (In the end we tried getting a locally hosted environment and tried to run reports off of the back end database, which was a knightmare, so abandoned).

It all depends what you actually want a service desk for and what I commonly find is that you end up needing more than one.

I would kill to do more with MS Dynamics right now, but you MUST be an Microsoft house to even attempt this as the cost of the typical overlapping MS infrastructure is EXPENSIVE.
 
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