As a powerful customer support software can cater webmasters with countless rich-featured tools, the customer support software is quite necessary for carrying out business activities or hosting small business online. We have presented a review on the best customer support software on the market to remove the potential puzzlements and hassles during the process when people try to find out the most ideal one from all kinds of projects.
Having long-time experience on testing open source software and selecting the best ones for different purposes, such as the email, forum, social network and photo gallery, we ensure that those dedicatedly-selected customer support software are all user-friendly and easy-to-handle enough for you. Read the following details, and know more information about them.
osTicket
Website: http://osticket.com/
As a widely-acknowledged open-source support ticket system, osTicket owns an easy-to-use web interface with inquiries made by email and web-based forms available. Besides, it is totally free with giving support for navigating, organizing or archiving all of your support responses and requests in a single place and provides your customers with responsiveness and accountability. In a word, this software is reliable, easy-to-setup and lightweight.
Here are more outstanding features as listed below:
Customer portal which enables all support requests and responses to be archived online without any user account or registration needed for submitting a ticket.
Email templates which are made for notices, alerts, auto-reply and responses; ticket assignment which works to assign tickets to a team or a staff.
Auto responder that can send out a configurable automatic reply when a message is received or a new ticket is opened.
Email integration which helps ticket to be created by email, phone or online forms.
HESK
Website: http://www.hesk.com/
As a free PHP helpdesk software which runs with the MySQL database, HESK enables you to set up a web-based ticket support system for the website. Your staffs are able to manage the customer support requests with an easy-to-use website interface and your customers are also able to submit the support tickets by using this helpdesk software. It needs to point out that this software is user-friendly and free of charge as well as gains a lot of recognitions that nearly 90% of its users say that the integrated knowledgebase has decreased a large number of support requests.
Other highlighted features are listed here:
Customer interface that can obtain detailed information from customers, rate and view staff replies, browse and search knowledgebase.
Unlimited administrators and staff accounts, easy translation into any language, email notifications of new replies.
Unlimited knowledgebase articles, unlimited subcategories and categories, easy and quick search capabilities.
Restricted access to some functionalities for certain staff, powerful ticket search ability.
phpMyFAQ
Website: http://www.phpmyfaq.de/
phpMyFAQ is an open-source and PHP-based as well as totally database-driven FAQ system. This software offers a multi-language content management system with an image manager and WYSIWYG editor involved. And it also supports multiple databases to store all of the data with PHP 5.3.3 (or higher) required. Besides, the software's content management system makes you capable of administrating your news, groups, users, FAQ records, glossary items, attachments and categories by the protected administration backend.
Here are more useful features of this software:
LDAP and HTTP authentication with single sign on support, revision system, and community modules.
Active directory support, revision system, user and group based permissions, and social networks.
FAQ statistics, open search support, smart answering and user comments.
Live helper chat
Website: http://livehelperchat.com/
As a free and flexible open source customer support software, Live helper chat supports IPhone, IPod, Android and Blackberry or other XMPP generic services. This software has plenty of free modules, such as the questionary or voting module, chat box or shout box module, browser sharer module, forms module, documents sharer module and FAQ module. What's more, it has unlimited operators, five widget positions, user screenshots and drag-and-drop widgets in store for its users.
There are more features involved as follows:
Multilanguage back office where every operator is able to have different language.
Chrome extension, proactive user invitation to chat, Windows/Mac/Linux client.
Online user tracking, chat remarks and chat archive.
Maian Support
Website: http://www.maiansupport.com/
As a free customer support software without nag screens, spyware or advertisings, Maian Support can be used for an boundless time without further cost. Moreover, this software's commercial license can unlock all functionality of it and includes the copyright removal. In short, it is a fast and powerful enough support ticket system.
More features that can't be forgot are listed as follows:
Option for visitors to manage account profiles and option for administer to manage user accounts.
Easy-to-install support ticket system which is written in PHP or MySQL scripting language.
Multiple administer users with access levels and multiple departments.