Customer Support Tools
Hey there everyone! I hope you are all doing well! I have a question regarding customer support: how do you handle support in your (side-)projects? I'm currently using one single email address/mailbox for all my projects and I manually respond to every message. The more projects I have now (and more users) it's getting harder to stay organized with support requests that way… I don't want to create seperate email inboxes for each of my projects because that way I'd have to check over 10 email inboxes separately every day… Do you know of any inexpensive (or selfhosted) simple customer support tools? I looked a bit around online and everything I could find was either made far large teams (and not for solo developers), was incredibly expensive or extremely hard to understand.
My ideal setup would look something like the following:
- a customer sends an email to support@project1.com, support@project2.com or to a support email address of one of my other projects
- I can view all messages in a central, category-based interface and reply to every message in an easy way
Thank you very much for any suggestions! Have a great day :)
Hey there!
You actually do not have to create seperate email inboxes. Just use them as a forwarder. You can simply use any email address to forward it to your main support inbox. So support@project1.com and support@project2.com would both redirect you to support@an.com
Otherwise I like to use Tawk.to. It has a live chat feature integrated, and if not available, sends a ticket directly to your dashboard with all the information you need.
@astinox Thank you for your reply! Email forwarding is a great idea but then I'd still have a huge, unstructured email inbox (which is what I want to get rid of)… But tawk.to looks like an incredible option! And the free plan is amazing! I'll have a look at it, thank you very much for the great suggestion!!
I have previously used HelpScout and they are the best. It was free then.
However they changed the pricing now and its all paid, you can check them if interested. Worth a try!
I'm also launching a service called "Web3Forms" which allows to accept contact forms on your website and it will forward to your email. In this case you can still use one email without revealing it. Yet, you can categorize it based on the Subject and Label it for Structuring.
@surjithctly Not used them in a while but remember it being a great platform. If you are using g suite, it was a breeze to setup.
If you are looking to answer every email from a single interface, grab a GSuite account for $5/month and use email aliases.
A few drawbacks:
- You will need to double check your “send as” email before sending
- The account avatar on the receiver will be the same for all, but may be changeable with BIMI DNS records
You can also use an email forwarder service to handle routing emails to you, but again the outbound email will not display the correct email address.
For a more “help desk” type of set up, check out https://eager.app. It’s an app I’m building targeted for SAAS products at the moment.
For a single-person team, going for a helpdesk is overkill. Helpscout is great if you are planning to. Very simple, but will serve the purpose if you have 1 more person to take care of tickets.
If you are alone handling and resolving all queries, go for services like fastmail. You can map multiple domains and aliases to a single inbox. The interface is clean and to-the-point. Using them from 9 years.
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