Data Recovery Ticketing Systems and Customer Portals

[lcoughey]

Since the beginning of my data recovery days, I have worked to improve our system for keeping track of our customers and jobs. While many labs are still using spreadsheets, I have always wanted a solution that includes a portal for our clients. So, I thoguht it would be helpful to compile a list here.

If you have more to contribute or want to share about your experience with one that is listed, please feel free to share in a comment.

Self-Hosted

• WebHelpDesk
  - expensive with annual fees for support and updates
  - limited customizations
  - requires a dedicated web server
  - support is not great
• CandyCRM
  - simple
  - requires a WordPress site
  - cheap
• Job Organizer
  - don't know much about it
  - made by a data recovery lab

Subscription Service

• RepairShopr
  - fairly expensive, can be paid monthly
  - has lots of potential
  - lack up recent updates and feature requests under review for more than 5 years suggests makes me question how long they will be around
  - support is horrible
• FreshDesk
  - not very expensive, can be paid montlhy
  - less features than some of the competition
  - support is great
  - public and private FAQ
  - social media (twitter / facebook) integration
  - website chat integration with the help of FreshChat (free version should suffice)
• ZenDesk
  - don't know much about it
• Data Recovery Manager
  - not very expensive
  - made by a data recovery lab
  - don't know much about it

[lcoughey]

After our exploration, we chose to go with the FreshDesk growth plan ($15/Agent/Month) and are quite pleased with it, thus far. There are some customization features that would be nice to have, but not enough to pay conisderably more for.

By switching to this plan, we instantly save about $100USD/year from the annual maintenance and support of WebHelpDesk. There is no real way to quantify the cost of hosting our own server, but there is also savings on that by moving to a hosted service.

Further to this, I just discovered that FreshDesk also has a chat option with FreshChat where we can integrate it with a chat on our website, as well as handle any chats that come in via our Facebook and Google Business pages. The free version is sufficient for us too. By using the free FreshChat, we will be saving outselves about $300USD a year with our PureChat subscription.

For those who aren't concerned about custom forms, you could probably get away with the free version of FreshDesk too.