Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, January 15, 2007:
Help Desk Software, Bug Tracking Software, CRM, Oh My!
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
I saw the post by Dharmesh in the BOS forums and thought I’d throw my 2 cents in. I generally try not to pitch in threads that specifically ask about HelpSpot so I’ll leave my 2 cents over here.
The basic gist of Dharmesh’s post was what he should do in terms of bug tracking software vs help desk software. Could he use the bug tracker (FogBugz in this case) as a help desk tool, should he use HelpSpot (or similar) as a bug tracker, or does he really need both. For purposes of the discussion here I’ll also expand the conversation to CRM as well since that normally enters these types of discussions.
My personal opinion is that about 80% of software companies and 99% of other companies need all 3 to be separate applications. So you should have a bug tracker, a help desk tool, and a CRM solution all relatively independent.
My main reasoning behind this is that these applications normally serve separate staff within an organization. Even in a small organization the programmers have their own needs separate from your customer service people, separate from your sales group. While having all 3 applications mashed together sounds like it should be more efficient it really isn’t. Your sales team will hate seeing “bugs”, your programmers don’t care about the last time you mailed a customer a holiday card, customer service also doesn’t care about bugs or this years sale conversion rates and so on.
Sure you’ll always have some people who overlap and for those few people it may be useful to have these apps together, most of the time that’s not the case. And by having them all together you’re getting a very bloated UI for everyone involved. Even in a dedicated piece of software the average user is only using 20% of it. When you mash these 3 apps together the average use is now probably only using 5%. That means the 95% they’re not using is simply in the way.
My other issue is that most systems which try and do everything end up doing nothing well. I’d rather have a top of the line help desk, bug tracker and CRM as opposed to a half ass do everything application.
Now specifically on the help desk front, my experience has been that using a bug tracker doesn’t work well if you have dedicated support personal or if the people doing support are not the programmers. I’ve sold many HelpSpot licenses to groups moving away from this very model. That said, you can get by using just a bug tracker if your programmers are your support team. In that scenario the added convenience of one application can be helpful. If you’re not planning on having a customer service portal and you’re really only dealing with email then this can work.
Personally I don’t do this and actually use separate apps for each, but that’s my preference. I simply feel it makes my life much easier to do so. Also using HelpSpots Live Lookup API I can integrate with my home grown CRM and pull in all the data I need. I could also integrate with my bug tracker if that was required, but I currently don’t.
Discussion
Thanks for your detailed follow-up on my BoS post.
I agree with just about all of your points. Though tempting to try and find a single solution to all three problems, I can see why it is unlikely that any single product will solve all three of these well.
Having said that, my challenge is around the fact that the team is small (< 10 people) where just about everyone wears multiple hats. I've dealt with this issue of having silod, independent systems before (in my prior startup, which grew much larger). It wasn't pretty. The big issue is that you end up having multiple places where things like lists of clients, signons, etc. are stored. This is rarely ever a good thing.
Will give this all some thought.
Created by Dharmesh Shah on 01.15.2007 3:20 pm
True. I think the issue then is finding the right products.
For instance, when I was building HelpSpot I initially had an entire system for importing the data you're speaking off. Basically double storing it from the CRM into HelpSpot. Before launch I ended up pulling all that out and instead implementing the Live Lookup API.
The API basically lets you hook HelpSpot up to any custom data system via a very simple API. That way all the customer data stays in the original system and HelpSpot just queries that in real time as needed. No need to double store everything. It's been extremely successful with about 50% of HelpSpot installations using the API.
By doing things in this manner HelpSpot gets only the data it needs without having to deal with the UI of a CRM, the duplication issues, the data schema issues and so on.
Created by Ian on 01.15.2007 3:25 pm