We switched to SupportCenter after having some issues with Kayako. Kayako was great software too, but it’s encoded and required a performance robbing decoder that affected the entire server. That and Kayako’s customer service sucks.

The Support Desk

SupportCenter does just what we need it to do without all the extra fluff. You can tell they really took a Gmail philosophy to UI design with their “less is more” AJAX interface that is clean and easy to use. There is a full featured trouble ticket system complete with escalation rules, multiple cues and notifications, custom data fields, and email piping. We use these features in a couple different ways:

Web Based Tickets-

SupportCenter allows you to insert a ticket submission form anywhere on your website. For us this was key as we wanted to integrate the support form in to our Secure Delivery app and pass user information from Secure Delivery to the help desk system. We set up a few custom data fields for user information that we use in troubleshooting problems customers are having- things like their account email address, customer ID in our system, and account class. Once there were set up we designed the integrated support ticket form to pass these variables for logged in users using simple hidden form fields.

When the tickets come in the are automatically filtered based on the custom fields like account class- tickets from paid accounts go in to a high priority queue while free accounts go in to the regular queue. Using the Support Center notification system I have an alert set up to send me a text message to my cell phone email address for priority paid tickets so even if I’m sipping on burbon in the back yard I’ll know a paying customer needs me.

Email Based Tickets-

Support Center also supports email piping, the must have feature for a serious support solution. Basically what email piping does is parse incoming emails to a specific address, read them, and insert them in to the web based support ticket system. This is important basically two ways-

First, when we reply to a web based ticket (the standard way for SD users to create support requests) the reply is automatically sent to the customer’s email. They can then simply reply to the email in their email reader to update their ticket. Their replies are piped to Support Center, parsed in to the support database, and show up in our web based administration panel automatically. This is far superior to other systems where you have to click on a link to go to a reply web page, enter a ticket ID and password, and then reply.

Second, email piping allows users to create new tickets by simply sending an email to our support@ address without even going to the web site. Although we don’t get the custom field information on the customer such as user ID when they email their support requests in directly, we do store the custom field information within Support Center so if they have ever submitted a ticket through the web form in the past it still shows up with their email. All custom fields have the option to be ticket based (associated with this incident) or user based so that their custom info shows up on every ticket they submit, even through email.

There is great value here for the money, and at $99 as opposed to the $299 Kayako eSupport price its really hard to beat.

Knowledgebase

Support Center also includes a built-in knowledgebase system that is quick and easy to use. You can easily create categories and KB articles. You can attach images to KB posts while you create it making the generation process that much quicker- no seperate ftp uploading. The KB generates search engine friendly URLs automatically and actually generates static HTML pages as opposed to dynamic docs. To check it out in more detail you can see the Secure Delivery Knowledgebase.

The knowledgebase is nearly perfect- the features you need without any extra crap slowing you down. I love it- now I just need to find the time to write about 100 kb articles…

Oh, and one other thing- the web based ticket forms, even custom integrated forms, can load KB article suggestions as the users type their questions in through a bit of javascript- an awesome feature that keeps users from asking already answered questions over and over again :)

Support Center… Support

I have only had one problem with Support Center- a funny error with generating KB articles. The great thing is that after contacting the developers they diagnosed the issue, solved the problem, and had an update posted to their website in less than 3 days! I know a little bit about web application development, and let me tell you- this was awesome.

They regularly update Support Center as you can see from their changelog. They use web based delivery to issue updates, so you can easily log in to your account and download the most current version at any time.

The only gripe I have with Support Center, if you can even call it that, is that its mildly difficult to customize. I’m used to looking at complex web applications, so I can somewhat sort through the mix of AJAX, php, and HTML to find what I’m looking for, but they sure didn’t make it easy. While they did provide some basic template files to change the basic submission form, knowledgebase layout, etc. I could see novice developers having a hard time wrapping their head around customizations.

Still, this is a small price to pay for all the power and functionality you get for such a great price, and I would recommend Support Center to anyone who wants a full featured, reliable support desk without breaking the bank.

Give Support Center a look, try their online demo, or download the free single agent version to give it a try- you won’t be disappointed.

Note: The links above are not affiliate links. We personally use this software at Secure Delivery, I love it, and thats why I’m recommending it. If you want an affiliate link you can click here :)

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

The PortableApps.com suite is basically a menu system that loads specially formatted portable software versions. These portable versions do not need to be installed on the computer you plug the thumb drive into- you run them directly from the USB stick. They are completely self contained, leaving no trace of the application or personal data on the computer you use them on.

There are three versions of the suite- standard, basic, and lite:

PortableApps Suite (Standard Edition): ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox – Portable Edition (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird – Portable Edition (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird – Portable Edition (email client) and runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.

PortableApps Suite (Lite Edition): Uses AbiWord Portable (word processor) instead of OpenOffice.org Portable and runs comfortably from a 256MB drive.

PortableApps Suite (Base Edition): If you’d like to pick and choose exactly which apps to include, you can try Portable Apps Suite (Base Edition). This is a stripped down package with just the PortableApps Menu, PortableApps Backup utility and custom folders, icons and autorun. It’s less than 1MB installed, so it’s a great option for smaller drives.

In addition to the suite packages, there are a number of handy programs you can install listed on their site. Being a web developer I installed the following to allow me to administer and work on Secure Delivery from anywhere:

WinMerge – File comparison
WinSCP – Windows SCP Client
Putty Portable – Portable version of the SSH / telnet Client
7zip Portable – free 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR archive tool
Pidgin Portable – Instant Message client (I’m not a big fan of the standard Gaim included with PortableApps so I removed it)
KompoZer Portable – A light web editor
Firefox Beta 3 – Installs along side the standard Firefox 2 so you can try both.
KeePass – A handy password locker for keeping all your logins straight.

With the above additions I’ve basically created a portable environment where I can respond to a customer support email from anywhere, log in with FTP or SSH, compare two files, download and extract a patch, and fix a bug. Add to that a full featured word processor, your own browser (with your own extensions and theme) and I really don’t know how I was able to deal without it.

I’d recommend PortableApps.com to anyone- its free, its incredibly useful, and it’s “no trace left behind” privacy might keep you from getting fired from work while working on your killer app :)

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Their customer support, however, leaves much to be desired.

Kayako offers a few options for their products- monthly hosted, monthly and yearly leased, owned. We opted for the monthly leased option as we didn’t want to plunk down the hefty $499 price for the owned license. Our major problem with all versions of the Kayako software was that it required either the Zend or Ioncube decoders to be installed on our server in order to run their software- all versions have “encoded” files that require the decoder running to use, including the owned license.

The decoders were causing a performance hit that we didn’t like. We looked around, found another support suite that did not have encoded code, and installed it. It worked. The owned version of it cost 1/4 the price of Kayako. It didn’t require any performance robbing decoders. We decided to go with it and drop Kayako.

This is where the pain began. First, there is no cancel button on their website. The only way to cancel is to contact their support email:

A few days ago, my first email:

I want to cancel this account. Please cancel all renewals of this license immediately.

Their reply:

Can you please let us know the reason for the cancellation of your eSupport License? If you have any issues regarding the product, we will be more than glad to assist you in that.

Waiting for your response.

Ok, you want to know why. I understand that- cool.

My second email:

We have decided to go with a solution that has 100% access to the source code unencoded. We have already made this decision and migrated to the new solution.

Please cancel the account immediately.

The key phrases in this email being “we have already migrated to a new solution” and “cancel the account immediately”.

Their second response:

In case of the Owned license, you will get 99% of open source code. You can modify the source code to customize the software as per your requirement. The 1% source code which is not provided includes the license management files and they are not provided to stop the piracy of the software. Please let me know if you are interested in buying the Owned license as we have some special offers for the day or you want us to cancel your eSupport Monthly Leased license.

Awaiting your response.

I’ll be the first to admit I snapped a little bit after this one. I already told them twice to cancel the account, I already told them we migrated to another solution. I know that in a couple days I am going to be re-billed for the leased license if they do not cancel my account. Now it just smells like they are trying to draw this out and get another payment from me when I have already removed their software from my server, installed another solution, and just want to move on with my life.

My third email:

I can not believe you badger your customers like this. I don’t want to talk about it or see special offers.

CANCEL THE MONTHLY LEASED LICENSE NOW.

If I receive another charge from your company I will file a fraud claim with my bank and perform a charge back. You have guaranteed that I will never be a customer of Kayako in the future, and I will go out of my way to share this experience with others.

Today I was billed again after repeatedly asking them to cancel the account. Kayko has not replied to my previous email or canceled my account.

My final email before I perform a chargeback with my bank:

I was just billed again for this license after I have asked you repeatedly to cancel.

You have 24 hours to refund my payment before I file fraud with Worldpay and my credit card company.

I am waiting for your response.

Screw you Kayako. Take it from someone else who runs a service that does monthly billing- This is not how you treat customers.

You have effectively taken a customer that was pleased with your software but couldn’t use it due to a compatibility issue and turned him into someone who is going to badmouth you to everyone he comes in contact with everywhere he goes online. I’ll get my money back anyway, and all you will have to show for it is bad press. Keep up the good work jerks.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

I’m on a roll with singing the praises of companies I deal with lately. A few weeks ago my business partner and I decided that, like all proper companies, we needed some “corporate apparel”. I did some searching online and found what I thought was the best deal- Queensboro.

Queensboro is pretty cool for a few reasons-

1. They are located in North Carolina (where I am from, so I know they rock automatically)

2. Their listed pricing includes the cost of embroidery- no additional costs!

3. They don’t charge a setup fee for standard sized logos (I don’t know about a life-size Elvis head or something, that’s probably extra)

4. They have a 4 item minimum, which is awesome. I really didn’t need 25 company t-shirts.

5. They have affordable corporate-quality private label as well as premium name-brand apparel.

Based on the above, I went ahead and uploaded our logo for our parent company, Portal Labs, LLC. Within a day it was reviewed and accepted into their system and I placed my order. While their site is not the prettiest thing I have seen, the functionality is great for ordering multiple sizes of the same thing at once- something that corporate customers will appreciate when they have to order 200 shirts at a time for their organization. The whole order process was quick and painless and I was done with the entire order in a few minutes.

A couple days after placing my order I received an email asking me to approve the “proof” of my logo. That’s the image shown above. They had faithfully reproduced our company logo with great result, and I approved the order for production.

Today the shirts arrived. I’m impressed. The shirts are of good quality (I went toward the high-end of the cheaper stuff, if that makes sense), the logo embroidery is clear and sharp, and the delivery time was acceptable at just a couple weeks- They did have a time-critical option for a fee, but I was in no hurry to get these.

My new Portal Labs shirts are awesome- nothing makes you feel like a real company more than a nice company shirt (besides maybe corporate taxes) and I’d recommend getting a couple made for any Internet entrepreneur. If anything you can order the embroidered logo boxer shorts for when you work from home in your underwear :)

Check them out, they have the best prices I have found with free setup: Custom-embroidered logo shirts and apparel by Queensboro

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Jason,

Thank you so much for all your help on this matter. You have gone above
and beyond call of duty. I will be sure to talk your delivery system up
anytime I can…

Being a small company we can’t afford thousands of dollars worth of advertising, so it feels good when we make a customer happy when they come to us with problems. After all, word-of-mouth advertising is the best kind, and aside from talking to your customers and working out their issues you don’t even spend a penny on it.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

I know, terrible problem to have, right?

Honestly though, Secure Delivery is becoming more and more popular with new accounts every day. With the coming addition of BKF* in the next few weeks, I expect it will only get worse on the hardware, not better. Paid subscriptions are bringing in enough money to pay for our current server setup and more, so it makes sense to switch now. Especially since the DC where our current server is located wants almost +$50 a month more just to add a stick of RAM in our current server. For $50 a month we can upgrade to one bad mother of a dual-quad-DDR-SCSI-1337-crazy-box and get a better processor and more disk space to boot.

I figure we will do this switch in December. Historically its the slow month for Internet shopping, and we can overlap our current server with the new, more bad ass server by bringing the new one online December 1st and cutting the old one off December 31st. This will give us plenty of time to configure the new server, migrate Secure Delivery, test everything 100%, move the DNS, do one last database import from the old server, and then do a DNS refresh to direct traffic to the new box.

Its a bit complicated, but if we do it right in theory there will only be 5 minutes of downtime at 3AM on a Sunday for our users (at least 90% of them anyway- some ISPs won’t follow our TTL request and might take longer to point to the new mamma jamma).

Once we get that solved, we’ll have to figure out that other problem we have- how to spend all the extra money we have in the bank account on advertising before the end of the year so we don’t have to pay tax on earnings :P

BKF: The Killer Feature™ that we are currently developing that we named after this English bloke who keeps asking us “When is it going to be done?!”

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Our traffic has dropped a bit from September, but thats ok. In September I tried a bunch of random traffic producing methods- everything from “buying traffic” to social bookmarking and forum posts. While we did get a big surge in traffic from what I suspect was pop-under traffic and surf consoles, there was not a corresponding big surge in sign-ups.

This confirmed my suspicions, but hey- I wanted to try it out anyway. At least now when I say buying visitors is a crock of @&*$ I have the experience to back up my claims instead of hearsay and conjecture.

Throughout September Secure Delivery got a number of reviews, both paid and free, from other bloggers. They continue to bring quality traffic to Secure Delivery and I suspect they will continue to in the future. In addition to the blog reviews, Secure Delivery was picked as on of the prizes for the Problogger Birthday Giveaway. This resulted in several posts on Problogger. While this didn’t bring a whole heck of a lot of traffic (there were always many other product links beside ours) I know for a fact that quite a few people who did come through created an account.

Add to that the random distribution of prizes meant that only 3 of the 5 people who won lifetime subscriptions actually sold digital downloads and could use the account and the cost of promotion on that one went way down. I’ll have to think of something to do with the other two lifetime prize subscriptions if they are not eventually claimed…

Fraud!

We had our first fraud claim on PayPal this weekend. Evidently someone signed up for a paid plan, decided they didn’t want to use the service, and decided to file a fraud claim against us in PayPal to get their $10 back.

You know, we hate it that someone wanted to cancel their subscription. That really sucks, and we’d love to know why. What really chaps our ass about this particular cancellation is that they could have just dropped us a support ticket saying that Secure Delivery was not for them and we would have happily canceled their subscription and given them a full refund.

Interestingly enough, the fraud reason was “Unauthorized use of PayPal account” even though they used their business domain email, set up a product being sold on that domain, and even added our buy button before canceling. Lies and deceit I tell you- when all they would have had to do is ask, and not even nicely at that.

Features Features Features….

Both my business partner and I are working on new features and trying to get ready for a publish.

A publish is a big thing to us- it pretty much copies our dev environment to the live site and lets all the new features we are working on behind the scenes out to the public. Being how our service directs people’s money and products to the right parties, we spend a long, long time testing new features in our dev environment before we publish to live, so we get pretty excited when we get to stop testing, throw the big switch, and actually launch new features and see how subscribers use them.

What will probably be in this upcoming publish includes a new payment processor (2CheckOut), a new method of putting your products “On Sale” and setting up “Introductory Offers”, and a few other tweaks and updates. Of course, all this is subject to change and development complications might move features further down the time line, yada yada yada.

Sorry for neglecting the blog, this whole running a business online thing is a lot of work. Thanks to all three of my readers- I’ll try to keep you updated as time permits :)

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.