Question

Anybody have any recommendations for setting up a system for managing customer feedback whether in terms of general suggestions or more specifically in terms of bug reports?

I'm looking for something that would be customer friendly rather than something like Jira which is aimed at developers. Ideally it's something that I could subscribe to and not have to install and maintain on my own servers.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Stuart - do you mean something a bit more detailed that Uservoice or GetSatisfaction?

Answer 2

Btw - i installed bugtracker yesterday for a client i am doing some work for. A free .Net OS platform. Works really well.

Ideal for startups (and free).

http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html

Answer 3

We use a combination of tools for managing customer support/feedback and internal bug tracking:

• Community Discussion: Get Satisfaction
• Customer Support: ZenDesk
• Internal Bug tracking/project management: Tracker

It's been important for us to make the distinction between official company support and community discussion as we found Get Satisfaction hard to use once user number grew. ZenDesk fills this gap and also integrates with Get Satisfaction. I wrote an article about it here:

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/central/community-discussion-and-customer-support-the-missing-link

Pivotal Tracker is amazing if you are using an agile approach to releases.

Answer 4

We're currently using Tender Support which feels user friendly enough for our clients. It supports both public and private conversations, along with FAQ management and that kind of thing. It's definitely geared more for product support than I felt UserVoice or Get Satisfaction were.

And it's a pay-monthly hosted service. Big win for us is that you can interact with it through email, so I rarely have to visit the web interface.