sjain

HappyFox is certainly a worthy alternative to Zendesk. Quoting Mashable.com: "Foursquare uses Zendesk, but other popular options include Get Satisfaction and the beautifully designed HappyFox." (http://mashable.com/2011/10/19/downtime-communication-tips/)

HappyFox is way simpler and we do have zendesk data import feature that will move your data too.

It is the only product which is time-tested both with large corporates and small businesses. HappyFox was originally a product I launched as Helpdesk pilot, in 2005 with in-premise and traditional licensing model.

Our email integration is simple and unlike Zendesk gives you email integration that works with your domain name right from the start. We were the first ones to launch a free plan that actually has features that you would need like Advanced Reporting and professional support.

We'll soon be launching our new pricing and a switch program that will allow you to make the most of our existing investment into other products.

The last thing I would really want to do is outsource customer service, esp. in the early years of business.

I wrote a small piece on What Your Startup can Gain by Delivering Great Customer Service: http://www.happyfox.com/blog/what-your-startup-can-gain-by-d...

As a passionate founder, you would have the right tools and people that will keep you customer service going.

+1 for founders to be part of customer service irrespective of the size of business.

It went to Facebook for permission and pressed "Don't Allow", it returned me back to your website with this message:

"Okay. The Gushbot will be gathering your Facebook photos while we prepare your invite."

I don't have many pictures on Facebook, more on trekearth and flickr. It would be good to bring support to old not so well maintained sites like trekearth. More value, at least for me.

While the product is derived from Helpdesk Pilot, a lot of things are different: Our target segment, product use case, pricing and delivery.

Helpdesk Pilot is established as a deployable enterprise product now. Also, Helpdesk Pilot has served a different market, for instance, it caters to large group of Internal IT help desk requirements in banks, universities and many other large organizations besides being used for customer support by many other companies. Many features like LDAP integration is more important to enterprise segment than for a cloud based customer support software.

We have plans to add different set of features for these products to serve different requirements more effectively.

The UI is done completely done in-house by our team. The idea with the design was to keep content always in focus and a lot of our own and customer experience in what works for a support staff.

The design process included mocking up the entire application in HTML/CSS long before we actually coding the application. Lot of workflow improvements was done at this stage.

We have consciously attempted to keep navigation and content separate and hence have no vertical navigation to other parts of the application when you are actually working on a ticket.

You could try Helpdesk Pilot - http://helpdeskpilot.com - saas model is in the making.