Our helpdesk app, both the SaaS and the self-hosted version - is powered by SQL Server. Of course, the SaaS app additionally uses S3 (to store file-attachments), Redis (to persist in-memory cache between deploys and restarts) and other fancy cloud stuff, but there's still one big ass SQL Server database at the heart of it.
And this Christmas we've migrated it to Linux.
After the recent Facebook outage I got curious how many SaaS B2B products have an actual SLA - a Service Level Agreement with a legally binding uptime commitment. Turns out SLA's are very uncommon in the SaaS space. Here's a little comparison table I compiled, just for illustration purpose.
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We've just published Jitbit v10 - Release Candidate for our self-hosted customers - the next gen .NET Core based version that works on both Linux and Windows.
I figured we owe this post to our customers (mostly) because of all the fluctuations we've been going through lately.
About eight years ago someone hacked into our AWS account and launched hundreds of GPU virtual machines for cryptomining. Our monthly bill went from the regular $200 to over $50k overnight. We did not have a paid "support" plan, we were not a VIP client (on the contrary, we were two scared kids trying to grow our little SaaS). But one phone call - and the problem was solved in 10 minutes.
Behind every successful help desk are agents who make them run.
You rely on your agents to help form the impression that customers or users get of your service, to provide genuine help when people need it and to gather and pass on valuable feedback that will help your company move forward successfully.
Believe it or not, a question comes up every now and then - can I get away with not having a help desk app?
I've recently bumped into several conversations about outsourcing customer support, mostly among bootstrapped software founders who are (obviously) overwhelmed with work.
How should a support agent deal with unresponsive users - who create tickets and then don't respond? ITIL tells us an incident should only be closed by the user who created it. Otherwise the ticket should be put "on hold". But in reality... There's only so much you can do:
Tagging is the bane of many support teams' existence. Do you do it manually? Use Zapier to build automated tagging? Use a dedicated tool to tag tickets based on customer sentiment? Set up daily reminders to make sure tagging actually happens? There are so many options—it can feel overwhelming!
