Any business looking to ensure that they offer a good customer service to their consumers is going to want some way of providing help to their users online. In today’s competitive market, being the best is crucial and if your customers think that you’re going to do your best at making sure their issues are rectified, there’s no doubt you’ll probably get repeat business. There are plenty of high-quality support ticket apps out there, but these can often come with a matching price tag. Luckily, there are some free options, too.
The app I’ll be looking at today is Trellis Desk and it certainly fits within the free and high quality category. All you need is a web server to install it on with some basic requirements and you’re away!
Overview
Trellis Desk is a self-hosted support ticket app that makes it incredibly easy to get a live customer support desk up and running without much configuration. It comes with a variety of features including a knowledge base, canned responses, easy control of departments and much more – meaning it’s well worth checking out. It also sports a very nice interface so, regardless of technological know-how, just about anyone can get their own support ticket system up and running.
Overview
Getting Started
To get Trellis up and running, users are required to have their own web server with some basic minimum requirements. The ‘readme’ file within the package details the installation process and once it is complete, users are then taken to the actual dashboard of Trellis. From here, you can managing tickets, tweak your settings, and anything else you need.
Fresh Installation Homepage
Along with a list of the latest tickets and admin actions taken from the log to help identify security threats, the dashboard also comes coupled with a notepad. This is a nifty little feature that allows admins to share a basic block of text information with other admins and this could be used as a general simple means of communication.
The Trellis Dashboard
Departments
The only real step to ensuring that the ticket desk can be used to its full potential at first is creating departments within the app. These allow tickets to be categorised based on the type of support needed and ensure that relevant staff can be assigned to each one.
When creating departments, it’s made possible to easily provide those choosing the department with a description of each so that they can choose the appropriate one. Auto assign is also an option and allows certain staff members to automatically be assigned to tickets based on the department, making it easy to ensure that the appropriate member of staff is delegated a certain ticket.
Creating a New Department
Another handy little feature of Trellis is the ability for users to escalate their issues. Should this be enabled, after the specified amount of time has passed without any activity, should users want to get the attention of the administrators or support staff, they can bump up their ticket to a higher priority status. Also, Trellis allows for escalation to another category so in addition to a higher status, tickets can also be moved to a different department.
Managing Tickets
When Trellis is all set up and customised to your liking, you can then start linking to the Trellis installation on your own website and directing users there for their support needs. The frontend of Trellis allows users, once registered, to instantly begin submitting support tickets. The app doesn’t go overboard on the details and simply provides the user with the ability to add a subject to the ticket, choose the priority status and then describe their issue. Once this is complete, the relevant users are notified that there is a ticket waiting and support staff can then begin acting upon them.
Ticket Submission Interface
Once communication starts between the support staff and the users, the ticket status is then updated to reflect the status of the support request and once replies have been provided by the staff, users can then provide feedback on whether the staff members were helpful or not. Tickets can also be put on hold for further action later and, when complete, they can be closed.
Replying to a Support Ticket
Another really useful feature of Trellis is the ability to add canned replies. This is useful if you experience users that often ask the same sort of question that you’ve already answered. By using canned replies, you can write some common replies beforehand to help to solve the problem and then, should the user submit a ticket that you believe could be resolved with that response, simply choose from the ‘Canned Replies’ dropdown and once chosen, the text automatically populates the reply box.
An Example Canned Reply
Knowledge Base
Trellis also acts as a useful knowledge base where support staff can create articles that should hopefully detail the steps needed to fix a problem or simply just documentation to ensure that users understand how to use the product or whatever service the staff are supporting. This can be useful should support staff want to link users directly to an explanation of the issue that is documented in the knowledge base and to ensure that the staff’s time is not wasted explaining issues that are already detailed in the knowledge base. Complete with the features to allow categorisation of articles and the creation of custom pages, this really completes Trellis’ array of features to aid in support.
Managing Articles in the Knowledge Base
Final Thoughts
When it comes to offering an affordable all-in-one solution to the task of running a support desk, Trellis certainly seems to offer this full package. Despite requiring a web server for it to be installed onto, it’s still absolutely free to use – an added bonus to small businesses that would perhaps be a bit more hesitant to fork out on apps until they have a strong customer base.
However, despite its upsides, it’s been a couple of years since it was last updated so it’s a sort of ‘what you see is what you get’ solution, as I doubt there will be any more updates to this version. I thought I’d review it because it’s still a nice solution that seems to offer businesses what they’d probably need to get this done. On the upside, there’s still a small chance of a new version being released in the near future that should hopefully provide a more stable reincarnation of what I found to be a really useful web app.