Then we came across House-on-the-Hill Software. We took a trial CD back to the office and within 2 hours of trying the software, we knew that we had found the system for us.

Initially we purchased SupportDesk complete with the Email and Call Escalation modules purely to administer the technical support for our products. The more we got to know the software, the more tasks we actually began to use SupportDesk for. We had looked into a separate CRM package for the company but because SupportDesk was so well laid out and so flexible, we find our usage of it moving more and more in that direction.

Support Section
We use the support section extensively. What really pleases us about the support section – and it’s a feature common throughout SupportDesk – is that the categories of the fields available are easily changeable. The setup is designed to make life easier for you, not the programmers of SupportDesk!
The support call dialogue is a one-stop-shop that collates all the information you are likely to need to fully document a support call: customer details, reply log, inventory list for the customer and an activity section. Since we have purchased the email module, we can set up a large number of email templates which can be scanned from our Inbox and automatically logged and assigned in SupportDesk. This saves us no end of time. The Support display window is very well planned and very visual and with the escalation module, you can quickly see any calls that have not been answered within your target response time (also defined by you).

Knowledgebase Section
The knowledgebase section is a really useful feature in several different ways.
Fundamentally it allows all our support staff to have access to the solutions to common questions, saving a great deal of unnecessary time where two different staff members might answer the same question independently. When we purchase the WebServer option, we can web enable the knowledgebase and this not only gives added value to our supported customers, but will also save our support staff a lot of admin and effort since users can browse to see if their query has already been included in the knowledgebase before deciding to log the call themselves. The knowledgebase button on the support call means that updating the IT is painless as new queries come in.

Customer and Contact Sections
The customer and contact database sections are perhaps the hidden gems of SupportDesk. The amount of information you can hold for a customer and the fields available are so well planned and integrated that SupportDesk can actually function as a CRM system. The hierarchical relationship between customer and contact databases makes it very easy for us to manage our users and license management allocations. Once again the fields are pretty flexible and there are very few limitations on how you use them.
E xcellent defaults have been selected for field names and categories but if they don’t suit your needs, no problem – use them in a way that suits you.
All the databases are searchable, so you can quickly filter customers to suit your needs.
Contact names are also remembered in the support call database so if you enter a new call from Joe Bloggs from ACME Ltd, SupportDesk will automatically pull in his details for you from the Customer and Contact databases. This saves so much time as there is no need for manual searches and data entry.

Inventory and Product Sections
Initially we did not make too much use of the inventory module. When we started to use SupportDesk for more than just support however, we delved into the inventory options deeper and found that, like the other features used, the Inventory database offers a host of features above the remit of a standard support package. Some of the sections here are more geared towards internal inventory rather than external customer use but again, Support Desk is so flexible you can pick up and use the bits you do need; you are not forced into a particular style of usage. The fact that the inventory database is so well integrated with the customer and contact databases (available through a tab on the customer/contact menu) means that you can very easily get an overall picture of the products bought – from an organisational level right down to an individual.

Activities and Notice Board Sections
The activity and notice board sections are invaluable tools. They are integrated with all the other databases so you can schedule activities for fellow support staff, set response targets associated with them and the activities will be displayed automatically in their individual notice boards.For example, we have added a ‘Web Trial’ category to the type of support call received. This automatically enters into the support database the details of visitors downloading our software from our website (collected from a web form) to try it free for 30 days. Once the call is logged, we add an activity to the call: previously defined as a courtesy call by a sales colleague, 3 days into the trial, which is automatically added to the appropriate sales colleague’s activity list.

Marketing Campaigns and Sales Opportunities
The sales and marketing databases are yet another reason why SupportDesk offers much more than technical support administration. For sales, we can pull in the contacts logged in the support database as ‘Pre-Sales’ or ‘Web Trial’ and our sales people can track all subsequent sales related activities and outcomes. Again the good integration means that all the customer information is already available to you – no extra work required. We can see ourselves using the sales database even more as we expand our sales force and purchase the Telephony Interface to help track sales related calls.
The Marketing Campaigns module lets you essentially filter the contacts database to pull out a subgroup of users relevant to a particular campaign, quickly and painlessly.

Suppliers
Although the supplier database is really designed for external suppliers, e.g., computer hardware suppliers to a company, SupportDesk is flexible enough for us to use it as a database of our software distributors around the globe. Using it in this way has the added benefit that we can easily pull in the distributor details and sales information through the inventory database – giving us an additional ’on-the-fly’ method of tracking which of our distributors is performing best by making the most sales of our products.

Reports and Graphics
The call escalation module is great for letting our support staff know when they have not met their response time targets, but when we want more detailed information on who is answering calls most efficiently, which products are generating most support calls, plot the trend of calls received or want summaries of a host of other features, then the report and graphics sections are invaluable. Again, we like the fact that if the report you want is not there, you can add your own to the report library.

Features we Particularly Like..
SupportDesk essentially offers a friendly GUI to a number of related database tables. The system is very well integrated and set out. On the odd occasion where we have reached a limitation in the

SupportDesk menus or statistics, we simply set up an ODBC link from the SupportDesk tables to GenStat and do our statistics or custom graphs there.

As software developers ourselves, we hate to be shoe-horned into a particular way of working so we love the flexibility aspect of SupportDesk.

The integrated approach of all the different sections means that SupportDesk is very easy to work with and very efficient in terms of manual input of data and underlying data storage space.

Importing and exporting data to and from the database is straightforward; we had no problems migrating our customer details into SupportDesk and importing updated information from our distributor databases when necessary is pretty painless.

The email module and automatic logging aspect is wonderful and saves us lots of tedious administration.

We have purchased the MS Access option initially but we are secure in the knowledge that when we do eventually hit the records limit in Access, we will easily be able to migrate our system onto a more powerful underlying database supported by SupportDesk, without losing any valuable information or having major export issues to worry about.

We have found the technical support offered by the House-on-the- Hill team to be fast, friendly and extremely efficient.

We look forward to the continued expansion of the use of House-on-the-Hill software within VSN and to the person hours saved by choosing the right support solution for us.

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