
Show HN: Use Trello as a Helpdesk - fiatjaf
https://boardthreads.com/
======
silverlight
At first glance, it's interesting. We currently use Freshdesk. We have around
3 people that use it daily. We get around 100 emails per day.

Re: the price point, it's certainly cheaper than a full-fledged offering like
Freshdesk, but honestly if there's one thing most businesses are probably
comfortable paying for, it's tools to keep their customers happy. So I'm not
sure competing on being much lower-priced is a win here.

About 80% of our email that comes in is answered with a canned response. I
would make that your number one feature to add (unless it's already in, in
which case I would highlight it on the homepage).

The other thing I would consider a must-have is the ability to move a card
from the "Completed" list back to the "Active" list if the customer re-
responds. I think a very typical workflow for this type of system is to answer
the email and then consider the case "closed" unless you hear back again from
the customer, in which case you want it to be moved back onto your active
list.

Finally, it's not super-important to us, but I know that reporting is big in
this space as well -- knowing who is responding to what and how quickly the
average email is getting answered, for example. That might be the type of
thing you could sell as an add-on, where you keep track of that on your end
and then allow them to access a report on your site.

Overall though it's a very neat idea. I might swing back by in a few months
and see where it's at and consider it for my next project.

~~~
fiatjaf
The pricing is cheap because it offers very little features. In fact it is
just a wrapper around Mailgun and Trello.

Canned responses are not possible to implement because all the action happens
inside Trello, and I can't modify the Trello UI to add new things. I've
thought about using some dark magic tricks for this task, but users would not
understand.

I have considered offering addons that would provide reporting and canned
responses also, but those should come after I have a bigger customer base.

Anyway, thank you very much for your feedback.

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ohnoesmyscv
Cool idea, but not sure if the Trello boards ux is suitable as a help desk.

At 15$ per month i use Reamaze
([https://www.reamaze.com](https://www.reamaze.com)) for my consultancy and it
serves as a full featured help desk with slack and github integration as well
and i hear they do have a trello in the works, last I asked. Not sure if there
are ones out there with a trello integration though.

Good stuff!

~~~
hw
I agree. Am looking for a help desk, will check out Reamaze. Trello as a help
desk seems quite limited for now, but maybe it'll get better.

~~~
spiro
Been working on an alternative in the help desk space for smaller teams.

[https://hipdesk.co](https://hipdesk.co)

Provides threaded email ticketing. Knowledge base will be there soon.

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appleflaxen
This looks cool!

Can you address how the board scales when your list of archived/answered
problems reaches 100 items? 1000? 10,000?

It seems like you need something beyond the UI shown in the gif to cope with
help-desk-sized email volume.

~~~
fiatjaf
We've been using it on [https://formspree.io/](https://formspree.io/) and
Trello handles it well up to 100 or more cards on the screen. If you archive
the cards, however, either at the time you reply or periodically ("Archive all
cards in this list"), it will be much easier and Trello can handle practically
unlimited archived cards.

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highace
Cool idea but why would I pay for this when I could pay for a proper helpdesk
service instead?

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throwaway2016a
I'm waiting until someone does this with AWS Lambda and SES as Serverless app
(which would make it easy to deploy without knowing AWS internals).

~~~
fiatjaf
You wouldn't get threaded conversations, attachments and other small but
important features that are solved on BoardThreads.

~~~
throwaway2016a
Why not? The In-Reply-To header in emails makes following threads pretty easy
and you can fire a web hook to API gateway to kick off a Lambda function when
you reply to a Trello story.

You might need a database to map the In-Reply-To header to a Trello story if
the customer replies to their own message but DynamoDB on AWS would let you do
this for pretty munch free.

AWS Lambda is actually absurdly powerful when combined with other AWS
products. Think IFTTT only with custom code. I am 100% sure there is nothing
this product does that can't be done with Lambda, SES, and AWS API Gateway
from a technical standpoint.

Granted by the time you are done it would cost enough to pay for over a year
of this service. Which is why I didn't say I would write it myself. Even if it
takes a weekend the break even is too long. Bit if someone wants to open
source it ;)

~~~
fiatjaf
"I am 100% sure there is nothing this product does that can't be done with
Lambda, SES, and AWS API Gateway from a technical standpoint."

That's a strange thing to say. How many products are there that cannot be done
with Lambda, SES and AWS API Gateway?

~~~
throwaway2016a
Good question. Quite a few... those are very niche products. In fact if I
think long on it I am not including the front-end in that 100%. If you want a
front-end you'd need a tiny bit of S3 or a server.

Lambda is good for stateless APIs and event processing but is not good for
anything that requires persistence.

SES is an email product so it's usage is niche but it is surprisingly
powerful. Example: firing a lambda function when an email bounces or is
received.

I didn't list a database in there. I'm assuming Trello can be used like a
database (and looking at their API it seems it can in this case).

So to answer your question:

\- Any app that requires state

\- Any app that requires persistent connections

\- Any app where a unit of work can take more than 6 seconds

\- Any front-ends [1]

\- Apps where local cache is needed to provide any sort of reasonable
performance

\- Apps that need a database

Cannot be made with just those three tools.

[1] It is possible to make a front-end with API gateway and Lambda. API
gateway can return different mime types, including HTML. But it would be a
huge hack and also not likely cost effective. A static site generated and
hosted on S3 with Cloud Front in-front of it is very cost effective but
requires the client use javascript. If noscript is a requirement you're stuck
with a server.

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mazlix
This is cool! I've actually been using Trello as the backend for an text
message service I made called
[http://advice.pocketwingman.us/](http://advice.pocketwingman.us/)

Worked as a great lo-fi solution for me, since you can just have all the
support team download the Trello app and they'll get a push notification
whenever something comes in.

~~~
robinson-wall
The background image on that page is 7.6MB, you might want to optimise that a
little - it took a long time to load even on a decent connection :)

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gogopuppygogo
Another option is to integrate your repository with your support desk to
provide decreased overall management involvement coupled with increased
transparency to the business people.

That's what these guys do:
[http://www.bluepensoftware.com/](http://www.bluepensoftware.com/)

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kerryritter
$18/mo seems pretty steep for such a service, but this is a pretty cool idea.

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pedrokost
Are custom email on the roadmap? Would be really useful then.

~~~
dlss
I think the usual method is to forward just help@ or support@ emails to the
3rd party support email address. See
[http://docs.helpscout.net/article/54-google-
apps](http://docs.helpscout.net/article/54-google-apps) etc

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hw
Is there a way I can add an auto-responder?

~~~
fiatjaf
We have at least one user that set up an auto-responder using Zapier and
Trello integration (totally unrelated to BoardThreads, but BoardThreads
supports any kind of interaction, even if it comes from Zapier).

