Running www.passyourtheory.co.uk involves, obviously, providing support to our customers and potential customers. Traditionally we’ve done this by publishing an email address and we pride ourselves on responding quickly. However, this has a number of drawbacks. Firstly, it means that a specific person receives the email and then needs to deal with it: this makes it difficult to share the support amongst a team. Secondly, the email sits on whichever PC it’s downloaded to making itoften difficult to keep the whole thread in view.
The obvious answer is some form of ticketing system. I certainly didn’t want the sort of system that requires the user to register for an account and I didn’t want anything over-featured and therefore complication. We wanted something simple that allowed each of us to see the outstanding tickets and respond to them. It took some considerable time to find, but Hesk is the system we’re trialling at present. It’s a PHP script that you upload to your server, and it includes an installation script that creates the various tables. It’s been nicely written and so also serves as an interesting tutorial. Best of all, it’s customisable and free!
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