ngDesk is a free online support ticket management system for teams with custom domain, API, and much more. Here you can use it to manage and resolve all the customer requests and queries. It lets you add your team members as admins and agents, and they share a same centralized tickets management UI where all the new and assigned tickets appear. This support system allows you to create tickets from multiple channels. It can help you create tickets from messages received from your business Facebook page and of course support emails. You can create unlimited email addresses for the support channels and manage support requests from an easy-to-use interface.
ngDesk is a one of the best free alternatives to popular support ticket management systems out there. It offers you all the features of Zendesk/Freshdesk and for free. Even though there are self-hosted ticketing systems out there but here you don’t have to host it on your end. You just create a free account and it will assign you a subdomain for you automatically. You can later map that subdomain to your own custom domain easily. It supports custom fields for the ticket management interface and you can easily customize that for agents or even system admins. Along with the tickets management, you get chatbots, knowledge base, schedules, escalations, triggers, and validations for the fields here.
Main Features of ngDesk:
- Unlimited agents: One of the best features of ngDesk is that it allows you to unlimited agents for free. You can easily invite agents in bulk via email address and even assign them a custom UI to manage the support tickets.
- Unlimited channels: After adding any number of agents, you can create support channels as well. Channels are nothing, but a medium on which the support tickets will arrive. You can create email addresses with different names to receive email tickets. Not only email channels but you can use Facebook as a channel too for receiving support requests from your business page.
- Custom domain for the support portal: This is a very rare feature that you will almost never find in any support system. In ngDesk, if you want you can host the support portal on your domain. For that, you will only have to create CNAME record in your domain registrar.
- Custom fields for tickets: Common fields for tickets such as priority, due date, assignee, etc., can be found in any support systems. But if you want a custom fields for tickets according your business then you can do that here. ngDesk allows you to create custom fields and you assign add those field in the UI of agents separately as well.
- Reports: ngDesk supports comprehensive repots to give you deeper insights to the key department functions and work processes. You can create custom reports and schedule them to continuously measure different help desk performance metrics. There is a dedicated section for the reports where you can create manage the reports and even download them on your PC.
- Chatbots: ngDesk also supports chatbots and you can deploy them on your website. To embed a customer hat n your website, it even provides WordPress plugin. The issue discussed in the chats can be transformed in to a support ticket that agents and admins will have to resolve.
- API access: ngDesk also provides API access to the support system. After generating the API keys, you can make simple API requests for doing some tasks programmatically. For example, using the ngDesk API, you can create new tickets. Also, you can even implement this functionality in developer apps.
Using this Free Online Support Tickets Management System:
Getting started with ngDesk is kind of complicated as it has a lot of features. But after going through the tutorials, you will be able to easily manage every aspect of it. The very first thing that you have to do is create an account on the main ngDesk website. After email verification, you will land on the main UI which looks like this.
To get started with managing tickets, you need to have support channels configured. So, you go to the modules and create ticket module. If it is already there then you go to the channels section In the channels, you can create as much email addresses you want.
Next thing to do in ngDesk is add agents. The best way to add agents is by inviting the via email addresses. You can even add your team members as agents. Just go to the “Manage Users” section and start sending invites.
Later, you can distribute the support email address and you will shortly start receiving the support requests. All the tickets will be available to all the agents and admins on the shared inbox like interface. There you can search, create, and update tickets. You can even assign those tickets to any other member of your team or even close the tickets. The UI to manage tickets is very simple and easy to use. You can also have pre-made responses to quickly close similar support tickets.
While creating account on ngDesk, you have to create a specific URL for your support portal. Initially, it has “ngDesk” subdomain but if you want then you can customize that easily. Make sure that you actually own a domain and then go to the settings and from the domain section, you add your custom domain. To do that, you will have to create a CNAME in your domain registrar pointing to your support portal that ngDesk created for you in the beginning.
In this way, you can use this support tickets management system to deal with user queries and issues. You can add link to the support portal on your business website and then manage tickets like a pro. It offers you all the features that you can expect from a fully functional support portal. The best part is that all the functionality is free. Of course there is much more to it than just managing support tickets. You can explore those features on your own via tutorials or help. For example, you can explore the reports section to create custom reports to have insights of how the portal is performing. You can also build a knowledge base for your customer to write articles to fix common issues related to your products and services.
Closing thoughts:
If you are a startup that can’t afford popular and premium help desk systems such as Zendesk then this is for you. ngDesk in my opinion provides all the features that you can hope for. However, it takes some time to get used to it. If you do not have any idea of how a support system works then I will suggest you to go through the tutorials first. They have a dedicated YouTube channel where you can find videos to get started. Overall, it is a great tool to have but I encountered some things broken on it while testing. So, I hop those flaws will be fixed in the coming updates. If you are looking for a completely free tickets management system with unlimited agents then you are at the right place. Just give ngDesk a try and let me know what you think.
