Bloggers @ MindSay

Web Based PHP Customer Support Help Desk System. Easy To Use And Feature Rich. Perfect For Internet Marketers, eBay(R)ers, Bloggers, Affiliate Marketers, Etc.

How To Save Yourself A Ton Of Time In Lost Productivity Have Happy Customers Thank You, And Easily Outsource Your BIGGEST Time Sucking Task...  Guaranteed!

You'll Pat Yourself On The Back For Being So Smart

Hi, my name is Frank Haywood and I work from home.

I can do this because amongst other things, I sell digital goods, mostly software and tools for business.

Yes, it's great thanks.  I thoroughly recommend it to anybody and everybody.

However, there is a downside and I'm going to explain it to you now.

I'd like you to take a few moments to imagine the scenario below, and put yourself in that situation.

Imagine you had one or more products you were selling online.  Every day you wake up and check your email to see new sales (which is nice) and also new support questions (which is a fact of life for any business).

You check the support questions, and you find that once again they're the same questions you've already answered either in the documentation, the product itself, or your sales letter, all of which people can't be bothered to read properly.

So you whip out your standard stock answer from your templates, a quick copy and paste into the email, edit it slightly, and off it goes.  Problem solved.  Except it's taken you 5-10 minutes to do it.

You now have just a dozen more to complete, and while you're answering those, some new ones come in, and also some replies to the emails you sent asking another question.

Two to three hours later and you're done.  Six or seven hours later, you have some more of the same stuff.

And then next day it repeats all over again.

All your customers say what "great support" you give.

But what you're doing isn't support, it's consultancy.  That wasn't part of the deal for the $27 product you sold now was it?

That's just not right, and it's not fair on you.

If you're doing consultancy, you want at least $70 an hour for it to be worthwhile.  But because you believe you're doing "support", you're prepared to charge nothing.

Crazy.

What's The Answer?

Here's the answer.

It's easy.  It really is easy.

Change the way you're thinking for starters, and for seconders, install some help desk software on your web site.

Not just any software, you want software that will:-

• Allow you to expand by passing the support tasks onto staff as your business grows.


• Answer repeated questions by using easy-click templates that you can pre-load.


• Have an easy to set up and use searchable knowledgebase, split by topic.


• Just generally make your life easier, and give you some time back for yourself.

That's why I created Ticket Desk Pro.  It's just right for any size of business.

It was built from the ground up with ease of use, security and scalability in mind.  Just install Ticket Desk Pro on your web site and from that point on, handle your customer support queries in a controlled manner.

Want A Look At The Feature Set?

Need a bit more detail?  Okay then, here are some bulleted features:-

• Multiple departments and multiple users.


• Multiple departments (CTRL-click selectable) per user.


• Multiple users per department.


• Users can be Moderators, Super Moderators or Administrators.


• Allowed attachment types which you can specify e.g. .jpg|.gif|.doc|.txt.


• Auto zip attachments.


• Tickets filtered in real time.


• Filters for department, priority, and awaiting response.


• Search tickets by keyword, department, priority, status and date.


• Multiple Standard Responses which can be selected, added and edited.


• Merge tickets.


• Searchable Frequently Asked Questions by department.


• System tools function to purge old tickets and attachments.


• Ability to contact other help desk staff by email.


• Ban filters by email address, IP address and key words plus wild card support.


• Email notifications to both customers and support staff.


• Choice of PHP mail or SMTP to send emails.


• Auto-added signatures for staff replies to customers.


• Captcha codes for security against spammers.


• Auto close tickets after a set duration.


• Time offset where the server is not in your time zone.


• Multiple languages via language files (English and German, more to come).


• Blend Ticket Desk Pro into your existing site design by changing the CSS.


• Last but not least, LIVE SUPPORT (operator - customer chat) with optional captcha codes.

Want To See For Yourself?

Click HERE for a demo showing what your customers will see. (opens in new window)

Click HERE for a demo of the admin panel that you'll be working with. (opens in new window)

System Requirements PHP 4.3 or above MySQL 4 ionCube Loaders* CURL support** *Most hosts support ionCube, and if not most of the remaining will install them for you when asked.  If not, then I can make a suggestion for full featured hosting at a budget price. **Again, most hosts already support CURL or will install it if requested.

How Did Ticket Desk Pro Come About?

About 18 months ago, before I'd even launched my first digital product online, one of my mentors told me to set up a help desk, and do everything through there.  He told me that if I didn't, email support would slowly begin to kill my business.

He knew that for a fact because that's exactly what had happened to him.

Sadly, I ignored him.  You live and learn, sometimes the hard way.

After ignoring him, I then spent a couple of hours every day for 12+ months answering support questions.

Worse still, I found I was answering the same support questions over and over by people who couldn't be bothered to read the documentation properly.

Compound that with umpteen similar things and you can probably appreciate that it was slowly becoming a very frustrating situation.

If you're not yet at that point in your business, trust me, you will be eventually.

So why not start as you mean to go on?  I wish I had.

Get yourself a copy of Ticket Desk Pro.

So What Do you Get For Your Money?

• A copy of Ticket Desk Pro help desk software for your web sites that you can install on as many domains as you personally own.


• A built in set of installation and usage docs in HTML format.
  
  

  
  

  Andreux

  
  
  53 replies
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  Annual Public Entry

  Six years. Happy blogaversary.
  
  Over the blog hill, I would assume, but I recently learned from another blogger that the first Internet journal appeared fifteen years ago in 1994. I have a long way to catch up.
  
  My first entry appeared far too long for the guy who introduced me to MindSay. He had established his account as one of the one-hundred series bloggers. I was blogger number two hundred forty-two. The numbers have since vanished, but I still remember mine from when MindSay used the LiveJournal (LJ) platform. Looking back on the entry... it actually does look too long for an introduction.
  
  But I did not care! This new "blog" space was intended just for me, and I had my small tight-knit network of two blogging friends that included this gentleman who exposed me to my six-year addiction & one of his friends. I searched for other users, and I was able to find verd & beloved Ms. Lo among us veterans. My small audience was perfect at the time. I was able to blog with unabashed solipsism free of any criticism.
  
  After several weeks of virtual anonymity here on MindSay, waves of cliques & droves of teens flocked to my new blogging home. It was only a few years later that I would find out that MindSay really had not yet opened for business at the time that I joined. In any event, I did not know if my small tight-knit network of two blogging friends & I would fit into the new crowd.
  
  Weeks later, my two friends left.
  
  By this point, however, I had befriended some of these eccentric cliques, like Kynthiae, & Tennessee teens, like Hannah. The influx was something like a new generation of bloggers. These bloggers, clearly familiar with the LJ format, had amazing layouts. In fact, they had some amazing entries too. They had this journal thing down to an art, but what made MindSay special was its AIMbot tool to update & its use of channels to meet like-minded bloggers. No wonder MindSay attracted this new generation. During this era, I learned that the best communication with these new bloggers was via reply rather than by writing entries.
  
  Maybe two years passed, and our fearless leaders, Brian & Adam, readied MindSay for a new direction. Versions 1 & 2 of MindSay utilised the LJ platform. Version 3 was MindSay's break from the established format to a new rich text editor with layout templates. Channels disappeared, and the AIMbot tool became obsolete.
  
  So rigid was our creativity that several users left mercilessly altogether.
  
  Focus from blogs eventually shifted to the community. How many more pictures could a user upload for a header image? No longer could we hide portions of our entries behind "cut-tags", and our user images remained frozen. Animated avatars are like a novelty these days. With this new sentiment on MindSay, in poured a new generation of bloggers like Mycki & Shiny. Instead of the edgy, young crowd from the last wave, an older, more mature crowd borne into a blogging site focused primarily on the community ultimately re-grounded me to my initial narcissistic point of blogging. The phenomenon had an opposite effect, and I retreated to my current Friends-Only blog to log all of my daily thoughts & events.
  
  
  ***
  
  Years later, I witnessed the rise & fall of such sites as MySpace & Friendster. I joined & left Friendster years ago because one of my Grenobloise friends used it & left. I never joined the cluttered mess that was MySpace, and after several months of my friends urging me to sign up for a Facebook account, I finally gave in to the peer pressure about two months ago. I doubt I will ever join Twitter though. Facebook became my way to interact with others, and MindSay became my site to quietly vent, sometimes about the Facebook friends. Not that venting is necessarily bad under the name of Andreux, but I certainly talk about them often. Get-togethers, opinions, humourous anecdotes... all of it stored right here for six years.
  
  But now I am seeing some bloggers talk about leaving MindSay, saying that the site is not what it used to be. What was MindSay? Was it a place for the community? Was it a stomping ground for dazzling HTML/CSS skills? Was it the small, humble site that only a few of us knew before the masses invaded with their extraordinary layouts & sophisticated groups?
  
  MindSay for me was always what I made of it. When the teens flooded, the site was a scenester neighbourhood. When the mature crew arrived, I shaped up my blog. One of the simplest, most important lessons that I ever learned about blogging is that the author can make whatever they want of their space:
  
  
• If he wants to criticise the government by way of political articles, then ravager can;
  
• If she wants to post silly questionnaires & surveys, then Kristin can;
  
• If she wants to document the highs & lows of love, then beccasays can;
  
• If she wants to talk the worst shit possible, then Jayme can;
  
• If he wants to exhibit the prose of amateur fiction, then TheMariner can;
  
• If he wants to post just a picture, then yes, Kuya can;
  
• And if he wants to talk about what to talk about on a blog, then damnit, I can. We can. We all can! There are simply no bounds to the insight within the minds of hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of writers wherever you are. We speak, we scream, we flirt, and we snitch. The fact remains that our voices keep MindSay alive.
  
  And we can bring down a site by leaving too. We can render MindSay into nothing if we make it that way.
  
  The exodus around this place has proven to be cyclical. It is almost a necessary evil for this place to flourish again. Once every two years, the masses threaten to vanish, possibly ushering in the next generation. I never look to the next generation. They always come to me as a surprise.
  
  We control what happens, and when the control is lost, the sentiment falls to chaos. MindSay is not dead. Six years later, I can say that MindSay is more vibrant now than my small company of four friends in the beginning. Since the first day, MindSay has gradually grown to the chatter that we see today. I do not doubt that bloggers will leave, but to say that MindSay is different, I ask what could you expect? To say that MindSay is dead is a skewed vision of what this place is now. Like a living organism, MindSay will change, and the generations will continue to surprise me.
  
  

  Dear Andreux,
  
  I hope I do you justice.
  
  Your loving author,
  Andrew

  
  
  Current Mood: Proud panda
  Current Music: Fragma - "Toca's Miracle"
  
  (Yeah, some LJ things never die)