ticket desk

Just to put your mind at rest, the pre-launch nickel sale for Ticket Desk Pro will start today.

Finally!

I know there are a lot of people itching to get their hands on this, and I’m sorry for the delay, but I’m sure you’ll agree it was all worth while when you get your copy.

The price starts at $5.02, and my guess is if you’re quick you’ll get it for under $10.

Even if you pay $20 for it, it’s still a bargain over the official launch price of $47, and even more so over the final price of $97.

You’ll get an email about it later today, and where you can get your copy.

Probably the best thing for you to do if you aren’t already, is subscribe to this blog notification list by going to the home page, and near the top right entering your name and email address and clicking the button.

If you want a quick look at the spec before you buy, this is where you should go now:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/nickel-sale-warning-ticket-desk-pro/

-Frank Haywood

You see the problem is, I just don’t give myself enough time.

At the last moment, I’ve spotted a problem which needs fixing before I can start the nickel sale.  As I don’t know how long it’s going to take to fix and test, I have no choice but to put the pre-launch back yet another couple of days until Thursday 27th.

I’m really sorry about this.  I thought everything was ready, when blammo!  I had a sudden realisation that part of the delivery process just wasn’t going to work.

As soon as I have an update, you can be sure I’ll make it here.

-Frank Haywood.

Tomorrow at 3.00pm GMT (10.00am EST), if all goes to plan I’ll be announcing the web link to the pre-launch of Ticket Desk Pro in a nickel sale.

If you want earlier notification than that, then it’s easy.  Just go to the home page of this blog and near the top right you’ll find two boxes for your name and email address.  Fill them in and click the button.

You’ll then be given the link to the nickel sale at least an hour earlier.

What can I say about Ticket Desk Pro?

In the 3 weeks or so that I’ve been using it, it’s already saved me a LOT of time, and time IS money.

I’m just kicking myself I didn’t use a help desk last year.  Instead I used email to do all my support, and that’s a BIG mistake for any online business.

Why?

Well with email, they just don’t make it through as well as they used to.  You’ve probably noticed yourself an increase on the amount of emails that don’t get through to your customers, friends and family.

And as I’ve said in an earlier post, it keeps all the conversation for a particular issue in one place.  It’s really hard when you get an email from someone and their mail client has dropped all the earlier conversation.

I think Yahoo does that, and maybe AOL too.

So while your customer can remember what the conversation was about, you’ve answered 20 other people since then and you’ve no idea what they’re talking about, or what their login details were or anything.

Painful.

And what if you have a standard answer for the same questions that gets asked over and over?

Well Ticket Desk Pro has both a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) section by department, and also the ability to add Standard Responses (SR) when you’re replying to one of your customers.

So when that question you’ve answered over and over comes up again, you just select the SR from a drop down, and click the “Add” button to add it your reply.  If more than one SR is appropriate, you can just add more by selecting them and clicking the button again.

If needs be, you can do a quick edit of the response you’ve just built up, and click “Add Reply”.

Job done in a fraction of the time it would have taken you by email.

But the most important thing is, even if the reply notification message to your customer doesn’t arrive in their inbox, when they check their ticket later on, they see that there has been a reply.

Result?  One happy customer.

So if you want to get your hands on this little beauty at a small fraction of the final price of $97, make sure you get notified of the nickel sale starting tomorrow Tuesday 25th at only $5.07.

Remember, the price increases by 5 cents with every sale, hence the term “nickel sale”.  The sooner you get it, the lower the price.

Will you be the first to grab this amazing tool?

I tell you what.  If you get it quickly, I’ll give you first warning of my next nickel sale, which will likely be for the Nickel Script itself.

More on that fantastic piece of software another time…

-Frank Haywood.

I’ve been using my new support desk software recently to handle all my support issues.  It’s made my life so much easier, and has actually allowed me to give better service to my customers.

One of the big deals for me when handling support by email was all those people who used email clients that threw away the previous messages.  What a painful experience that is.

So every time I received an email reply to a support problem from a customer, I had to go digging through other emails to find out what we’d been discussing.

If you’ve ever had to go through this yourself, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.  It’s an incredible time waster.

Using Ticket Desk Pro has also helped me enormously as I’ve now been able to hand some support over to my friend Donna Maher who has a VERY useful site at:-

http://www.productcreationpro.com/

Donna is one of life’s truly nice people, so please be courteous when dealing with her.

While I’ve not been so well this last week, Donna has been handling the bulk of the support tickets for me, leaving me with just a few to deal with myself.  Thank you Donna!

In all, if I could change the past 18 months, one of the things I would have done is to use a support desk for all my support issues.  Trying to handle them by email is just plain crazy.

In fact handling support by email is a business killer.  I freewheeled for much of 2007 purely because I was spending so much time on email support.

Mike Filsaime told me that 18 months ago, but I thought I knew better.

You live and learn.

If you want a copy of Ticket Desk Pro, then when I finally launch it will be $47 for  short while before rising to its final price of $97.

BUT.

For a short while, you’ll be able to get it in a nickel sale starting at just $5.07.

That means that if you’re one of the first to buy, you’ll be getting a 94%-95% discount on the final price.  In fact the first 18 people to buy will get it for under $6.

I’ll be launching it as a nickel sale because I want lots of installations out there as quickly as possible.  And I’ll also be looking for affiliates.

Can you help there?

The nickel sale will start at $5.07, increase by 5 cents with each sale, run for a week or two and then be removed and the real site will go live.

Afterwards, the price will be $47 and promoted through ClickBank with 50% commission, and then a month later the price will go up to $97, which we feel is its true value.

You can see a breakdown of the feature list here:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/nickel-sale-warning-ticket-desk-pro/

-Frank Haywood

Last Monday (which seems like a very long time ago), I said that I was going to come clean about Ticket Desk Pro.

It has a background that goes back two and a half years, that’s how long it’s been in development.  But Ticket Desk Pro isn’t the name it’s always been known as.

The original item of software has an excellent pedigree and it’s been worked on extensively by the developer this last 4 months or so and had new features added to it at my suggestion, and will now continue to be developed under its new name.

We also found a fair few minor bugs and fixed those too.

The old version will shortly disappear after TDP is launched.

Here we go then.

Ticket Desk Pro has been developed by David Bennett of Maian Script World, and TDP is based on Maian Support.

Maian Support hasn’t had any work done on it since March 2007.  David considered it as complete as he wanted it to be, but I saw there were a few really nice things he could do to it to turn it into a much more friendly piece of software.

So after sweet talking him for about a month, he finally agreed to not only re-write Maian Support and turn it into Ticket Desk Pro, but also to do some other nice little scripts with me too.

One of them you may have already used if you bought resale rights to SmartDD LITE, is the Nickel Script.

(I still can’t believe that NickelScript.com was free when I went to register a domain for the script!)

So back to TDP.  I have lots of other little ideas for improving it, but even in its current state, it’s a vast improvement over Maian Support in all sorts of little ways.

Three of the more noticeable things that we did was to:-

#1 – Add in extra filters to the open tickets.  This is an incredible time saver over the original script.  Now you can also select by “Awaiting Admin Response” to show you only the open tickets that are awaiting an answer from you.

This is a godsend when your support desk becomes busy.  I really don’t know if I could have kept my sanity without this one feature alone.  It was well worth all the testing and tweaking we went through to get it working correctly.

#2 – Allow the linking of multiple users to a department, and multiple departments to a user.  The old script took an “all or one” approach, you could either be responsible for all departments or one of them, but nothing in between.

Ticket Desk Pro now allows you to select and allocate multiple departments to a user, which is very useful if there’s some parts of your support system you don’t want everyone to have access to.

#3 – Add in Standard Responses.  Hallelujah!

You can now create a standard response, which when answering a ticket can be selected from a drop down and added to your answer just by clicking the “Add” button.

So you can either create complete answers to the same question, or create snippets of standard responses and add each one in turn to an open ticket until you’ve built a complete answer to the ticket.

I can’t even begin to tell you how useful this is.  If I lost this one feature, I’d probably want to use a different script, it’s that good.

Overall TDP is probably the best support desk system I’ve seen.  I’m not just saying that because it’s mine, I’m saying that because it’s true.

The most important thing to me was that it should be easy to use while still being fully functional.  David has achieved that in spades.

We’ll continue to add in truly useful features as they arise, but we won’t fall into the trap that we see many software vendors do of “over-engineering”.

What I mean by that is, sometimes an item of software is finished.  It doesn’t need anything else adding to it, but the developers feel that they have to continue adding in features that will never get used by 98% of people.

I’ve seen some great software turn into bloatware over the years that eventually became unwieldy and replaced by something slimmer from another vendor.  Example:  Microsoft Office, once the best, has now become over-engineered, and replaced on many people’s desktops by the much better Open Office.

If we add in a feature, then the majority will find it useful.  We also figure that if we find it useful, then so will most other people.

Okay, apart from the three important changes above, we’ve made all sorts of very useful little changes under the hood in various places throughout the script.  I even found a few bugs from the original that no-one had reported.

Tomorrow I’ll make a post about the pre-launch nickel sale, but just to warn you, the date for pre-launch is set for Tuesday 1st April.

-Frank Haywood