Zammad Open Source Helpdesk Software vs SaaS

ZammadCompanies that are able to deliver the standard of service & support that their customers expect, even with a distributed team, will pull ahead of their competitors who are slower to adjust to a distributed work environment.

While a shared support inbox may seem convenient at first, a thriving company will quickly outgrow such a primitive solution. As the volume of support tickets grow, a robust helpdesk software supporting ticket assignment, priority, and escalations promotes accountability over cases that team members may be working on in different time zones, around the world.

SaaS helpdesk software such as Zendesk, ServiceNow, Force.com, or Freshdesk all have limiting factors such as the number of agents, or the maximum attachment size that can be uploaded by a customer. The per-seat costs of commercial help desk solutions can rapidly increase the technology costs for your support team.

For comparable functionality to Zammad, Zendesk charges $89/month per agent, so the savings quickly add up with a self-hosted support helpdesk — even though there is an initial cost to implement the solution on any supported cloud provider. Even with a relatively small number of support agents, the cost to implement Zammad will pay for itself within a few months, as the cost of hosting is miniscule compared to a SaaS.

Zammad has no limit on the number of support agents or monthly tickets. The only limitations are based on the capacity of your server, which can always be scaled up at the respective cloud provider. As a self-hosted support helpdesk, Zammad can be hosted in any geographic region of your choice, and encrypted to comply with data sovereignty & privacy requirements.

Zammad Open Source Helpdesk screenshot

As a support manager — making the switch to Zammad is not difficult, as you are able to designate an existing support email address as the inbox to be monitored by Zammad for incoming support requests. Furthermore, with the automatic assignment of ticket numbers, any email replies from the customer will be associated with the same support ticket.

Text templates (canned responses) make it easier for your support reps to adopt a consistent tone and voice — according to your company’s policies. They also increase support productivity by saving reps from having to retype responses to frequently encountered questions.

Zammad can be branded with your own company name/logo to provide a customer portal where support users can login to securely view & manage their open tickets. Integration with Elasticsearch provides a visualization of support tickets by status, average time to resolution, and escalation rate.

In addition to email, Zammad also supports SMS (over Twilio), Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, and live chat as additional support channels for intaking new support cases, and build customer loyalty through rapid & accurate responses to each and every customer.

The uncertain economic picture amid a global recession and pandemic naturally drives businesses to look for cost savings from outsourcing. With Zammad, you can quickly on-board (and off-board) any support reps from Zammad admin area, monitor their performance, and reassign automatically assigned support tickets where necessary.

Because of the sensitive nature of personal identifiable information often shared through support channels, security should be a paramount consideration when deploying a self-hosted support solution. When you hire Autoize as a consultant for Zammad to deploy Zammad on behalf of your customer service team, we will ensure your Zammad is properly configured with a TLS reverse proxy, uses SSL/STARTTLS to send follow-up emails over SMTP, and the support server is hardened against would-be attackers.

Zammad supports authentication against an external SAML identity provider or third-party accounts such as Facebook, Github, Google, or LinkedIn over OAuth to make it more convenient for your support agents and/or customers to sign in to Zammad to manage their tickets. Users receive a notification whenever a new Zammad session is initiated from a new IP address, including the approximate location, to ward off unauthorized access attempts.

LDAP integration, S/MIME for email signing/encryption, and integrations with VoIP service providers such as Placetel and sipgate.io are available to gather caller ID information and automatically route customers to available support agents.

Get in touch with an expert for Zammad at Autoize for assistance with deploying & customizing Zammad for your specific use case. If possible, please provide details about a) expected number of users b) volume of support tickets c) desired integrations to enable us to better assist you by recommending a Zammad hosting provider and server specifications.