Zendesk

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Do not build this if a whole department runs on it. Ticketing an organisation depends on is the product, and the dependency is the point.

Routing rules, service level agreements, business hours, satisfaction surveys, reporting a manager reads, and dozens of people who already know how to use it. Replacing that is a change-management project rather than an engineering one, and the software is the smaller half.

WHEN TO KEEP PAYING
- A support department, service level commitments, and reporting somebody outside the team relies on
- Anywhere the cost of retraining exceeds the subscription

WHEN TO BUILD
- A small team, a shared inbox and a help centre. Then the shape is under Help Scout and Chatwoot elsewhere in this catalogue, and it is a fortnight

FIRST, CHECK THE SEATS
- Priced per agent. Occasional contributors on full seats is the usual overspend, and lighter roles often exist for exactly that
- An audit of who logged in last month is frequently worth more than a migration

IF YOU BUILD IT, THE PARTS THAT DECIDE WHETHER IT WORKS
- **Email threading** by Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References, never by subject alone, with quoted history stripped for display and kept in full — a fixture per mail client, because they all quote differently
- Automatic replies and bounces detected from their headers and never turned into tickets, or the inbox starts talking to itself
- **Collision detection**: who has a ticket open, who is typing, and a warning before sending if somebody else already replied
- A private note that is impossible to send to the customer by accident, rendered so differently it cannot be confused. That mistake is seen by the person it is about
- Service level targets computed from an append-only events table at query time, with business hours honoured, and a breach visible before it happens rather than reported afterwards
- Monitor the age of the newest inbound message. An inbox that quietly stops receiving is the worst failure here

AND THE THING THAT REDUCES TICKETS MORE THAN ANY HELP DESK
Record the searches in your help centre that return nothing. That list is the set of articles somebody expected to exist, and writing five of them removes more volume than any routing rule.

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
Audit the seats before anything else. If you build, spend the time on threading, collisions and the note that must never go out.