Archive for the ‘Timesaving Tools’ Category

The Three Pillars Help Desk created by Willie Crawford is simple, yet versatile. It has all of the features you would expect from support desk software, yet it’s incredibly inexpensive ($97 with $50 discount) compared to other solutions like Kayako.

I find the ease of use, and design a lot better compared to the free software I was previously using, and the free support desk was causing a lot problems for my customers, so I was dealing with support through email.

Before I run through the features, I just want to mention the one thing that really jumped out at me about this software. Your customers don’t have to register for an account before they can submit a ticket!

To me this is an awesome feature, because I find that people don’t want to take the time to register, confirm their registration, and so on, so they just end up emailing you because it’s faster. And well, that just defeats the whole purpose of having a support desk.

So what can the Three Pillars Help Desk do?

- Create ticket: Your customers enter their name and email address, choose a subject for their ticket, type in their message and enter the CAPTCHA. The ticket gets created in the database, and your customer is emailed their ticket ID.

- Check ticket status: You customer can check the status of their ticket at anytime by simply typing in their email address and ticket ID. They’ll be able to view their entire history.

- Super Admin (You): You can assign different people to handle specific support requests. For instance, if you provide design and blog installation, you could have one person take care of blog install support questions, and another who can deal with design questions.

You have full control over who can read and respond to help tickets, which is perfect for when you have tickets being submitted for things that you want to personally take care. For example: JV requests. You can set it so that no else can read those tickets, or respond to them.

- One-touch responses: This feature is a big time saver. If you find that you get tickets from customers asking the same questions, you can create a one-touch response.

So when you get asked the question, you simply choose the response you want from the drop down box - easy!

- Email notifications: Allow your customers to be notified when they open a ticket and when you reply to it. You can also choose to have email notifications sent to your assistant when a ticket is submitted, so they can respond in a timely manner. You can also add custom signatures to your emails, which can be used to promote other projects.

- FAQ/Knowledgebase: To save you and your customer time, you can enter questions into the FAQ so they can check for the answer to their question there. There is also an option to faq-ify a commonly asked question, and with the click of a button you can add it to your knowledgebase.

- Ticket priorities: To help you deal with the urgent requests first, and go down from there.

- Ticket categories/departments: You can add a category for each of your products or services so that when a customer submits a ticket you know the exact product they are referring to. This is perfect because you have one support desk for all of your websites.

This help desk software has everything I need, and yes, what most help desk software has. But, the Three Pillars Help Desk allows you to pretty much do whatever you want with the design, and you can install it on unlimited domains. You can easily change the header, footer, colours, and even promote your other products, like Willie Crawford has does.

Who is this product for?

Well, if you’re tired of having your inbox flooded with support requests and you’re ready to streamline your efforts, a support desk is for you. If you are more comfortable handling support through email, this product is not for you. Three Pillars Help Desk.

This is the exact support desk software I use for my own business, and my assistant recently asked me what software I was using because it was nothing like she’d ever seen before -  so simple and easy to use.

On the down side:

The only real downside I’ve found with this software is that you have to know how to set up a database, and you need to be able to edit the template html in plain text (to change your header, footer, etc.)

Fortunately, the software comes with a step-by-step manual and video and it shows you how to create and set up your database in cpanel, and get things up and running.

The design editing part, well, it took me a little longer to figure that out.

You see I use NVU, and so when I was editing the html files in the WYSIWYG, it was adding in extra code which was messing up the end result. So what I did was make my changes in the html editor, then compared the html to the original html template file, and this is what I found:

Once I removed the above coding, it worked perfectly! If this sounds too complicated, they can install it for you for $25. Three Pillars Help Desk Review

If you’re ready to streamline your support, whether you plan to handle it yourself through a help desk, or hire someone to take care of it for you, you can get a $50 discount here: Three Pillars Help Desk Review (the discount is limited, so if you’re interested I wouldn’t wait to pick up a copy of this software). Once you order, you’ll be taken to the download page where you can download everything right away:

* Three Pillars help desk software
* Installation Manual (PDF) and video
* BONUS #1: 5 HTML Templates
* Advanced Power Features
* Desktop Ticket Alert software
* BONUS #2: Over-Delivery Report

Get it here => Three Pillars Help Desk

Mailwasher Spam Filter and Removal Tool by: FireTrust

Review by: Sweetie Staff

What it is: Spam filter and spam blocking software for email

What You’ll Get:

This great piece of desktop software helps you quickly sort your email with minimal fuss. It allows you to preview the email on your server, WITHOUT ever having to download unwanted messages to your computer. You can create blacklists, friends lists, etc…allowing you to sort your email in a flash.

I’ve been using the Pro version of Mailwasher for several years and wouldn’t have it any other way. I also always get my virtual assistants to use it because I know it saves tons of time. Once they try it, they’re hooked and use it for all their clients.

You can download a free version and use it for as long as you want. The only catch is that it only works for one email address. If you want to use it for more than one email address, you’ve got to cough up a bit of cash, but it’s well worth it.”

I think words can’t do this tool justice and when I see people complain about spam, I can’t seem to express how it well it works and how much time it saves. So, I thought I’d give you a rundown of this handy software. . I’ve included screen shots to really give you a picture of how easy it can be.

I open up the software and it checks all my emails. Hundreds of emails are previewed in the software within seconds and you can view the full text (no html for your protection) of any email in the preview pane at the bottom.

In this preview pane, you’ll notice that some email senders are marked as “friend”, “blacklisted” and “origin blacklisted by spamcop”. The “friend” and “blacklisted” are set by me and that info is stored by Mailwasher. The “origin blacklisted by spamcop” is through the Spamcop database. Now, I don’t necessarily think Spamcop is the greatest thing, but I have to say these results prove to be quite accurate for my email.

Once email is loaded into the software (again it’s fast), you can easily sort by Date, Status, From…or whatever you want. Just click any of the titles in the tabs at the top of the screen and mailwasher will sort according to that title. Often, I sort by “Status” to put all the blacklisted senders to the bottom.

To update the status of any user, simply right click on the email in question. A pop-up will appear allowing you to add the specific email address to the blacklist or the whole domain to the blacklist. Or you put the specific address or the whole domain on your friends list.

Changing Status in Mailwasher

To get your email ready for processing, you can go through each email and click the delete box to the far left (blacklisted emails are automatically set to delete) or if you have a lot of emails to delete, it might save more time to just choose the option of “Mark All Emails for Deletion” and then uncheck the emails that you want to keep. I use this feature a lot, so I can just get rid of email that is FYI-type stuff and doesn’t require any action on my part. It keeps my Outlook inbox really (err…well pretty) clean.

Once the you’ve marked all the emails that need to be deleted from your server (Remember – NOTHING has been downloaded to your computer, you’re just quickly previewing email off the server), you can process it. Just click “Process” and all the emails for deletion will be removed from your server.

Once the email has been deleted, you can open up your usual email program or have Mailwasher automatically open it for you and download the email you ACTUALLY want.

Voila!

There are other features you might want to explore, but that’s the basics. If this process seems cumbersome to you – I promise it’s not. This process is quick and it’s a snap.

Again, you can download it free (for one email address) or pay the $39.95 for the Pro version (more than well worth it).

Grab your free copy of Mailwasher here.