Zammad Made Our Customer Support Much More Efficient

Why Zammad?

When choosing software, the Nextcloud team values reliable open-source solutions with a great UX. In 2016, they realized that the time to pick a strong helpdesk tool had come: „We needed a helpdesk system because we wanted to manage our Support more professionally,“ recalls Tobias. „We initially chose the on-premise version of Zammad in 2016. But we kept growing, and we made some great experiences with Zammad, so we recently decided to switch to a hosted plan!“

Working with Zammad

Before the fork to Zammad, Nextcloud worked with OTRS iirc, but they decided to start afresh when switching to Zammad. „Zammad is now mainly used by our Support,“ tells us Arthur Schiwon, Software Engineer at Nextcloud. 20 agents process up to 500 tickets per month, with everything happening in English. „But we also rely on it to manage job applications and general inquiries.“ As a result, Zammad has become the main communication channel between Nextcloud and their customers.

Having switched from on-prem to hosted, the maintenance effort has been reduced. „Of course there is still the occasional bit of work that pops up on the monitoring endpoint, but we have automated most of it,“ Arthur says.

Zammad has become essential for Nextcloud Support. „It’s part of the core of the job,“ explains Daphne Muller, Support lead. „Just picture an everyday situation: We receive a new customer inquiry. An agent assigns it to the corresponding team (by means of a tag) or processes it right away. The next steps in problem-solving are taken and the ticket status and reminder updated – either for the customer or the agent. Then we define the priority and possible escalation date.“ All of these steps of Nextcloud’s workflow rely heavily on Zammad’s key features.
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What’s the verdict after 5 years?

In general, the Nextcloud team are very happy with how Zammad has become a key part of their stack. „Of course there are always things you could improve. For example, we’ve seen some shortcuts being accidentally triggered. But we found a workaround for that, and we have seen many new implementations over the course of the five years that we have been using Zammad.“

„The idea was to support our customers with their code-based challenges – and with Zammad, we can now achieve this very efficiently.“

Nextcloud have already integrated the on-prem version of Zammad into their infrastructure. „We’re very pleased with it and would like to extend it further in the future,“ Arthur tells us. Well, we’d like that, too!