Managing customer support (37 Signals Highrise)

37Signals today launched Highrise, a new take on contact management. My initial reaction was that I didn’t quite understand the practical purpose until I started thinking about using Highrise in conjunction with something like Salesforce.com or SugarCRM to manage customer cases beyond initial creation. Highrise has a very logical interface that forces you (or your staff) to address tasks and cases as they relate to the unique individual or company. Oddly, none of the systems that we have tried enforce this behavior. And while I am not sure that Highrise will work either it’s an interesting new way to meet the need.

Somehow despite all the investment that software vendors and end-users have made, customer support remains a difficult beast. I have written about managing and designing support teams in the past but I still feel like there is a bit of mystery. And as many open source companies base their business models on support subscriptions it would seem logical that anyone would have come up with a complete solution, but it’s yet to happen (that I know of).

I know of several companies that use case management in Salesforce or Sugar and quite a few who use JIRA (which despite the fact that it has no notion of a “customer” with parent/child relationships is by far the best system for tracking bugs and managing cases)–except that you have to integrate it with Salesforce or Sugar for it to really be locked-in with the customer master.

It seems to me that if the features from Highrise were built into Salesforce or Sugar they could open up whole new markets specifically for support. The alternative would be to use the APIs for Highrise and integrate with SF.com or Sugar…but how many systems do we really need to run a theoretically simple business?