I'm considering moving from a yearly-based support agreement to incident-based support "sales" and would need to keep track of each issue with some sort of ticket system. I have no idea what these types of programs are called... anybody got any advice? :D

Know of any software that will let my techs take calls, look up the customer records, see a list of tickets from their past calls, generate a new issue, log the call under a new ticket number, etc? It would be great if the software would also handle processing credit cards for the per-incident charge.

I've been googling for a bit with not much success, but I'm not sure what keywords to search for. If I'm not looking in the right place, please point me in the right direction!

You are here: http://www.kayako.com/esupport.php

You are here: http://www.kayako.com/esupport.php

I dont recommend the version that includes the chat. It has been timming out more than often and will just hurt your business more than help.

Cheers,

What about WHMCS (http://www.whmcs.com)?
It's a client manager that has a built in helpdesk.

Not nearly as robust of a helpdesk as Kayako, though.

Kayako is quite nice and you've got the ability to run it locally or off of their servers.

A lot of people use it and I've never had any issues.

Clientexec maybe ?