What is the best help desk software?
Here are a handful of help desk support software providers that are worth looking into.
1. Freshdesk.
Used by big names like HP and Panasonic, Freshdesk deserves to be added to the list of leading support platforms on the current market.
Freshdesk's unique gamification feature - Freshdesk Arcade - sets the Freshdesk platform apart from its competitors. It displays leaderboards and badges for the most successful people when it comes to support.
Features
- Offers a shared inbox for support agents to access and manage tickets from a variety of channels including social media, voice, email, and live chat.
- Keeps track of conversations by priority and category.
- Integrates with popular apps like MailChimp, Shopify, and Office 365.
- The application facilitates the mobility of sales agents who may need to ask customers questions from their mobile devices.
Pricing
Freshdesk is free for an unlimited number of agents, with limited functionality. Standard support starts at $15 per agent per month and is billed annually.
Start with Freshdesk ->
2. ZenDesk Support.
As for the help desk functionality, ZenDesk Support previously only functioned as a standalone product. However, ZenDesk Suite is now available, integrating ZenDesk Support, Guide, Talk, and Chat under a single platform.
So what sets Zendesk Support apart is the fact that you can use it in tandem with these complementary tools. While the user interface doesn't get a lot of points, the technology behind the platform makes it worth using, no matter what.
Features
- Integrates tickets from various channels seamlessly via web and mobile.
- Offers multiple support ticket forms for agents who work to best meet a customer's specific needs.
- Includes business rules for automation that trigger automatic workflows based on changes to an original ticket.
- Incorporates advanced self-service support using theartificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning suggestions for new content ideas and updates to outdated articles.
Pricing
ZenDesk support is available for the following teams:
- Team Suite: $49 per agent per month (billed annually)
- Growth Suite: $79 per agent per month (billed annually)
- Professional Suite: $99 per agent per month (billed annually)
Start with ZenDesk Support ->
3. HubSpot.
HubSpot Service Hub is a support software offered by HubSpot, and it's designed to create a frictionless customer experience. One of its main features is the Conversations inbox, which brings together all customer communication channels - CRM software, email, live chat, forms, Facebook messenger and more - in a universal inbox.
Contact and company data stored in HubSpot CRM automatically enriches every conversation, so your help desk team has contextual information about the customer's history with your business.
You can start using Service Hub for free and set up your customer support team with a live chat, a ticketing, a team email, a call, and more. Then, as your business grows and you move from reactive to proactive customer engagement, you can opt for one of the paid tiers and scale your business. Plus, if you're already using other HubSpot software, integration is a breeze.
Features
- Includes the Conversations inbox, which brings together all of your communication channels — email inboxes, live chat, forms, Facebook messaging, and more — into one universal inbox.
- Offers a comprehensive help desk service, with routing, automation, and reports to easily turn chats and emails into tickets that can be organized, prioritized, and tracked.
- Integrating a self-service knowledge base for customers who want to find information without talking to an agent.
- Provides customer feedback tools to help your team conduct surveys and gather direct feedback from customers.
Pricing
The Service Hub of HubSpot offers three paid levels starting at $45/month for two agents, $360/month for five agents, and $1200/month for 10 paid users. All of these rates are billed annually.
4. Comm100
Comm100 is a help desk support software that provides help desk and communication products, as well as ticketing, livechat, and email. It also allows you to offer help to your customer base via Twitter, text messages, a post, and more.
You will be notified immediately when you receive messages from your customers, allowing you to fix any issues on time. Another advantage is that you can manage all of your chats on different platforms from a single dashboard.
Additionally, it allows e-commerce businesses to monitor, track, and engage with online customers in real time.
You can use it to track metrics like:
- The browsing history of your customers.
- Time spent on a particular page.
- Product or service controlled by the user.
- The geography and demographics of your users.
You can take into account several factors, including the time spent on the site, the URL, and the current page, among others. It also helps you optimize your sales campaigns by identifying the product or service that attracts the most visitors or prospects.
Here are some of its other key features:
- Automatic ticket creation from offline messages
- Possibility to personalize the email signature.
- It allows you to send personalized invitations to potential customers.
- Automate multiple invitations by setting up invitation styles, rules, and messages.
- Integration with Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, and WhatsApp.
One of its other products includes a live chat tool that allows your website users to instantly start a live chat by clicking the chat button. You can place it as a floating or built-in button.
And when the device is offline, the chat widget works like a contact form for the user.
Pricing
When it comes to live chat, the prices are as follows:
- Team: $29 per agent per month
- Business: $49 per agent per month
- Company: Customized quote
There's also an omnichannel pricing plan that starts at $59 per agent per month. For bots and automation, no pricing is provided on the website.
5. JitBit
Trusted by thousands of businesses, JitBit is a powerful help desk support automation tool that provides an excellent email-based approach to customer support.
While they focus primarily on email, they also offer all types of service management, help desk, and support software, like a knowledge base, live chat, integrations, and chatbots. Their tool is hosted on the cloud and quick to set up. It's also affordable and integrates with all the popular integrations you need like Dropbox, Slack, and Dropbox.
Features
- Includes a team mailbox to manage your ticket list with advanced filtering and reporting features.
- It includes an “idea forum” where customers can suggest and vote for new features.
- Offers a mobile help desk support service with mobile applications for iOS and Android.
- Provides automation triggers to send automatic responses, assign tickets, and set due dates.
Pricing
JitBit's plans are as follows:
- The Freelancer plan (for one user) is $29/month.
- The Startup plan (for 4 users) is $69/month.
- The Enterprise plan (for 7 users) is $129/month and includes downloadable backups.
- The Enterprise plan (for 9 users/$29 per additional agent) is $249/month and hides the text “Powered by JitBit,” and provides expedited support and HIPAA compliance.
6. HelpDesk
The main selling points by HelpDesk are its ease of use and scalability, with three multi-tiered plans for growing businesses.
What sets HelpDesk apart is the robustness of the platform's offerings. With automation and integration tools, HelpDesk can help your team be more efficient and use some of the other tools that you already use in your tech stack.
Features
- Includes a shared inbox that allows you to create ticket lists and group tickets based on predefined filters.
- Creates business roles (for structure) and groups for customer support agents to share in their workflows.
- Uses automation (with a percentage of automatic responses and automated assignments) and omnichannel support.
- Integrates with popular apps including LiveChat, Zapier, and HubSpot.
Pricing
The HelpDesk Starter plan (the best for simple email management) starts at $4 per month per agent; the Team plan, which offers extended features specific to the help desk support service, starts at $19 per month per agent.
7. Acquire
Used by hundreds of businesses around the world, Acquire is a customer engagement tool that includes help desk support service software.
Their selling point is their “unified customer view,” which allows you to visualize and engage with your customers in a single dashboard, regardless of where they are in the customer journey. All communications are grouped together in one place to avoid the disjointed nature of traditional help desk support services.
Features
- A unified agent dashboard where you can switch between livechat, chatbots, analytics, and customer timelines to get a complete view of each customer.
- Real-time support via livechat, chatbots, and video chat.
- A central inbox for all help desk support and email service requests.
- Interact with customers on-screen through co-browsing without downloading.
Pricing
You'll need to get in touch with their team as their pricing model is very personalized.
8. HappyFox
Winner of the “Best Help Desk Support Software” award from PC Magazine over the past four years, HappyFox is one of the best help desk support software options out there. It is comprehensive and very easy to use.
What sets HappyFox apart is the fact that you can use it to respond to customers on just about any customer service medium, managing the process in one centralized location.
It integrates with popular tools that members of various customer-facing departments tend to use, including Salesforce, Slack, Jira, and Magento.
Features
- Offers a centralized ticketing system that supports email, social media (for example, converting private Facebook messages into tickets), and voice (for example, call transcripts are converted into tickets).
- Includes a knowledge base for self-service support
- Convert your livechat conversations on Happyfox Chat into tickets.
Pricing
HappyFox offers two types of prices. There is a tier for small to medium teams (minimum of 5 agents) that starts at $29 and goes up to $89 per agent per month, and another for large teams (with an unlimited number of agents) that starts at $1499 per month.
9. SolarWinds Service Desk
SolarWinds Service Desk (previously known as Samanage) is regularly recognized as one of the best IT help desk platforms available.
You may have heard of their massive data breach in 2020, but I wanted to add them to the list anyway.
What sets SolarWinds Service Desk apart is that it really serves IT teams well. Besides what it can do to help IT teams better serve customers (both internal and external to an organization), it can also serve as a central repository for team knowledge and other important assets.
Features
- Allows teams to keep an eye on their organization's technology infrastructure through an IT-specific function called configuration management database (CMDB) software.
- Includes an internal service portal for employees and knowledge base management.
- Incorporates IT asset management functionality.
Pricing
SolarWinds Service Desk offers plans starting at $19 per agent per month and up to $89 per agent per month.
10. HelpCenter
HelpCenter is focused on Shopify merchants and therefore integrates seamlessly into the platform's ecosystem. It's one of the top-rated apps in the customer service category, with over 55,000 stores already benefiting from its services.
HelpCenter's HelpDesk ticketing system can centralize all customer requests, so you don't have to switch between channels. Regardless of how customers choose to contact your business, whether it's via email, Facebook Messenger, or livechat, you'll be able to access all of these communications in one place.
In addition to the help desk support service, HelpCenter also has an FAQ generator, a livechat, and product description tabs for a better overall shopping experience. The application is intuitive and easy to use and requires no prior experience to be up and running in no time.
Features
- Centralized communication between multiple stores and different channels in a single HelpDesk
- A variety of internal tools to improve your workflow, such as customer communication and order history, rules (automation), automatic responses, internal feedback, custom templates, etc.
- Access to Shopify order management from the help desl service.
- Unlimited number of agents and inboxes
- Features that allow you to create an informative FAQ page adapted to the design of your store in about 10 minutes (templates, predefined answers, sections and categories, search bar).
- Custom tabs that allow you to organize your product descriptions for a better user experience.
- Livechat for 24/7 accessibility
Pricing
- Their free plan includes all the basic features.
- The Tabs and FAQ plan costs $3.99/month.
- The Help Desk plan costs $9.99/month.
- The professional plan costs $12.48/month.
All of these products are billed annually. A free trial is available to start using HelpCenter.
What is HelpDesk software?
Help desk support software help - they reduce the time it takes for a customer support agent to deal with issues. This is done by streamlining incoming tickets from a variety of channels in a centralized location. Help desk software, in particular, is ideal for small and large businesses.
It offers the following benefits to teams:
- Scalability : You can jump-start your efforts with a basic, low-cost plan (some are even free to start with) and upgrade to more advanced plans as business needs increase.
- Easy to implement : Because service desk software is generally stored in the cloud, internal configuration is minimal. After you start a trial or subscription, you can quickly deploy the technology to the teams involved. Also, if you are not happy with the choice of software, it is easy to opt out and move on.
- Profitability : You don't need an entire team to manage a help desk support software, since the maintenance work on the back end is usually taken care of by the vendor.
Important characteristics when choosing a Help Desk software
Given the above benefits, help desk systems vary.
However, there are a handful of essential features that you should pay close attention to when choosing the good help desk support software for your customer support team.
- Ease of issuing tickets : Tickets are the way you manage customer communications. Make sure it's easy to create and close tickets, edit them, and route them to the appropriate internal channels. In addition, agents should be able to store old tickets and return to them without difficulty.
- Consolidating tickets from a variety of channels : Where do your customers contact you the most? Whether it's about Chatbot, a livechat, Emails, social media, or phone, make sure the software you choose offers integrations that connect a multi-channel system.
- Self-service option : If you want to speed up the support process, a knowledge base can be very helpful in offering advice on common customer issues. Beyond that, a knowledge management software has numerous advantages. It can serve as a content source for sales agents looking for enablers and marketing teams looking to understand what topics are most popular with customers.
- Integrations : There is a difference between Have a Help desk support softwareutilize actually. Make sure the provider you choose offers relevant integrations with others customer support tools. This will save you the need for manual updates and entries by streamlining all data.
- Service Level Agreements : Adhering to your service level agreements is critical to the long-term success of your business. The right help desk support software in Saas mode makes it possible to manage services and service level agreements according to the required standards. Users will be able to get answers from a live agent without the need for escalation.
- Knowledge Management : The right help desk tool will allow for easy integration with knowledge modules that handle specific information requests. Team members can solve problems while prioritizing what's most important in their daily lives. At the same time, they stay up to date with what is happening in their environment through notifications.
- Project management : This is a great feature to have and will impact team performance. The ability to delegate tasks in a contact center is a great management tool because agents can categorize issues and assign them to the right people through the ticketing software itself.
While the above characteristics are generally important, each business sector has its own nuances. Consider the specific needs of your business when considering which functions you consider to be most important.
Summary
Every business is different, with teams and processes specific to their customer journey. What works for one business may not work for another.
Do your research and take the time to check out the platforms that interest you right from the start. You want software that can develop alongside your business model, in the short and long term, and the only way to do that is by partnering with a platform that teams want use.
Engage multiple types of users and seek feedback from those who will be responsible for implementing and managing the tool. From there, you can work to find the perfect fit for your employees. And your customers.
