Best Help Desk Software

What Is Help Desk Software?

Help desk software is a customer service tool that provides centralized support and information service management. It handles queries submitted externally through categorization, prioritization, automated routing, escalation, and service level management. Support personnel are also required to deliver their part in the whole process.

The primary users for a help desk system include customer service agents, and the actual customers or consumers. Customer support managers and the owners of the business can also use the IT ticketing system. Their focus on the helpdesk system is to check on reports, set workflows, and help the agents by working on escalated tickets.

The best help desk software assists agents to deal with different end-user complaints and inquiries including requests for a service, for information, and for help with any incidents. This means there are multiple requests from multiple channels. The IT ticketing system ensures that all issues are monitored, ticketed and nothing is left unattended by customer service agents.

What Does Help Desk Software Do?

Businesses in different industries need to provide the best customer service to ensure that each and every customer is happy. This also helps to find new leads since a happy customer will always recommend your brand. Adopting an IT ticketing system is, therefore, a necessity for your business. Here are some things a helpdesk system does.

• Resolve tickets more accurately — A business has different departments each with a different service delivery process. In an IT ticketing system, queries relating to specific departments are routed to the relevant professionals. This ensures that the query gets an accurate response within a short time.
• Build a knowledge base — Information about different problems and solutions is usually stored in a ticketing software database. This saves valuable time for similar future issues. Furthermore, the information is not only available to your support team but can also be made available to your clients or customers.
• Ticket categorization and prioritization — When requesting assistance, some tickets usually have a higher priority compared to others. For quick responses to such tickets, help desk software sorts the tickets and delivers them to a support agent. Based on how they are listed, emergencies will be sorted out first.

How We Rank the Best Help Desk Software

At SaasGenius, we apply a careful evaluation methodology to ensure the accuracy and reliability of our rankings. Our evaluation includes three key categories: Usability, Features, and Support. In addition, we use an individual score, called the Genius Score, to evaluate each software solution. The Genius Score ranges from 0 to 100 and reflects the overall quality and value of the software. If you want to get a deeper insight into our evaluation process, check out our comprehensive rating methodology page.

Main Features of Help Desk Software

The market offers different excellent options that you can use to improve your support process. If you want to choose a solution that works best, the key consideration is the features available in the support ticketing system. Here are three basic service desk software features you should look for:

• Multichannel support — Nowadays, most businesses offer a range of different communication channels for both staff and customers. You should look for a helpdesk system with the ability to provide help on different channels. This includes email, phone, and social media, which are the most used support channels.
• Analytics and reporting — The purpose of implementing an IT ticketing system is to ensure a seamless support process. Analytics is the process of identifying patterns in the data and creating reports. This helps businesses make informed decisions on how to improve their support service delivery process.
• Friendly interface — This is one of the most vital and key features of service desk software. You should be able to easily log in to your dashboard and view support tickets in a centralized panel. The same applies to both support agents and consumers. A consumer should be able to log in and create a ticket seamlessly and get reliable answers.

Benefits of Using Help Desk Software

A quality customer experience is crucial in earning customer loyalty and keeping them buying your product or service. A coherent way of doing this is by implementing the best helpdesk system.

Listed below are a number of the key benefits that businesses can expect from using the best helpdesk systems.

Quality and Effective Support

One of the main benefits of using help desk software is the seamless management of customer concerns. Queries and complaints from customers will be resolved quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, you can integrate different channels to ensure every customer is catered for. This ensures quality and effective customer support.

Strengthen Brand Reputation and Image

Since the best ticketing software ensures quality customer assistance, each of your clients will be satisfied. A happy and content customer will be happy and loyal to your brand. Furthermore, they are more likely to mention your company when asked for any recommendations. This could be crucial for creating a strong brand image while maintaining a good reputation.

Systematic Monitoring and Tracking

To efficiently monitor your business, you need to track the current status of queries and how the agents deal with them. A helpdesk system allows you to monitor a problem’s cycle, from its inception, through the solving process to its eventual resolution. By monitoring, you can come up with a systematic and cost-effective way of dealing with customer queries.

Better Customer Relationship

As stated earlier, the key to a successful business is maintaining good customer relationships. By providing the best customer support, every consumer will be satisfied, thus building trust in the business. Furthermore, it also maintains a profitable and healthy relationship with both existing and new clients.

Single Point Communication

Since the help desk software is a single central support ticketing system, all customer requests, queries, and complaints are taken care of from a single point. This means that you can have multiple agents who have access to multiple queries. Furthermore, as an admin, queries can be distributed to available agents for quicker replies. Your customer support team will handle all requests without hassle.

Automation

Help desk software automatically carries out predictable and repetitive tasks including answering recurring customer queries and admin tasks such as providing reports. Automation is also implemented on other functionalities such as ticket categorization and routing. This whole process ensures a streamlined and quick customer experience.

Scalability

Businesses grow with time and this means an increase in both the workforce and consumers. Scalability is the ability of a system to adapt to a new environment, which includes an increase in the number of users. Most service desk software usually needs an upgrade to a higher tier to allow scalability. This allows you to grow your business while maintaining the same quality of support.

Integrations

One benefit of implementing ticketing software is the ability to integrate other helpdesk systems. This means that if the software lacks a certain feature that is specific to your organization, you can easily add it without affecting its normal functions. For example, IT ticketing systems can be integrated with your CRM and an external billing support ticketing system if needed.

Who Should Use Delp Desk Software

Typically, every industry offers a customer support service to its consumers. This means that all companies need to implement the best help desk software. Here are a few industries that are already enjoying the benefits of implementing a support ticking system.

Healthcare

Healthcare services and hospitals rely on technology to deal with issues that need emergency responses. The industry cannot afford any delay since human life is at stake. Ticketing software plays a crucial role to ensure a fast response to emergencies through tracking, management, and escalation. Accurately integrating IT assets with the best help desk software connects services to end-users.

Insurance

Global insurance agencies are always looking for improved ways to serve their customers better. By doing this, companies boost their efficiency and other processes that help in compliance and regulations related to the industry. With the best help desk software, they can minimize risks relating to standardization. Furthermore, automated responses save staff time and limit errors.

E-commerce

E-commerce platforms involve a lot of communication between the customer and the online platform. Also, some consumers communicate directly with the actual product sellers. Implementing the best help desk software ensures streamlined buying and selling processes. Furthermore, it will help build a good relationship with customers, potentially attracting new leads.

Tourism and Hospitality

The tourism and hospitality industry is volatile and therefore needs to adapt to changes fast. Similarly, it needs to provide a great experience and offer ideal customer support services. An IT ticketing system is the best choice in this situation since it is scalable and keeps advancing. It also helps to create a reliable customer experience by responding to queries systematically.

How Much Does Help Desk Software Cost

Prices for help desk software vary depending on the type of ticketing system you want to use. Normally, the average pricing ranges from $60 to $80 per workstation per month. Higher prices include 24/7 support as well as the availability of other software integrations. If you go for the enterprise tier, the prices rise depending on the number of users.

Types of Help Desk Software

Service desk software is usually grouped according to the form of deployment, whether the source code is openly available, and the size of your business. When looking for an ideal ticketing software, you should consider these factors. Below are the five main types of ticketing software.

Web Help Desk

This is a software service offered as SaaS. All the tools required for customer services are deployed via the internet through a browser. The vital information about customer history and companies data is stored on host servers. Businesses don’t need any hardware upgrades or new technologies to access the service. This type of ticketing software offers monthly and yearly subscriptions.

On-Premise Help Desk

A company purchases the software and installs it on servers that are only accessible by the company itself. For those who intend to use this type of ticketing system, an infrastructure has to be created. Furthermore, the company needs IT experts and professionals to perform installations, updates, and upgrades. This type of service desk software is suitable for companies with sensitive information e.g., security.

Enterprise Help Desk

Most help desk software is designed for helping entities that are external to the business. However, with an enterprise help desk, the business can also offer in-house assistance. The software provides help to employees who might be facing issues while serving consumers. This ensures that their productivity is not hindered and the company’s customers get answers to queries.

Open-Source Help Desk

Open-source help desk software is common among the IT community since it is usually free of charge. Users of the software can alter the original code of the platform to match their needs. This type of software is, however, not cost-effective since it requires highly skilled personnel to carry about updates, fix bugs, and strengthen the security of the helpdesk system.

Cloud-Based Help Desk

Similar to other types of ticketing software in the list, a cloud-based help desk includes all the features needed for customer service. It includes a combination of installed software and web services. Data is accessed locally from the cloud, which includes a host operated by a third party.

Trends in Help Desk Software

Customer service is undergoing a significant transformation thanks to the advancements in technology. Although support agents will still be using software to help customers, artificial intelligence will be the key driver to better customer service delivery. Here are technologies that will soon revolutionize the customer service sector.

• Application of artificial intelligence — AI will find its way into the ticketing software mostly as an interface for customers. Most of the available processes will be automated and only a few issues that require decision-making will involve the agents. An example of such is an artificial intelligence answering questions based on previous replies from agents. This will save both time and manpower.
• Rise of smart technology — Smart technology has already found a place in smart houses and intelligent robots. Customer service is another industry that is embracing this development through creating smart technologies such as chatbots. These tools remember customer responses and give suggestions accordingly.
• Cloud computing — Businesses usually grow rapidly leading to high demands from consumers. With cloud computing technology in customer service, you can easily cater to the greater demands of your consumers. Furthermore, it makes it easy for you to make changes to your business structure for a better customer relationship.
• Big data analysis — As your company keeps growing and offering customer services, a huge amount of data is collected by the ticketing software. Big data analytics could be crucial in such a situation. It would help identify patterns and trends from a large amount of data to help your business make informed decisions.