Easily Shortlist and Compare Help Desk Software That Meets Your Customer Service & End-User Support Requirements

What Is Help Desk Software?

Help Desk Software manages end-user support queries. It comprises tools, features, and information that forms the bedrock of a company’s ticket management system.

Two groups use Help Desk Software; support teams and end-users.

For support teams, it facilitates the collection, prioritisation, tracking, monitoring, and resolution of support tickets. For end-users, it helps to submit support tickets and track and monitor the status of their tickets.

Help Desk Software includes features similar to a customer service desk. Like customised branding, personalisation, collaborative workspaces, and company information. However, the main goals of Help Desk Software are to manage support tickets and answer customer queries.

What Does Help Desk Software Do?

A top-end Helpdesk will include software that creates a better all-around experience for support teams and end users. It will:

• Automate mundane and repetitive tasks to lighten support teams’ workloads
• Promote multi-channel communication between support teams and end users (47% of UK customers use five different communication channels)
• Provide time-saving, 24/7 self-service options that enable customers to complete tasks on their own (something that 67% of customers prefer when seeking help)
• Gather feedback that helps to identify areas of improvement and potential new features
• Analyse and report on the performance of the ticketing system

Who Uses Help Desk Software?

A Help Desk is the first port of call for a company’s customers, employees, support teams (including outsourced call centres), third parties, and management to find answers to different questions they may have. While troubleshooting problems they may encounter, like:

• Customers: Why can’t I log in?
• Employees: When am I eligible for a device upgrade?
• Support team members: How do I roll back to a previous software version?
• Third-party suppliers: How can I integrate my external application?
• Managers: How much did customer support cost this year?

Help Desk Software for Small Businesses

Initially, small businesses rely heavily on customer reviews and brand building. But, as SMBs grow, they don’t have the resources to review their services. Let alone monitor all forms of support channels. This makes the need for automated help desk functions essential.

With powerful automation, smaller support teams can focus on answering tickets. A medium-sized company will also require similar features and prioritising a scalable model for their growing business.

Help Desk Software for Enterprises

Enterprises need better collaboration between internal departments. As well as managing agents in different countries, time zones, and languages. A key Help Desk Software tool for enterprises is the ability to measure support team performance. By doing so, they can identify gaps in their processes. Helping to implement different strategies to improve and streamline efficiency.

Benefits of Help Desk Software Solutions

End-User Benefits

• Self-service: A self-service portal empowers customers to resolve their issues online, 24/7.
• Access to a searchable database of information: A knowledge base (KB) includes a wealth of information, like legal documents, step-by-step workflows, product specifications, and tutorials for understanding how to use a company’s product or service.
• Global access for branches and remote teams: Help Desk Software provides 24/7 support across international time zones.
• Multi-channel support: Multi-channel conduits between support teams and end users include email, phone, instant message, social and business networks, voice, and chatbots to connect with a company’s Helpdesk.
• Getting started: Training tools – like tutorials, community forums, and demos – enable new customers, new employees, and third parties to onboard at their own pace.
• Access to service-level agreements (SLAs): SLAs may define timeframes for resolving customer issues, enable the measurement of performance metrics, and provide a framework for conflict resolution if customers are dissatisfied with services.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): Generative AI features like chatbots can provide instant answers to customers and guide them to resolve queries themselves in real-time, 24/7.

Support Team Benefits

• Automated ticket resolution: Help Desk Software alleviates support teams’ workloads by automating many manual and repetitive processes. Predefined workflows simplify onboarding and offboarding procedures. Happy customers mean fewer tickets.
• Improved support team communication: A shared Inbox will result in less duplicated effort as team members can keep track of a ticket’s history, progress, and status. Tickets may be easily escalated, re-prioritised, or farmed out to support team members with smaller workloads.
• Regulation compliance: Help Desk monitoring software ensures business processes comply with specific industry regulations.
• Identification of support failures: Predictive analytics and reporting software offer actionable insights to help support teams identify customers’ most common challenges and proactively plug gaps in the support process.
• Improved resource utilisation: Ticket monitoring helps to identify possible bottlenecks in the support pipeline.
• Keep teams on the same page: Help Desk Software ensures teams across the board – like management, finance, and human resources – are kept up to date.

Possible Limitations of a Help Desk System

• Security implications of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) practices: To avoid security problems when support team members use their own devices at work, businesses need to implement a secure BYOD policy.
• Learning curve challenges: Additional support from external consultants may be required to implement and manage specialist help desk systems.
• Employee buy-in: Employees may baulk at doing things differently and may need training to get to grips with new features.
• Cost implications: Investing in Help Desk Software requires a financial outlay. However, some software suppliers offer free trials. While open-source software can appear to be a cost-effective option, external or internal support may be costly.

What Help Desk Software Features Do Customers Expect?

Research shows that businesses should never underestimate the value of excellent customer service. 91% of customers say they are more likely to make another purchase if their experience with a brand is positive.

However, there is often a disconnect between customer expectations and what businesses provide. For instance, while 66% of customers want to be treated as unique individuals, only 34% believe they are.

Customers’ service expectations are not only escalating, they’re making new kinds of demands. Businesses need to implement software that addresses demands such as:

• Transparency: Greater honesty from businesses about their products and their ability to match service promises
• Corporate ethics: Companies must demonstrate social and environmental responsibility
• Convenience: Digital platforms should rival traditional in-person experiences
• Personalisation: Extraordinary experiences must create emotional connections
• Multi-channel engagement: Choice of channels through which to interact with businesses one-on-one should be offered
• Innovation: Businesses should regularly release new features
• Credible, relevant information: Product information must be transparent

Types of Help Desk Software

There are numerous ways to categorise Help Desk Software. It can be designed to address the needs of a specific industry, department or team, or serve to help a company achieve their service goals.

Other considerations are the number of users, software budget, and whether to choose a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or in-house solution.

Popular Help Desk Configurations

• IT Help Desk: An IT Help Desk helps support teams to address computer-related issues, like network outages, hardware rollouts, and software updates. It uses automation software to track, monitor, and report on system performance and resource usage. IT support teams also depend on sophisticated security software.
• Customer Help Desk: A customer-centric portal provides self-service capabilities for external customers to manage their accounts and resolve problems themselves. It may include multi-channel or one-on-one support for customers to communicate with company representatives. It will usually include a searchable knowledge base so that users can quickly find answers to their questions. A self-service customer portal also allows support teams to collaborate on ticket tracking through a shared Inbox.
• Business Help Desk: Business support desks may address internal or external issues. Internal HR, finance, and marketing and sales teams may use specialised Help Desk Software like personnel, accounting, and e-commerce applications. Business associates, partners, and suppliers may use business support desks to access information about a company’s products, services, and financial standing.

Help Desk Ticket Categories

• Technical (hardware and software) and network support
• Product or service enquiries
• Complaint and feedback channels
• Account and billing management
• Legal policies, like employment and SLA queries
• Security and access management

Help Desk Software Features

Help Desk Software often includes tools that populate an organisation’s customer portal. The kind of software featured on self-service portals ranges from access management applications and customisable dashboards to application program interfaces (APIs) and intranets.

However, resolving end-user queries and support tickets is the main focus of standard Help Desk Software.

Typical features that support a business’s helpdesk ticketing system include:

• Analytics and reporting
• Automation for prioritising and assigning queries and requests
• Chatbots and instant messaging
• Data-driven analysis and insights
• Email support
• Knowledge base and/or a content management system (CMS)
• Live chat
• Metrics for measuring customer satisfaction
• Multi-channel capabilities
• Network performance monitoring
• Online collaboration software
• Predefined workflow for common tasks
• Self-service options

What Help Desk Software Does a Business Need?

Creating a Helpdesk is an ongoing process. Changing business requirements, customer needs, budgets, hardware capabilities, and new product features will dictate what software is necessary to achieve a company’s support goals.

However, the first consideration for businesses is whether to develop a customised Help Desk and mix and match the software they want to use or buy into an existing solution. Making this decision involves researching open-source and proprietary systems, and analysing costs.

Tips for Getting Started

1. Assign a dedicated team to Help Desk planning.
2. Use customer and support team feedback to list the service problems that need to be addressed and the company’s support goal(s). Goals can be as varied as increasing ticket resolution or identifying missing functionality.
3. Walk through, and report on, a typical support day, including the time taken for different tasks.
4. Identify similar and disparate business requirements and customer needs. This will help the planning team discover what tasks a self-service portal can address that will benefit both support teams and customers. Examples of these types of tasks are account updating and ticket tracking.
5. Identify where AI can automate mundane, labour-intensive routines, and technically challenging procedures.
6. Identify customer support metrics, like what channels are used the most often to submit queries and how long it takes to resolve tickets.