Best Help Desk Software: Focus on customer experience 

Service & Support

by   INSIGHTLY TEAM March 10, 2023

As customer retention/expansion is beginning to eclipse acquisition as the key metric for growth in many businesses, it’s more important than ever to provide exceptional customer experiences. 

A big area of the customer experience is what happens when something goes wrong. Customers with issues want quick resolutions to their requests. So it goes without saying that when it comes to managing customer support requests, businesses need to have efficient and effective solutions in place. That’s where help desk software or customer service software comes in. Help desk software is designed to streamline customer support by automating ticket tracking, managing service requests, and providing communication channels for customer inquiries. With so many options available on the market, it can be difficult to choose the best help desk software for your business needs.

You’ll want to select the best help desk software for your business, which likely means choosing cloud-based help desk software. Cloud-based help desk software has become increasingly popular in recent years, as it provides businesses with the flexibility and convenience of accessing customer support tools from any location with an internet connection. Additionally, many businesses are looking for free help desk ticketing systems to reduce costs and manage customer support requests more efficiently, but those may not have the features needed for a growing enterprise. Some of the most popular help desk software solutions include Insightly Service, Jira Service Desk, Freshdesk, and Zendesk. Choosing to use help desk software from the same vendor as your marketing automation platform and/or your CRM can have additional benefits. 

marketing automation platform

Simple help desk software is also a popular choice for businesses with smaller support teams. These software solutions typically offer basic ticket tracking and communication features at a lower cost than more comprehensive solutions. However, businesses with larger support teams or more complex support needs may require more advanced features like automation and analytics to effectively manage customer support requests.

Help Desk Software Examples

Help desk software examples include a range of tools designed to help businesses manage customer support requests. Help desk support involves providing technical assistance to customers or users of a product or service. Service desk software is designed to provide a more comprehensive approach to customer support, including IT support, service requests, and incident management.

Some of the top 10 help desk software solutions on the market include Insightly Service, Jira Service Desk, Zendesk, Freshdesk, ServiceNow, HappyFox, Zoho Desk, Help Scout, TeamSupport, Kayako, and LiveAgent. While this is not a comprehensive help desk software list, these software solutions offer a range of features to support businesses of all sizes and industries in managing customer support requests.

Help desk software is used to manage customer support requests, including questions, issues, and requests for service. It provides a central platform for customer communication, ticket tracking, and team collaboration. Service desk software is typically used by customer service teams and also by IT departments to manage incidents and service requests related to technology infrastructure.

Help Desk Software Open Source

The definition of open source software (OSS) is software that is available with its source code, making it available for use, modification, and distribution with its original rights. Open source help desk software provides businesses with the flexibility to customize and modify the software to meet their specific needs. Additionally, open source software can appear to be more affordable than proprietary solutions, making it an attractive option for businesses with limited budgets. 

Some of the best help desk software open source solutions include OSTicket, UVdesk, and OTRS. These software solutions offer a range of features to support businesses in managing customer support requests, including ticket tracking, communication channels, and automation.

However you must have a team with strong technical skills to get the most out of open source software. Rather than focus your human resources on developing help desk solutions, wouldn’t it be better to have them working on helping your customers? As such, open source can seem like a good solution at the outset, but with so many feature-rich and affordable solutions on the market today, you’d be hard pressed to find a business for which OSS is the best fit.

Best Help Desk Ticketing System

The best helpdesk ticketing system will depend on the specific needs of your business. Some businesses may require more advanced features like automation and analytics, while others may be looking for a simple solution to track incoming calls, assign them to team members, record progress and note resolution. 

When you have your customer service team on the same platform as the rest of your go-to-market teams (e.g. sales, marketing), you’ll find that teams are more aligned and therefore more communicative and collaborative. For example, Insightly Service runs on the same platform and data set as Insightly CRM and Insightly Marketing, offering a shared, 360-degree view of the customer by all teams. You may find that the best helpdesk ticketing system for your business is from a vendor your teams are already using. 

Open source ticketing systems like OSTicket and UVdesk can be an attractive option for businesses looking for a more affordable solution that requires the technical skills for essential customization. Additionally, ticketing systems like Insightly, HubSpot, ZenDesk and Freshdesk offer a range of features to support businesses of all sizes and industries.

Top 10 Help Desk Software In The USA

The top 10 help desk software in the USA changes frequently and will only matter to your business if you are using all of the standard help desk tools list. Which help desk software is right for your business? That’s what’s most relevant. You can visit review sites like TrustRadius, TrustPilot, G2, Capterra and others that rate software to see how your choices line up. 

You may also wish to explore the vendors your company is already using. For instance, if your company uses Insightly CRM, than you should look at Insightly Service since it will align your sales team and customer service team on a shared platform. As an example, a sales person with a login to the CRM can see the status of support tickets right in the CRM. Therefore, if a customer has multiple open service tickets, the timing might not be right for a call about upgrading to more seats or a higher plan level. That type of insight helps your customers feel seen, heard and understood while also empowering your teams by giving them a 360-degree view of the customer. 

What are the Features of Help Desk Software?

Help desk software helps teams that respond to customer inquiries. Rather than using spreadsheets or organizing requests in an email inbox, help desk software is specially designed to manage this important function that contributes to customer satisfaction. Most teams moving from spreadsheets or email to customer service software or help desk software find that they increase speed of responses, relevance of conversations, and garner more insights into what recurring issues that customers have. This data can help all teams within an organization to elevate the customer experience. Let’s break them down:

Speed: When tickets come into a shared software platform (vs. an email inbox), all agents can be alerted and tickets can be automatically assigned. This speeds up the response time by avoiding having requests sit, and by putting the request in front of the most qualified resource to respond to it. This means you’ll close customer support tickets faster and share mission-critical information across your teams. 

Relevance: In a customer service platform, it’s easy to see past tickets from one customer and similar tickets from other customers. You’ll get a timely read on current and historical customer status and spark more engaging, relevant conversations that lead to issue resolution. 

Insights: Rather than siloing data with different team members on their computers or in their inboxes, a customer service platform shares issue data and issue resolution. You can form knowledge bases for empowering current and future team members, as well as customers. 

One key tool that is part of help desk software is an SLA countdown. An SLA, or service-level agreement, is a metric that shows how much time is left of resolve an issue to be within the contracted time with a customer. Agents can have this metric overtly displayed in a help desk software tool so that they can prioritize their work around hitting that metric. Visibility of this data point is something that you can’t get in spreadsheets. It makes help desk agents acutely aware of the expectations of their team. 

Help Desk Software Download

Ready to start using your helpdesk software? If it’s time to drive more productive conversations and solutions that lead to higher satisfaction and successful customer interactions, it’s time to look into a platform for your team. Rather than download something (a help desk download for Windows 10 or PC is old school), look to the cloud for easy access to help desk software with just a help desk login per team member. 

Insightly Service is priced per agent per month and is 100% cloud based software. Just login and go…no worries about installing or downloading help desk software. Choose from three plan levels (Plus, Professional, or Enterprise) for the plan that best suits your business needs. Or, if your team is already using Insightly Marketing and Insightly CRM, explore Insightly All-In-One so your whole business can operate with the help of a single vendor for additional value. 

Additional helpful links

More information on this topic is available on the following pages: