Get ideas on how to improve your IT service desk so you create a support loop that benefits the entire company—and your customers.

Consider help desk software that offers a variety of pre-built, third-party integrations. For example, the Zendesk Marketplace offers over 1,500 apps and integrations, complete with user reviews and ratings.

Workflow automation uses technology to streamline business activities, eliminating the need for manual input. In the context of a help desk, workflows can help businesses establish predefined sequences of actions and rules that automate and guide the processing of support tickets.

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Help desk software empowers businesses to deliver more efficient and higher-quality service, whether managing customer conversations or handling IT support requests. Read on to learn about some options on the market so you can find the right fit for your needs.

The right integrations can extend the functionality and capabilities of your help desk systems to get a 360-degree view of the customer and streamline your data across systems. This information can help you and your team gain a complete, accurate picture of your customers—and understand exactly what they need.

With AI-powered software like Zendesk, you can empower customers and employees to help themselves. Just look at Unity, a development platform that used Zendesk AI-powered automations and self-service to save $1.3 million.

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is a web-based ticketing system designed to assist IT professionals in managing and tracking support requests. The platform allows users to create, prioritize, and assign tickets. Users can also set alerts and customize ticket attributes and rules to receive ticket activity and status notifications.

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With help desk software, teams can quickly spot inefficiencies and implement improvement opportunities. For example, businesses can use these tools to track customer service key performance indicators (KPIs) like first reply time (FRT) or average resolution time. This information can help organizations stay agile and deliver outstanding service at every turn.

Help desk systems have access to a tremendous amount of confidential customer and employee information, and you need to be sure that information is safe. Comprehensive security features protect data and can help organizations achieve security compliance. Look for options like Zendesk with comprehensive compliance certifications and memberships to know your information is in good hands.

Below is a brief overview of the help desk options on the list, including starting prices, key features, and free trial length, if applicable.

Additionally, organizations can use help desk software to spot inefficiencies in their support processes, leading to more efficient service and less time wasted on unnecessary tasks. Take Degreed, for example. The learning experience platform uses Zendesk to increase automation and self-service—leading to $1M in cost savings.

Help desk software is a tool designed to assist support teams in tracking, prioritizing, and resolving service queries from customers, employees, or business partners. The right help desk system empowers agents to collaborate on requests and personalize conversations across channels. Additionally, with AI and automation, help desk software can help teams automate resolutions, boost agent productivity, and optimize workflows.

Customers can become angry, frustrated, or stressed when they can’t complete simple tasks independently. Using customer service software with self-service capabilities allows them to quickly find relevant resources and resolve issues independently, reducing the number of support tickets.

SysAid's help desk software offers a suite of ITSM capabilities. The platform provides ticketing functionality, allowing users to log, prioritize, and track support requests. SysAid can help teams with asset management so businesses manage and monitor their IT assets throughout their life cycle.

Investing in help desk tools can lead to significant cost savings for businesses. Teams can take advantage of self-service resources and workflow automation to reduce the pressure on support teams, leading to labor cost savings.

HappyFox’s help desk offers a few options for its self-service knowledge bases. These include an internal knowledge base for support teams and HR, an external knowledge base software for customers, and a multilingual knowledge base for global self-service.

The software includes a knowledge base with automation features to handle repetitive tasks, and its reporting and analytics tools provide metrics for help desk performance and customer support trends. SysAid is also customizable and offers integrations with third-party tools and applications.

Vivantio's help desk software assists businesses with service management. Teams can integrate Vivantio with a support mailbox to automatically tag and categorize incoming emails. It also offers email templates for automated responses, ensuring customers receive acknowledgment.

HubSpot Service Hub provides a single dashboard that lets your support team log, organize, and track all customer issues in one place. Agents can view customer data, ticket status, queue location, and the time it takes to resolve an issue. Reporting and analytics help you monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like ticket volume and first contact resolution time.

Yes, Zendesk is a help desk software. We provide an AI-powered help desk solution for organizations to efficiently manage customer support and service requests. Zendesk features include ticketing, workflow automation, knowledge base, and omnichannel support, making it a comprehensive solution for help desk operations. Our software enables businesses to streamline customer interactions and enhance overall support processes.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $650 per year for one to three agents. A free plan and a seven-day free trial are available.

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk supports email integration, automatically converting incoming customer emails into tickets. The software includes reporting tools for tracking ticket metrics, response times, and overall support performance.

It's worth noting that the Freshworks platform comprises three systems: Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller. Each system operates within its own workspace, requiring agents to navigate between multiple tabs to access customer information. This setup may impact customer service efficiency, potentially leading to delays and oversight of important information.

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Self-service options allow customers to find articles in the help center. Teams can build their help center via a no-code interface and customize it with their logo and branded colors. From there, the Einstein Service Agent chatbot can direct customers to relevant articles and solve problems.

Help desk tools can streamline the process of providing fast and easy support options to internal and external customers. An omnichannel ticketing system, for example, consolidates customer requests and IT support tickets in a single location. This eliminates the need to toggle between systems and channels, enabling agents to deliver quick, efficient service.

The Freshworks cloud-based help desk tool, Freshdesk, serves as a centralized platform for support teams to manage and respond to customer requests. Its ticketing system consolidates requests from various channels into a shared team inbox.

With the right help desk system, support teams are equipped with all the tools they need to provide quick, effective service. Here are a few common things to consider when choosing a partner:

Enable agents to provide fast, personalized service on any channel with the Zendesk Agent Workspace. This omnichannel ticketing system is fused with AI features like Agent copilot—a support agent’s second-in-command that can recommend what to say to customers, independently solve routine tickets like refund requests, and streamline the ticket resolution process.

Remember that Salesforce can be intricate, requiring a longer learning curve for first-time users. Salesforce isn't solely dedicated to customer experience, providing a comprehensive suite for sales and marketing. That means businesses seeking to enhance their customer service may find it easier to achieve their goals by opting for software specifically designed for CX.

Help desk tools foster better team collaboration by providing a centralized platform where all team members can access and update information. They also help support reps better understand the customer journey so they can focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint.

The software includes automation tools like pre-written responses and automated ticket routing. Additionally, LiveAgent provides a knowledge base for help center articles, FAQs, and self-service resources. The platform also offers collaboration tools, reporting and analytics software, and integrations with third-party applications.

HubSpot Service Hub offers ticket routing and automation features that allow your team to automate tasks. The platform also automatically creates tickets when a customer submits a form, email, or chat.

Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service platform that provides a single view of customer information and history. It features automated workflows, AI-powered productivity tools, and a single ticketing system for issue resolution.

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An omnichannel approach creates connected and consistent interactions across channels and touchpoints. With it, customers and employees can get convenient support over their preferred communication mediums, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and live chat.

Zendesk AI agents are pre-trained on over 18 billion real customer interactions and integrate with your business systems, enabling them to offer personalized support to complex customer requests like your human agents would. Generative AI can accelerate knowledge base content creation by helping you turn a few bullet points into a fully-fledged article. Routing and intelligence can automatically forward requests to the right agent based on their availability, workload, and expertise. Additionally, Zendesk QA can review 100 percent of your tickets to ensure your agents—both human and AI—are operating as efficiently as possible.

Zoho’s help desk also features automation tools that allow users to set predefined rules and workflows for ticket routing. Additionally, its reporting and analytics tools track ticket volumes, response times, and agent performance. Zoho Desk offers integration with other Zoho applications and third-party tools.

Finally, SolarWinds’ ITSM system enables businesses to standardize their service requests and processes. It helps teams manage daily IT tasks, collaborate internally, and offer customer portals for self-service. SolarWinds also helps users automate ticket creation, escalation, and routing.

It also gives HR and IT teams a comprehensive view of the employee journey, facilitating seamless employee service. With context and data, tracking software, reporting and analytics tools, and easy-to-automate workflows all in one place, your business will stay in sync.

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Other features of Help Scout’s help desk include a help center, live chat and messaging software, automation, custom workflows, pre-built reporting dashboards, and collaboration tools. Help Scout also offers integration options in their app marketplace.

Customer expectations are rising, and businesses need to implement systems that help their teams deliver outstanding customer experiences (CX). According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, 80 percent of customers expect chat agents and support representatives to assist them with everything they need. To achieve that, you need the right help desk software.

Help Scout offers a customer help desk that enables support teams to collaboratively manage customer conversations. The tool consolidates requests from email, live chat, self-service portals, and other channels into a shared inbox. All requests filter into this centralized location, where the system can tag, update, and assign tickets to agents or teams.

SolarWinds Service Desk can help users manage and track support tickets in one centralized interface. It features reporting tools that allow users to analyze business metrics and agent performance. It's also an incident management software, letting users manage tickets from different channels, including mobile apps, phone calls, and live chats.

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Jira Service Management from Atlassian offers a help desk program for project management and customer service. The software features a self-service portal that offers customizable request forms and gives customers and employees a place to create requests, find answers, and get help.

LiveAgent is a help desk software that helps customer support teams manage inquiries across multiple communication channels. Its ticketing system supports channels like phone, email, live chat, knowledge base, and social media, routing tickets into a shared team inbox. Its chat software allows agents to provide live support and features a real-time typing view so support agents can see what the customer is typing before they hit send.

Help desk software can improve your business by helping to improve your customer and employee service. With it, you can personalize interactions, reduce costs, foster greater team collaboration, and more.

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By infusing AI across the entire service experience, Zendesk can help unlock your support team’s potential. Our AI is purpose-built for customer service and can help your team resolve even the most complex customer interactions at every touchpoint. If you want to promote a hands-off CX experience, we can assist with that too by helping you write and update help center articles, and assist your users with 24/7 AI agent support. Not only that, but Zendesk is easy to use and easy to scale—meaning we can get you started quickly and be there for you as you grow.

HappyFox is a cloud-based IT help desk solution designed to help support teams deliver customer service. The help desk features a ticketing system that creates tickets from email, voice, live chat, messaging, social media, and web form requests and routes them to its shared inbox.

Service desk chatbots can help both IT support and customer service teams. Learn how a service desk chatbot can improve your employee and customer experience.

Though often referred to interchangeably, help desk software and service desk software have a few differences. A help desk primarily assists and resolves specific user issues or incidents. In contrast, a service desk is a more comprehensive IT support function that addresses incidents, manages service requests, coordinates IT processes, and integrates broader IT service management functions.

It offers automation capabilities and customizable ticket fields to help categorize and route incoming customer inquiries and requests. Omniroute™ automatically assigns tickets based on support agent bandwidth, time-triggered automation performs actions based on the time since an action has been completed, and event-triggered capabilities can initiate actions based on pre-defined criteria. Additionally, users can define custom ticket statuses for greater visibility into the ticket's progress.

Don’t know the difference between a help desk vs. a service desk? While these IT tools share similarities, they have distinct approaches to solving problems. Read our comparison guide to learn how they differ.

The product’s portal widget builder features custom themes and designs, and the software’s searchable online knowledge base comes with custom forms and fields. Its help desk also features pre-built and customizable reporting and analytics dashboards and a report builder that allows teams to create custom charts to display data and metrics.

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The right help desk solution enables you to adapt to evolving expectations so you can continuously provide a great customer experience and employee service. That’s where Zendesk excels.

Next, we’ll dive into more comprehensive product overviews. Below, you’ll find expanded product descriptions, pros and cons, and other information that can help you make your selection.

For example, organizations can establish omnichannel routing to automatically direct customer or employee requests across multiple support channels, factoring in agent status, capacity, skill set, and ticket priority. Doing so can reduce wait times, increase agent productivity, and boost customer satisfaction.

With a reporting and analytics solution that integrates data from every channel, you can measure how customers interact with your business and how you perform.

With Zendesk, context moves with the user from channel to channel and lives in the omnichannel Agent Workspace, which creates a unified view of conversation history and background information and can even bring in data from key business systems. Help desk software that prioritizes omnichannel service allows agents to deliver efficient, personalized service at scale.

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk software that assists businesses with customer support operations. The platform offers a ticketing system, allowing users to create, categorize, and prioritize support tickets. Zoho Desk features a knowledge base so users have access to self-service resources. The software enables omnichannel support for communication channels, including email, phone, live chat, and social media.

Zendesk seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack and is easily customizable with the 1,500+ apps and integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace. Keeping your company and customer data is our top priority, and we have the compliance certifications and memberships to prove it.

Zendesk provides a comprehensive help desk solution for the AI era. Designed specifically for service teams, it prioritizes ease of use and scales to any use case, whether supporting customers, employees, or both.

Jira offers conversational ticketing, meaning agents have a single view of requests from email, chat, and its service desk. Users can triage, track, and route incoming requests to agents or teams and use bulk ticket actions to group similar tickets.

Help desk software that features reporting and analytics gives you fast access to valuable customer insights that can help you: