Help desk software allows customer-care operators to track users’ requests and address their queries. It is a computer program that makes customer-care service efficient and resourceful.
A good help desk software ensures that all issues (whether they are complaints or requests for service/information) are ticketed and monitored in such as way that none of them is left unattended or forgotten (because of delays or service level breaches).
Why do small businesses require a helpdesk?
In a small business, each decision goes a long way in shaping customers’ experiences. Customers’ loyalty towards a brand depends on how the company’s employees take requests and respond to complaints. Sometimes, just being there for customers round the clock to show them that you care means a lot.
The level of commitment that you offer to customers at this scale differentiates you from your competitors. To earn trust and respect, you have to go above and beyond—this includes hopping on calls outside of working hours.
Help desk software connects you with your customers in diverse ways. It usually consists of three parts:
- Ticket Management
- Automation Suite
- Reporting and optimization
It may also have features that gather and organize queries and solutions into a knowledge base, such as guide articles or FAQs.
We have compiled a list of best helpdesk software for small businesses that allow your team to manage everything in one place, whether you are selling products or services.
Table of Contents
9. Kayako
Plus Points: Easy integrations to hundreds of apps; quantify your productiveness
Pricing: Starts at $15 per agent per month; 14-day free trial available
Kayako helps businesses get better at delivering effortless customer service experiences. It is packed with multiple powerful features that allow agents to begin managing requests and conversations in no time.
One of its many tools is Live Chat, which enables you to provide a tailored, engaging live chat experience 24/7. Another great tool named Collaborator allows agents to leverage the expertise of external stakeholders (vendors or suppliers) to help resolve complex queries.
The software provides a comprehensive visualization of the entire customer journey, outlining every interaction customer has had with your business. Every key parameter (page views, orders, shipping history, helpdesk searches) is properly organized and visible in realtime.
From startups and Fortune 100 companies to government and Charity, Kayako serves more than 131,000 businesses, including De Beers, Peugeot, FedEx, NASA, and the American Motorcyclist Association.
8. RingCentral Contact Center
Plus Points: Leading security features; Wide range of integrations
Pricing: Starts at $20 per month; Free trial is limited to 5 users and 2 desktop phones
Cloud-based RingCenter Contact Center improves the overall call center experience by connecting customers with agents who can best handle their needs. It allows customers to contact your business on any communication channel while giving agents all the necessary information required to solve issues quickly and efficiently.
The platform has everything you need to receive incoming calls and solve customers’ problems, including a range of integration options with powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Microsoft. You can also build custom integrations using APIs.
Its agent management system helps you optimize agent schedules to reduce downtime and prevent long wait times for customers. Real-time reports are there to help you perform in-depth customer surveys and train new staff.
All in all, it’s a great platform tailored specifically for small businesses, but there are a few other options in the market worth considering.
7. Jira Service Management
Seamless change management initiated from bitbucket pipelines
Plus Points: Highly customizable dashboard; Tool for collecting customers’ feedback
Pricing: Free for 3 agents; Standard version costs $20 per agent per month
Jira Service Management is an IT Service Management (ITSM) solution specially designed for IT operations and development teams. It empowers the team to quickly adapt to business changes and deliver great customer experiences.
The platform features on-call scheduling, alerting, and incident swarming. The user interface is very simple and has a modern look. It’s intuitive enough even for a novice admin or user.
It has all standard tools that you need to run a usual IT helpdesk. You can set your helpdesk in an hour. Although the default setup works pretty well, you can customize it as per your company’s requirements. The dashboard contains all important metrics, stats, and graphs to help you work efficiently.
In terms of integration with other applications, there are countless possibilities. The company offers more than 1,000 apps and integration to ensure the software can be customized to fit your use case.
6. LiveAgent
Plus Points: Set up unique rules to automate your workflow; Voice integration
Pricing: Starts at $15 per agent per month; 14-day free trial available
LiveAgent is a fully-featured help desk software that provides excellent ticketing, automation, and live chat system to personalize your customer interactions.
It lets you place an email ticketing system or a chatbox on your website or mobile app. Depending on your plan, you can make multiple chat boxes and email addresses for different departments.
The ticket system is simple yet effective. There is an option to enable auto-routing for tickets and limit the number to chats or phone calls directed to a particular agent. What more impressive is tickets from a returning customer are auto-routed to the same agent who helped him/her with previous issues.
This helpdesk service is offered as both cloud software and on-premise installations. The former is priced on a pay-per-use basis by a number of agents, while the latter uses the-front pricing model, based solely on the number of agents.
5. HubSpot Service Hub
Plus Points: Comes with HubSpot CRM, Comprehensive ticketing
Pricing: Premium version starts at $45 per month; Free plan available for unlimited users
HubSpot Service Hub allows you to scale your customer support and unite your office team on one simple yet powerful platform. It includes five tools to provide proactive service that delights, retains, and grows your customer base.
- Ticketing and automation keeps you organized
- A knowledge base so customers can find answers to common questions
- Live chat and bots for faster response times
- Feedback and Survey tools to analyze customers’ experience
- Reporting tool so you can continually improve
Service Hub has the longest list of features available for free. It also comes with comprehensive sets of actions, controls, and information for managing tickets. For example, you can schedule meetings, add notes, logs, and attachments on the ticket detail page.
Overall, this platform will make it easy to gather and analyze customer needs. It will also give you detailed insights that drive impact in the rest of your business.
4. Zoho Desk
Plus Points: Augmented Intelligence for your team; Integrates with other Zoho apps
Pricing: Premium version starts at $12 per month; 15-day trial of any plan
Zoho Desk is a great choice for smaller businesses who want a highly configurable, scalable, and easy-to-manage platform. It is packed with numerous advanced functions, such as voice-over IP and social media integration, data analytics for managers monitoring customer interactions.
Zoho Desk also contains embeddable self-service, multi-stakeholder process management, and a powerful AI assistant to deliver phenomenal customer service.
Its augmented intelligence system, named Zia, can help agents perform important tasks like anomaly detection and sentiment analysis. Zia also serves as a conversation assistant to help customers find solutions quickly.
Real-time analytics provides you with in-depth detail of customer service stats. Crucial metrics like live traffic, individual agent stats, and ticket resolution time can be monitored on a daily basis, so odd behaviors are caught well in time.
What more? Zoho Desk offers a free version (for up to three agents) to head start your operations.
3. LiveChat
Plus Points: 5-minute installation; Macro filters for FAQs
Pricing: Starts at $16/month; 14-day free trial available
LiveChat can be directly added to your website to capture more leads and close more sales. It allows your site visitors to send their queries and receive answers in no time.
The chatbox itself is quite versatile. You can share files with visitors, send a calendar to schedule a meeting, send link buttons, or set up pre-recorded responses to quickly answer most common queries.
The platform perfectly balances AI automation and the human touch. The AI greets visitors and quickly routes chats based on what they do on your website, so you can serve them better.
All chats can be transferred between support agents, which is useful if your business has two or more departments with different specialties.
You can also import chats from other platforms (email, SMS, FB Messenger, Apple Business Chat messages) into LiveChat to make it easier to handle requests. All chats are protected via 256-bit encryption.
Apart from chat functionality, the platform also has a built-in ticketing system, real-time website traffic monitoring, and agents’ efficiency analytics. It is currently used by more than 31,000 companies, including both small and large size businesses. The most popular among them are Sony, LG, Lexus, Paypal, Adobe, Unilever, and Ikea.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk dashboard
Plus Points: Built-in routing and intelligence to collect critical details; Add lots of custom fields of varying types
Pricing: Starts at $49/month; 14-day free trial available
Zendesk is a versatile yet powerful customer relationship management software provider. It allows your firm to have a natural conversation with customers, without letting them feel what’s going on behind the curtains.
You can have conversations with your customers on any channel (social messaging apps, chat, voice, email, and more) while keeping all interactions and relevant material in one place for further analysis.
The platform makes it easier to trace, prioritize and respond to queries with one unified agent workspace. With more than 1,000 pre-built integrations, agents can offer better, more personalized support.
On average, the platform increases agent productivity by 30% (at any scale) and customer satisfaction by 25%. After all, there is a reason why more than 140,000 customers trust Zendesk as their complete service solution.
Read: 13 Best Productivity Apps To Use This Year
1. Freshdesk
Plus Points: Straightforward interface; Fine-grained control; Fairly priced
Pricing: Starts at $15/month; 21-day free trial available
Freshdesk is a cloud-based helpdesk system the merges best-in-class ticketing, self-service, and reporting. It unifies conversations from phone, chat, web, email, and social and helps you resolve queries across channels effortlessly.
To save time, the software automates your repetitive work and lets you seamlessly collaborate with other teams to resolve issues faster. Its inbuilt reporting features provide you with every vital information your need. You can analyze the team’s performance along with metrics most relevant to you. All of this in one click!
More specifically, it tracks agents’ productivity throughout the day and splits this data by the hour. One can look up who sent out immediate responses or who resolved the most tickets.
Read: 15 Best Note-Taking Apps To Boost Your Productivity
The platform is currently used by more than 40,000 businesses (both small and large ones), including HP, Pearson, Henkel, Panasonic, and American Express.