Elevate
customer experiences
with help desk know-how
One thing that always stays with a customer after they purchase your product or service is the overall experience they have with your business. To ensure they remember you in a positive light, it's essential to support them beyond the purchase journey. This is where a help desk solution can help. Learn all that there is to help desk for sustained business success and growth.
Try Zoho Desk for freeWhen should your
business deploy one?
- Unhappy customers
- High volumes of pending tickets
- Long wait times to receive service
- Poor brand reputation
- Limited insight into service operations
- High churn rate
- Lack of feedback to drive innovation
What is help desk
software?
Help desk software helps a business communicate with its customers across channels quickly and seamlessly. It captures all customer interactions as tickets in a centralized location for easy tracking and management. Additionally, it empowers a business to take customer-driven decisions and helps agents increase customer satisfaction levels with its powerful AI, self-service, automation, and analytical capabilities.
What are the benefits
of help desk software?
Effective customer service is key to business growth, and a help desk solution can enhance this by streamlining customer service activities and enabling teams to meet their goals more efficiently. Discover the additional benefits of implementing a help desk solution for your organization.
Maximize agent productivity
Help desk software enables your agents to craft personalized messages and send quick responses by providing all the context they need in one place, such as the customer's history of interactions with your business.
Increase customer satisfaction
Reduce agent workload and meet your customer's need for instant and 24/7 support by setting up a help center right from your help desk system.
Improve ticket resolution time
With automation, pre-written responses, and AI, your agents are equipped with the right resources to send out quick and informative answers, decreasing resolution time.
Create more growth opportunities
A help desk allows you to unify your various business operations with the help of multiple integration options. For instance, if you have your CRM integrated with your help desk, your agents can understand your customers' complete journey, provide them with effective service, and explore upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Improve service operations
Get a better understanding of your service operations and take the right decisions for business success by analyzing important customer service metrics like ticket resolution times, customer satisfaction scores, and support agent performance with the help of reports and dashboards.
Who is it meant for?
Every business, regardless of size, that interacts with customers on a regular basis benefits from a help desk solution. Here's a breakdown of how it can benefit businesses of all sizes.
- Freelancers
- Small businesses
- Medium-sized businesses
- Enterprises
Freelancers
Freelancers often build strong connections with their clients because of their direct, personal interactions with customers. However, as the client base grows, it often becomes difficult to provide the same personal touch in every interaction. Help desk software keeps a record of every customer interaction, allowing you to revisit customer interactions and deliver experiences that are meaningful, personal, and memorable. Moreover, you can automate tasks so that you are more focused on delivering quick service.
Small businesses
When you have a small team to manage your growing customer base, it becomes important to balance customer and employee satisfaction. Help desk software enables you to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently. Automation helps you streamline service activities like assigning tickets to agents and sending responses to commonly asked questions with the help of canned responses, AI, and chatbots.
Medium-sized businesses
With a growing customer base and workforce, it becomes essential to streamline your service operations. By automating tasks and creating resources such as a help center to make it easier for customers to resolve issues on their own, you can improve employee productivity and customer satisfaction levels.
Enterprises
In large organizations, the high volume of incoming tickets, multiple teams, and complex processes can make it challenging to foster strong customer relationships. A help desk solution can address these challenges by offering omnichannel support, automating ticket workflows, empowering agents with AI-powered responses, and providing comprehensive insights through intuitive reporting.
How is it
relevant to
your industry?
From healthcare to finance, each industry faces unique customer journeys. Discover how a help desk can be customized for your specific needs, streamline processes, and elevate your customer experience.
- Healthcare
- Financial services
- Education
- Hospitality
- IT
- Ecommerce
Healthcare
In the healthcare industry, a help desk comes in handy for multiple stakeholders, including doctors, administrators, and patients. By embedding chatbots and webforms across your website, you can empower your customers to carry out simple tasks like scheduling appointments, saving time so your service representatives can focus on the most complex issues. Moreover, with automation and centralization of customer service requests, your reps can attend to any emergency requests quickly, even with customers spread across multiple channels.
Doctors can provide personalized remote consultation to their patients by accessing their patients' medical history and previous interactions through the system. The collaborative features available in help desk software enable better coordination between teams to ensure your customers always receive accurate, timely information.
With a small team of three active members, a handful of volunteering psychiatrists, psychologists, and over a hundred volunteers called "befrienders" working in a unified platform, the team is now able to address and resolve the issues of over 200,000 migrant workers. Every call a migrant worker makes to HealthServe is logged as a ticket in Zoho Desk, and assigned to a team member to review and follow up. The counseling team does a diligent job reviewing each ticket that comes in.
Michael Cheah,Executive Director, HealthServe
Financial services
If you're in banking, insurance, or wealth and asset management, you can meet your customer's preferences for secure and quick conversations through a help desk system. The right software solution keeps your customers' information secure by allowing you to control permissions and access settings.
You also can reduce customer wait times and avoid constant transfers between departments by setting up workflows and assignment rules to direct customers to the right agent based on the type of question or issue they have and other criteria. Collaboration features available within your help desk solution help your agents communicate with other departments as needed to deliver quick and informative responses.
To ensure your global customer base has easy access to information, you can set up a help center in your customers' preferred language.
Zoho Desk is now a major part of operations at Pioneer Insurance and has significantly helped the company improve its business performance. In 2021, Pioneer Insurance logged more than 60,000 tickets in Zoho Desk. Impressively, the company is able to close around 75% of tickets the same day they are opened.
Earl Ferrer,First Vice President, Digital Transformation, Pioneer Insurance
Education
In an education setting, parents, students, or your staff might require help anytime of the day. A help desk system helps you meet the need for 24/7 support by setting up a help center that includes knowledge base articles to answer commonly asked questions. You can set up a community site where individuals can help each other and also include a chatbot that delivers basic information and directs customers to the available agents.
You can cater to your customers' diverse needs by being available on their preferred channels while your help desk system organizes all support tickets in one place. In situations requiring empathy and tactful responses, you can deploy the power of AI and human intelligence to analyze customer sentiment and aid your service representatives in crafting the perfect reply.
With the omnichannel setup in Zoho Desk, the IT team in Education Partnership North East (EPNE) now has a single point of interaction for all their customers. Segregating the team into different departments helped EPNE not just handle tickets more efficiently, it also brought a workflow into their business structure that was lacking before.
Neil Gray,IT Support Manager, EPNE
Hospitality
Being a service-oriented industry, it can get challenging to meet your customer expectations at every step of their journey. A help desk system is a major asset for hospitality businesses. As customers raise requests from multiple channels, a help desk system stores all your customer-facing interactions in one place. This helps you focus on personalizing each customer's experience and providing them with instant support through embeddable chat widgets and a help center.
Proactively help your customers by automating tasks like providing travel updates or sending helpful information when a customer checks in at your hotel. You can also collect feedback to understand your customers' experience and make improvements to grow your business further.
Shiji offers its services and products to more than 90,000 hotels, which makes it difficult to identify the owners of each ticket. To steer clear of confusion, it has created a custom function in Zoho Desk which pulls the regional and service office information from the account record and assigns it to the ticket so the associated support person can easily identify customers.
Kyle Kurdle,Vice President, Global Service Delivery, Shiji Group
IT
You can deploy a help desk to either resolve in-house issues or provide assistance to external users. An organization's productivity heavily relies on the smooth functioning of the software it uses, so a help desk system is essential to protect against downtime and disruption. You can use automation to prioritize tickets based on the nature of each issue and help your agents work effectively.
Other value-adding features include the ability to provide remote support sessions and deploy a chatbot for answering commonly asked questions. This way your users can get 24/7 help without having to wait for an agent to be available. On the back-end, you can use reports and dashboards to understand performance at the team and agent level.
Using Zoho Desk, the team at Cartika is able to see and respond to all customer conversations from a single screen without needing to switch back and forth between multiple tools.
Matt Cianfarani,Chief Operating Officer, Cartika
Ecommerce
Whether your end users are retailers or direct consumers, they all prefer transparent insights into their orders and purchases. A help desk system can automate many routine tasks, such as sending order updates, freeing up agents to focus on more complex issues. Embedding a chat widget on your website further helps ensure your customers have a smooth buying journey.
To streamline the support process effectively, you can set up multiple departments within your help desk system for different functions like order updates, returns and exchanges, and finances. You can create multiple help centers for every brand or product your organization offers to reduce agent workloads and meet customer expectations regarding service quality.
Serve your diverse customer base effortlessly with Zoho Desk.
Start 15-day free trialWhat are the types
of help desk software?
There are various ways to manage customer service requests in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. We’ve highlighted the differences between the various types of help desk software to guide you in the right direction on your digital transformation journey.
- On-premises vs cloud-based
- Closed vs open source
- Customer service software vs service desk
On-premises vs cloud-based
On-premises
On-prem help desk software is installed and hosted on the company's own servers or data centers. It is internally managed by the organization, which allows them to have complete control over customization, security settings, and data storage. However, it is expensive to purchase and maintain on-premise software.
Cloud-based
Cloud-based software is hosted on the vendor's server and accessible on the internet. The vendor is responsible for the security, updates, and maintenance, reducing the cost while facilitating scalability. This also makes it convenient for users to access the software remotely.
Closed vs Open source
Closed
Closed-source software does not provide its source code to the public. This enables you to run your operations in a safe and secure environment. However, you can typically still customize the software to get a solution that meets your needs by collaborating with the vendor.
Open source
The source code of open-source help desk software is publicly accessible, which creates opportunities for anyone to customize it. However, making the source code available to everyone also creates security issues. Maintaining the system and getting support can also be difficult as there are few companies providing support for open software.
Customer service software vs Service desk
Customer service software
Customer service software makes it seamless for businesses to manage requests received from customers through multiple channels. With its advanced automation and analytical capabilities, businesses can run service operations effortlessly.
Service desk
Organizations incorporate a service desk to resolve IT requests raised by the employees, address ongoing issues that might slow down employees' work, and proactively develop ways to avoid downtime. This software also allows businesses to create a knowledge base to help employees resolve issues on their own.
Top 10 features to look for
in a help desk system
Providing excellent customer service is essential for businesses of all sizes. A help desk system can be a valuable tool in helping you achieve this goal. But with so many options on the market, it can be difficult to know which features are most important. Here are 10 essential features to look for in a help desk system:
- Omnichannel support
- Artificial intelligence
- Self-service
- Automation
- Collaborative tools
- Multilingual customer service
- Mobile app
- Integrations
- Analytics
- Security and compliance
Omnichannel support
Customers expect to be able to reach you on their preferred channel, whether it's email, phone, social media, messaging apps, or live chat. A good help desk system should support all of these channels and unify interactions in a single interface. This way, you don't have to use multiple applications, and your customers can be confident they'll receive a prompt reply.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a game-changing tool for customer service. AI-powered help desk systems enable your agents to do more in less time by automating tasks such as updating ticket fields, auto-tagging tickets, and creating responses.
Self-service
Customers often prefer to find answers on their own when possible. A help desk system should include a self-service portal where customers can access a knowledge base, community forum, or chatbot support. This reduces the number of tickets your agents need to handle and helps improve customer satisfaction.
Automation
A help desk system should have powerful automation capabilities to automate routine tasks such as sending acknowledgment emails, ticket updates, and reminders. This frees up your agents' time to focus on more complex issues and improve overall efficiency.
Collaborative tools
Customer service often involves multiple teams working together. A help desk system should make it easy for agents to collaborate with each other and other departments through features like private comments and threads. This allows agents to tag their colleagues within a ticket and resolve issues quickly.
Multilingual customer service
If you have a global customer base, you need a help desk system that can support multiple languages. This will allow you to provide better service to your customers and improve their overall experience with your brand.
Mobile app
A mobile app is essential for any help desk system. This allows your agents to access tickets remotely and respond to customers as quickly as possible. Mobile access also allows managers to track important metrics and provide support to agents.
Integrations
Your help desk system should integrate with the other systems you use in your business, such as your CRM, marketing automation platform, and accounting software. This will help you streamline your operations and provide a consistent experience for both customers and internal users.
Analytics
A good help desk system should provide you with detailed analytics about your customer service operations. This data can help you identify areas for improvement and track your progress over time.
Security and compliance
When choosing a help desk system, it's important to make sure that it meets all of the relevant security and compliance requirements like HIPAA, GPDR, and CCPA. This will help to protect your customers' data and ensure that you are operating in a legal manner.
Other factors to consider while
choosing help desk software
While features are crucial for streamlining customer service operations, several other factors significantly impact your success with a help desk solution. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind as you move forward in your help desk journey.
Total cost of ownership
Before purchasing new software, it's crucial to evaluate the total cost of ownership, including the subscription fees, add-on services, maintenance, support, customization, and integration costs. Make sure the software you choose meets all your requirements at the
right price.
Scalability
Your software should be flexible enough to adapt to continue serving your customers' needs as the business grows. You don't want to run the risk of exceeding your system's capacity, experiencing a slowdown, and harming your reputation with customers.
Learning curve
As you move to a new system, it is important to make the transition convenient and simple for your agents. This can only be possible if the software has an intuitive UI, easy navigation,
and helpful support resources.
Customizability
Your employees are used to certain ways of carrying out their day-to-day operations. Your help desk solution needs to be customizable to support your business processes and
workflows.
Support
For times when you need your vendor's assistance getting through an issue or understanding how to meet your business requirements, you should be confident that your vendor has a proper support system in place.
Comparison of
leading help desk solutions
When it comes to choosing help desk software, it can be overwhelming to choose from the many available solutions. To simplify the process for you, we've examined the top 10 leading help desk solutions on the market.
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Select minimum 3 products
CloseShow resultsZendesk Support
Salesforce Service Cloud
Help Scout
HappyFox
Hiver
Freshdesk
Kayako
TeamSupport
Helpshift
Zoho Desk
Zendesk Support
Salesforce Service Cloud
Help Scout
HappyFox
Hiver
Freshdesk
Kayako
TeamSupport
Helpshift
Trial
Free plan
Starting plan
Highest plan
Gartner rating
G2 rating
Zoho Desk
15 days
Yes
$7.00
$40.00
4.4
(1746 reviews)4.4
(5764 reviews)
Zendesk Support
14 days
No
$19.00
$115.00
4.3
(301 reviews)4.3
(5891 reviews)
Salesforce Service Cloud
30 days
No
$25.00
$330.00
4.4
(322 reviews)4.3
(3880 reviews)
Help Scout
Yes (duration not specified)
No
$22.00
$65.00
NA
4.4
(404 reviews)
HappyFox
Yes (duration not specified)
No
$9.00
Custom
NA
4.5
(253 reviews)
Hiver
7 days
No
$19.00
Custom
NA
4.6
( 1090 reviews )
Freshdesk
21 days
Yes
$15.00
$79.00
4.4
(614 reviews)4.4
(3179 reviews)
Kayako
14 days
No
$39.00
Custom
NA
4
( 219 reviews)
TeamSupport
No
No
$29.00
Custom
NA
4.4
(872 reviews)
Helpshift
30 days
Yes
$150.00
Custom
NA
4.3
(379 reviews)
Disclaimer: All names and marks mentioned here remain the property of their original owners. Prices are as published by the named competitors on their website(s) as on 05-09-2024 (without taking into account the taxes or discounts), and are subject to change based on the pricing policies of the competitors. The details provided on this page are for general purposes only and cannot be considered as authorized information from the respective competitors. Zoho disclaims any liability for possible errors, omissions, or consequential losses based on the details here.
Check out the detailed comparison of the top three leading solutions to narrow down your selection and
find the right solution for your organization.
Zoho Desk is a powerful help desk
solution trusted by 100,000 businesses worldwide
- Easy setup
- Refreshingly modern UI
- Minimal learning curve
- No hidden costs or rigid contracts
Here's what
you can achieve
with us
15%
increase in first contact resolution.
50%
faster response time.
14%
increase in CSAT score.
48%
reduction in customer churn rate.
50%
faster implementation.
*Metrics reported by our customers through an internal survey.
Try Zoho Desk to elevate your
customer satisfaction!
- 15 day free trial.
- No credit card required.
- No software to download.
Most frequently asked questions
Every help desk system offers different features and number of users in their free plan, while the trial plan allows you to access all of their features for a limited period of time. A free help desk system is particularly helpful for businesses with a small team size and limited number of customer service requests. This will enable your small team to meet your customer's expectations while boosting trust and loyalty in your brand.
As your business expands, you'll need a help desk system that is affordable and scalable to meet your growing business needs. This is when it is ideal to move to a paid plan and utilize the system to its full potential to build stronger customer relationships.
The best way to measure your customer satisfaction levels is by collecting feedback after every customer interaction and analyzing the customer ratings. As your customer's satisfaction often relies on various factors like lower wait times and faster query resolution, you can also rely on metrics like first response time and average resolution time. To understand the overall health of the customer service function further, you can analyze various other metrics through your help desk system.
In today's digitized world, the quality of your customers' experiences with your business has a huge impact on your ability to succeed and grow. If you are looking to enhance your service levels, avoid negative customer reviews, delegate tasks efficiently to your agents, meet service commitments towards your customers, stay connected, and build brand loyalty, you'll need a help desk solution for your business.
The cost of a help desk solution depends on various factors, such as team size, features required for effective operations, and the vendor you choose. Unfortunately, high pricing, hidden costs, and restrictive contracts are all too common. Zoho Desk offers transparent pricing and is available at an affordable price range, from $7 to $40 per user per year.
The best way to provide quick and accurate answers to your global customer base 24/7 is by building a multilingual help center. You can create a knowledge base containing answers to commonly asked questions, set up a community forum for customers to discuss ideas or issues among each other, or embed a chatbot on a website to help customers find answers instantly.
Zoho Desk is extensively customizable, making it easy for you to adapt it to your business flow and operations. You can use it to streamline your HR help desk operations, such as collecting resumes through webforms, answering employee questions 24/7 through a help center, and automating routine processes.
Remote help desk software makes it easy for agents to access their customers' or users' computers to troubleshoot problems or perform system updates. This helps your customers get help instantly while saving your agents time and effort.