What's New  Explore the new updates and features of BoldDesk in our September release. Learn More.

What is Help Desk Software?

A help desk software is a powerful collaborative tool widely used in the IT sector. It helps businesses scale cost-effectively, improve customer satisfaction and streamline communications systematically. A help desk can be an individual, a global organizational function, or an external service that serves broad-ranging customer support activities.

What is HelpDesk Banner

Types of Help Desk Solutions

There are 3 types of help desk software available.

Cloud-based

Cloud-based help desks are widely used and managed by web browsers. It is easy to set up and provides an anytime-accessible central repository, integrations, and scaling. The only disadvantage is that it mainly depends on the internet connection, technology, and hardware.

On-premises(self-hosted)

On-premises help desk solutions are hard to set up. But they manage everything related to storing data through in-house servers and system configuration while keeping data secured. Moreover, it can also be tailored according to the organization’s needs.

Open source

Open-source help desks give businesses a considerable chance to modify some of the help desk features according to their needs by changing the software’s source code.

The Role of Help Desk Systems in Your Organization

The help desk system has become a bedrock in the modern competitive world as it delivers solutions wherever possible. It’s one of the most flexible ways to carry out quality customer support. Help desks ensure that customer concerns and technical issues are quickly addressed and resolved, boosting efficiency and saving valuable time by eliminating the need for agents.

Help desks have made it even easier for customers to contact a particular organization for support by facilitating online and offline contact support (email, phone, live chats, social media). It also helps managers track and prioritize incoming tickets within the company.

In addition, ticket volume, customer satisfaction, resolution times, and agent performance can be continuously tracked by help desk solutions. Likewise, these help desk solutions can help improve your organization’s processes in many ways.

Role-of-a-Help-Desk
Who-Uses-Help-Desks_

Who Uses Help Desk Software?

As mentioned, help desk tools are used by many organizations and individuals. Here is a list of user types that primarily benefit from using help desks.

Advantages of Help Desk

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction gives an indication of value in your service or product. Help desks support you to consistently empower users, deliver technical support, and provide a better customer experience. Below are some tips for upheaving a help desk’s client satisfaction.

Boosted Productivity

The help desk also performs complaint management effectively using tagging system and complaint ticketing. This paves the path to increase efficiency, clarity, and productivity, avoiding confusion in the workspace.

Scale Smarter

With help desk software, organizations can scale smarter to new diverse areas while supporting a high volume of customers. As a result, the company can expand its business to new regions without hesitation.

Improve Overall Workflow

Thanks to the help desk software, now you can track metrics like:

It also prioritizes important tasks, auto-assigns help desk tickets, avoids duplicate tickets, resolve tickets faster, and acts as a multitask smarter to maximize efficiency.

Operate from Anywhere in the World

This is one of the leading advantages of cloud-based help desk software that can be accessed globally. Therefore, it is the perfect solution if your team works remotely. Also, the agents can resolve and respond to their customers with the help of help desk mobile applications in case the agents are not available on their desks.

Disadvantages of Help Desk

Financial Cost Concerns

Compared to shared inboxes, file systems, and spreadsheets, help desk software can be more costly. This is because organizations install help desk products as self-hosted software or SaaS products.

Learning curve

It can take some time for users to get familiar with the tool initially. Yet, they can learn about the tool and grasp its functionalities easily and quickly by setting up workshops, introductory programs, and questionnaires.

Limited Facilities

If you choose free help desk software, it will only have a limited set of resources and facilities. Consequently, this will lead to poor client experience while tarnishing your organization’s goodwill. Hence, it is essential to consider the features when selecting free help desk software.

Inconsistency

Team members can also get disappointed when facing free help desk software limitations. Their limitations can frustrate the users and reduce the processes’ accountability, consistency, and effectiveness. So, you must be careful when choosing free help desk software.

Help Desk vs. CRM

CRM System or Customer Relationship Management System is a dedicated platform that manages your relationships with customers. CRM is a very comfortable and convenient place to store all data when the business expands daily. It allows you to collect and keep data and information about your company and customers. So, you can get a clear image of every customer and understand their status.

Although the help desk and CRM system sound pretty similar, there are some significant differences. CRM systems only handle customer information, while the help desks utilize the information to aid agents. Also, help desks can be used to automate responses, answer common questions, and redirect people to an info portal.
So, it is clear that help desks serve more purposes than CRM systems.

Help-Desk-vs.-CRM
Help Desk vs Live chat

Help Desk vs. Live Chat

Live chat is a setup that assists representatives in communicating with customers in real-time. So it is an online messaging application, and most help desk software has them as an inbuilt component.

Live chat seems interruptive as it needs immediate attention, which may lead to exhaustion of your team. Also, it requires more force when compared to the process of help desks. Therefore, more human resources are needed for a live chat solution.

Key Features of IT Help Desk Software

IT help desk software is comprised of multiple features. Below are some vital features designed in a help desk to improve end-user experience and enhance customer satisfaction.

Ticket Management

A perfect help desk composes robust ticket management capabilities, allowing businesses to grasp, organize, and manage service requests from employees, customers, and support teams. In addition, help desks automatically assign tickets and allow end-to-end traction service tickets to trail the progress of issues and resolve them.

Ticket-Management
Collaboration-Properties

Collaboration Properties

Here, all the agents get a chance to work with built-in collaboration tools. You should have the below collaborative features to enable collaboration successfully between team members.

Automation

This is another user-oriented IT help desk feature that can ensure immediate responses to your customers. For example, suppose that you utilize automated chatbots so that they will respond to customers even when your team is not online in the blink of an eye.

Automation
Reporting-metrics

Reporting, metrics, and analytics

Reports, metrics, and analytics play a vital part in achieving the success of a support team. Help desks support you in collecting and tracking performances, daily goals, and metrics. Then those metrics can be converted into reports in real-time.

Third-party integrations

Most of the help desks integrate with other third-party tools like Slack, Hubspot, Jira, and Salesforce to avoid switching between external tools.

Third-party-integrations

15 Best Help Desk Software Solutions for 2023

Prior to choosing for the right help desk software, it’s essential to comprehend your requirements and identify the tools that meet them. Let’s have a comparison to their individual features, pricing and choose the best help desk software for your business.

BoldDesk

BoldDesk is not just any help desk software solution. It’s a contemporary, integrable, cloud-based help desk that enhances customer service by offering top-tier customer support tools and self-service attributes.

Top reasons why customers love BoldDesk

Ease of use: BoldDesk provides an intuitive user interface that is easily accessible to all users.

Multibranding and customization: Companies can create separate customer portals, customized to match each of their brands, that funnel tickets to one agent portal. Most features can also be customized to suit different workflows.

Unlimited Agent pricing: Save money and time with a plan that includes an unlimited number of support agents, rather than paying per agent and renegotiating each time your team expands.

Email-to-ticket conversion: The ticketing system auto-converts support emails into tickets, ensuring customer concerns do not fall through the cracks.

SLA: Companies can set BoldDesk with their SLA terms. This determines when notifications and reminders are sent for upcoming due dates and when tickets are automatically escalated when those dates pass with no resolution.

Multilanguage support: Text can be translated into 13 languages, for now, improving communication.

AI features: AI helps in summarizing ticket conversations and KB articles, translating text into various languages, and creating SEO-friendly KB articles.

Integration: Users can link their preferred tools and apps to streamline workflows, centralize data, and enhance productivity.

Automation: Support leads can automate ticket assignment, routine customer responses, etc.

For a more in-depth understanding of BoldDesk’s features, refer to the following video.

Pricing

Don’t miss out on our Unlimited Agents package. This package simplifies your payment process, letting you devote more time and energy to your business growth rather than juggling your budget.

For any questions, please feel free to reach out to the BoldDesk support team. You can start a 15-day free trial or schedule a live demo.

Zendesk

Zendesk is cloud-based help desk software that provides enhanced features to improve customer relationships through better communication.

Zendesk

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts at $19/user/month

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is help desk software that facilitates better customer service and increases customer satisfaction.

Zoho Desk

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts at $14/user/month

HappyFox

HappyFox is help desk software that offers vast applications for customer service, ticketing, and customer support.

HappyFox

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts at $26/user/month

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is live chat and help desk software that provides a unified platform for customer support and communication.

LiveAgent

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts at $9/user/month

Help Scout

Help Scout is IT help desk software that focuses on creating a simple, efficient, and friendly customer service experience.

Features

Help Scout

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $20/month/user

Kayako

Kayako is a customer service platform that allows businesses to provide a personalized support experience.

Kayako

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $15/user/month

Hiver

Hiver is an email-based customer support tool that helps teams collaborate and deliver better customer service.

Hiver

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Pricing starts from $15 per user per month

Proprofs

Proprofs is a comprehensive customer support solution that includes a help desk, knowledge base, and chat software.

Proprofs Help Desk

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $20 /agent/month

HubSpot

HubSpot is a customer service platform that helps businesses attract and engage customers.

HubSpot

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $18 per user per month

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is cloud-based help desk software that enables businesses to provide multichannel support.

Freshdesk

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $15/agent/month

AzureDesk

AzureDesk is a simple help desk software solution that helps businesses provide effective customer support.

AzureDesk

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $33/user/month

Jira Service Desk

Jira Service Desk is service management software that helps IT and business teams collaborate and deliver solutions fast.

Jira Service Desk

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $21/user/month

Hive Support

Hive Support is a help desk software plugin for WordPress that helps customer support teams to manage customer inquiries in a fast and streamlined manner.

Hive Support

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $59/user/year

Hesk

Hesk is help desk software that helps businesses streamline their customer service.

Hesk

Features

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Starts from $25/10 users/month

Table summary

The following is a comprehensive table summary for the leading help desk software solutions.

Name

Features

Pricing

Starts at $12 per month per user.

Starts at $19 per user per month.

Starts at $14 per user per month.

Starts at $26 per user per month.

Starts at $9 per user per month.

Starts from $20 per month per user.

Starts from $15 per month per user.

Starts from $15 per agent per month.

Starts from $20 per agent per month.

Starts from $18 for 2 users per month.

Starts from $15 per user per month.

Starts from $33 per user per month.

Starts from $21 per user per month.

Starts from $12 per user per month.

Starts from $25/10 users/month

Should I use Help Desk Tools?

As discussed, help desk tool can support your organization’s internal and external users in many ways. For example, help desks perform a vital role in tracking, sending, and managing service and work order requests. So, if your organization is looking for ways to automate, scale, or increase the user experience in support services, using a help desk is the perfect solution.

It also improves the customer’s experience with your product or service. If you need an effective method to organize customer communication effectively, you should use a help desk.

Likewise, there are many situations where help desks can improve your organization internally and externally. So, if you have a requirement, don’t hesitate to go for a help desk solution.

Bottom Line

This article discussed a detailed analysis of help desks and their dominant features, pros, and cons. I hope you now have a good understanding of help desks and why you should use them in your organizations. Thank you for reading!

Looking for help desk software? Try BoldDesk for free

Start your 15-day free trial with instant access

Test out all the features of BoldDesk


Free 15-day trial

No credit card required

Easy setup

Live Chat Icon