Customer service can make or break your business. It doesn’t matter how great your product or services might be; if customers feel they can’t rely on your support, the relationship can quickly turn sour. In fact, over 65% of people have higher customer service expectations than they did only three to five years ago.
The bottom line: As companies compete in a saturated market on customer service alone, you can’t afford to slip up even a little.
It stands to reason that the more your business expands, the more queries you’ll have to answer. At some point, manually handling support requests becomes nearly impossible.
This is where help desk software comes in.
A high-quality help desk platform should enable you to consolidate customer queries into one inbox, no matter which channel they originated from. It should also permit you to allocate tickets to specific agents and keep all conversation data at your fingertips to provide faster, more reliable support.
With all that said, this article explores the best help desk software of 2023 for taking your customer support to the next level. More specifically, we’ll look at each tool’s key features, pricing, pros, cons, and identify who they’re best suited for.
Let’s dive in…
When it comes to customer support software, Zendesk is one of the oldest contenders on the market. They’ve been around since 2007 and have since amassed over 160,000 customers. Zendesk also won #1 in Gartner’s Digital Customer Service use case.
Zendeks offers a complete customer service solution that’s easy to scale. More specifically, it comes with a chatbot that can use language mimicking your brand’s voice. It also facilitates omnichannel customer service, allowing you to meet customers where they’re at. I.e., live chat, social, email, voice, SMS messaging, etc. You can also build an integrated self-help center and community forum.
Automation and AI-powered bots make personalized support at scale possible- even if your agents are busy or out of the office. With its wide range of features and flexible pricing plans, Zendesk suits startups, small businesses, large firms, and enterprises. So, rest assured, you won’t have to jump ship if your business expands.
There are three premium plans billed annually:
Salesforce provides various business software solutions, including sales, marketing, commerce, and customer service platforms. Founded in 1999, Salesforce first entered the market with its (CRM) system. It was one of the first cloud subscription services available. Since then, the company has continued innovating and building trust with its loyal customer base.
The Service Cloud promises to boost customer loyalty with AI-powered workflows and automation. You can also provide personalized service at every touchpoint and improve your call center management with Salesforce’s smart productivity tools. As such, it’s one of the best platforms for businesses with their own call centers.
However, it’s not the easiest platform to use. Thanks to its wide range of sophisticated features, Salesforce has a steep learning curve. That said, it offers more affordable pricing than Zendesk and provides everything growing businesses need to step up their customer service game.
Salesforce’s Service Cloud comes with four pricing plans- each billed annually per user, per month.
Zoho Desk might be for you if you’re a small business looking for a free help desk solution. The platform dates back to the mid-nineties and is well renowned for its simplicity. Over 50 million users rely on this service provider.
Zoho Desk has useful automation features to make your agents’ lives a little easier. For instance, an AI assistant can speak to customers and identify repeated keywords and opinions in your customers’ text to analyze their feelings. You can also auto-tag tickets to help agents identify the query’s subject matter, build a knowledge base, and offer customers other self-service functions.
Analytics also cover time-tracking for individual tickets. Plus, you can generate real-time reports for big-picture metrics across your entire customer support system.
There’s a free plan for up to three agents, with a private knowledge base accessible only to your team, email ticketing, and customer management tools. Beyond this, three premium plans are priced per agent per month. You can choose to pay monthly or annually (with the latter, you’ll enjoy a slight saving) as listed below:
Freshdesk is the best help desk system for small businesses. However, customer service is only a part of Freshworks’ overall toolkit. For example, Freshdesk provides a ticket management system with AI automation that routes tickets to the most relevant, available agents. Their AI is called Freddy. Freddy also works as a chatbot, similar to the bots offered by other tools in this list.
In addition, agents have a shared inbox, so they can collaborate on more complex queries. Omnichannel support is available across email, phone, chat, and more.
The platform also comes with helpful website widgets, such as web forms, personalized content, and page-click detection. All of which come in handy for finetuning your user experience, a neat element that other software hasn’t placed as much focus on.
Freshdesk comes with a free plan for up to ten agents. This comes with:
On top of this, there are three premium plans, which you can further upgrade to include omnichannel support. In addition, you can opt to pay either monthly or annually for extra savings.
The omnichannel plans:
Hubspot is another giant in the digital marketing realm. It provides a wide range of software solutions alongside some handy free tools. As such, expanding your toolkit across sales, operations, marketing, etc., is a breeze.
Its CRM system is at the core of HubSpot’s offering, making it an excellent option for managing customers and progressing them through your funnel. As a result, Hubspot’s service hub is tightly interwoven with Hubspot’s CRM.
HubSpot provides an immense range of features, making it an incredibly scalable solution. But, as a result, it also comes with a steep learning curve. The Service Hub boasts a full suite of help desk automation tools for handling your online knowledge base, chatbots, customer surveys, and more. In addition, Hubspot offers a wide range of team management tools on higher plans.
Plus, all data feeds into powerful real-time reporting, whereby you can customize several report dashboards.
You can access a range of free tools, including Service tools like ticketing, email scheduling, live chat, a shared inbox, and basic bots. After that, there are three Service Hub plans. All of which are paid per user per month and billed annually.
You can also opt to bundle the Service Hub with HubSpot’s other tools. However, HubSpot’s pricing is pretty complex, so we recommend visiting their website for more information.
HappyFox offers a range of services. Aside from customer service tools, they also provide IT and operations support. Based in California, their focus is on making their customers happy.
The HelpDesk is the platform’s main toolkit and includes email ticketing with ticket templates. In addition, you can send SMS notifications to customers when their tickets are being processed and build an online knowledge base, including a community forum. You can also create customer satisfaction surveys and customize your helpdesk to suit your brand (including a custom domain).
Like many other tools, HappyFox offers an AI assistant for conversational ticketing. In addition, there’s a live chat tool, a chatbot, and you can launch automated workflows.
First, there’s a plan that can be billed monthly, annually, every two years, or even every three years, based on how many agents you have. Or, if you have a big support team, some plans permit unlimited agents.
HappyFox’s pricing is among the most flexible we’ve seen. Here are the prices for annual billing:
Unlimited agent plans are considerably more expensive. However, they start to warrant themselves if you have more than 52 agents.
LiveAgent is a simpler, more intuitive platform best suited to beginners looking for ease of use. The product provides all the key features you need to deliver a great customer experience. For instance, it comes with an advanced ticketing system, live chat for your website, a customer self-service portal and knowledge base, and an omnichannel inbox. Not to mention, call-center software is also built-in! On top of this, LiveAgent has some of the most affordable pricing plans on this list.
Live agent comes with a free plan. After that, there are three premium plans, paid monthly based on the number of agents you have.
The free plan comes with one email address for ticketing, one custom chat button and only features very limited reports.
It’s worth noting that on the Ticket and Ticket+Chat plan, you need to pay an additional $39 per month to access social media channels like Instagram, Viber, Twitter, and Facebook.
Jira is a project and ticket management tool Australian software company Atlassian created. Jira comes with many tool subsets, but its main software concerns itself with issue tracking, making it particularly effective for IT ticketing.
The Service platform is still relatively new and focuses on aligning IT teams with other departments like sales. In other words, it’s not as concerned with customer support as it is with operator support. Instead, the key goal is to provide speedy resolutions so that other departments can get back to work.
It comes with high-velocity service management, and tickets can be tracked in real-time. Jira also pays special attention to asset and knowledge management, which are vital for effective IT team collaborations.
Jira’s pricing works on a per agent, per month basis. However, the more agents you sign up, the greater the discount.
A free plan for three agents allows small teams to plan and track work efficiently. After that, there are three premium plans. Prices based on 50 agents are as follows:
Help desk software can quickly get expensive. Luckily, for those looking to dip their toes in the water, a few free versions are available. Most notably:
However, it’s important to consider the limitations of such freemium versions. For example, most restrict the number of agents that can access your help desk, so you’ll need to upgrade to facilitate larger customer support teams. Others miss important features, such as knowledge base creation, the ability to generate reports, and/or automation. Unfortunately, many of the key benefits of using help desk software greatly depreciate without such features.
As with anything, you get what you pay for, so it’s often worth considering a premium service. But always request a free trial demo or utilize a trial to see if the features align with your needs and warrant the cost.
Before wrapping up the guide, here’s all you have to know before choosing the best ticketing software:
In short, help desk software can help you provide more effective customer support by streamlining omnichannel communications into one centralized inbox. That’s as well as automating tedious tasks that take time away from your customers. For example, in response to easily answered questions, you can use help desk software to help customers find relevant self-help documentation. Some provide an intuitive chatbot for this feature. Ticketing software should also automatically allocate support requests to available agents or agents with the most relevant skill sets.
Here are some of the best reasons to consider investing in help desk software:
Automation ensures agents don’t waste time on tedious tasks. The same goes for self-service features that enable you to provide customers with the necessary information. The result? Customers are less likely to want to speak to a human agent, freeing up your customer support team to improve the customer experience of customers who get in touch.
When you streamline your customer support strategy, you might not need as many agents on your team as you did before. Thus, saving on staffing costs.
Help desk software helps you provide superior customer service, so your customers don’t have to struggle with easily avoidable frustration. For example:
All of this goes a long way to providing higher-quality customer support.
Here are some key considerations to help you choose the best help desk software for your business:
Price is an important consideration when choosing help desk software. It’s wise to look for software with free and affordable plans. But, more importantly, tools that provide good value for money that won’t force you to upgrade for features you’ll likely need in the future.
The best help desk software should come with powerful analytics and reporting features to monitor why customers seek support and if the support they receive is sufficiently effective. In addition, help desk software should allow you to conduct surveys and analyze sentiments from calls and chats to get clearer insights into your customers’ pain points. Then with this information, you’re better positioned to improve your product, services, and overarching customer support strategy.
One of the greatest benefits of help desk software is that it can reduce the time spent on tedious, repeatable tasks. So, it’s important to check that your chosen software can significantly streamline your workflows.
Human customer support is great, but did you know that 40% of customers prefer self-service options over human contact? That’s why it’s vital that whatever help desk software you choose comes with the ability to create easy-to-navigate knowledge bases for your customers.
You can find some frequently asked questions below.
Helpdesks represent general customer service and support. This is where customers can reach out to ask questions about the company or products. They can log complaints, express comments, or use help deks to find their own solutions.
In contrast, technical support specifically refers to problem-solving surrounding a product.
Omnichannel refers to retail, marketing, or communications strategies that adopt various contact methods. Most businesses employ omnichannel services today. For instance, they’re usually active on their own website, social media, email, telephone, etc. Thus requiring agents to interact with customers all over the place. Omnichannel solutions like help desk software allow companies to streamline interactions from different channels into one inbox.
Agent routing is a process where users are automatically connected with a specific agent. The routing may depend on several factors. For example, agent availability. However, it could also re-connect customers with the agent they spoke to previously or the agent with the most relevant skillset.
So, there you have it. That’s our list of the best help desk software in 2023. Old giants remain strong, while more agile, younger companies are starting to offer more affordable solutions.
If you’re a small business looking for help desk tools, we recommend Live Agent for its affordable pricing or Freshdesk. In contrast, IT companies should check out Jira’s Service Desk for unique asset management features. Whereas more established companies are in good hands with Hubspot Service Hub, Salesforce Helpdesk, or Zendesk.
Remember, when choosing a Helpdesk, it’s essential to consider which features are the most important to you and which metrics you’d most like to track. While the software mentioned above shares key components, their focuses are subtly different. So, bear that in mind before making any final purchasing decisions.
Let us know in the comments below which tools you rely on to provide your customer support.