Top 15 IT Help Desk Ticketing Systems - 2023
The best help desk ticketing systems, features, benefits, pricing guidelines, and recommendations.
As your business and customer base expand, having a help desk ticketing system becomes increasingly necessary for your customer support operation to run successfully. Without one, your team simply cannot swiftly and efficiently handle customer queries, requests, and incident reports that continue to pile up on different channels.
While help desk software is not in the HR space, we find that many of our readers are asking us about these solutions and so wanted to provide some research so they can find and buy the right ticketing system :)
Top IT Help Desk Ticketing Systems
We pride ourselves on strict editorial standards and use a thorough process to vet and review software before we publish it on the site (and in fact, most vendors we have to end up rejecting). This process includes having our team of HR and recruiting experts use the tool themselves, getting user feedback, and then evaluating the vendor on key metrics like their financial health, customer retention, and responsiveness to customer queries. You can read more about how we evaluate vendors here.
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Zendesk is arguably the most well-known customer support software available today. Among its features are integrated surveys to measure customer satisfaction and analytics dashboards to monitor your team’s performance.
PROS
CONS
Zendesk is a cloud-based customer support solution that allows you to receive, prioritize, and handle customer support requests from different channels including email, chat, and social media, all in one centralized and shared location.
With the help of triggers, you’re able to automatically assign and escalate tickets to specific groups, send automated responses and follow-ups, notify customers and agents of certain updates and tag certain tickets for easy reporting and information retrieval. Among Zendesk’s features are also integrated surveys to measure customer satisfaction and analytics dashboards to monitor your team’s performance.
Mailchimp, Uber, Khan Academy
Zendesk offers five paid plans: Essential, Team, Professional, Enterprise, and Elite. These plans cater to different business sizes and range from $5 to $199 per agent per month, billed annually.
To find out which plan suits your business, visit Zendesk’s pricing page. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial or contact Zendesk’s team for a demo.
Best For
Freshdesk is a scalable solution for companies of any size. It packs strong features, including one for gamification to encourage agents to improve their output.
PROS
- Freshdesk enables your customer service team to offer proactive support across multiple channels, including Facebook, Twitter, email, and website, to engage your customers.
- Freshdesk is incredibly user-friendly. Your agents don’t need any specialized coding or technical knowledge to use it. Plus, it offers diverse templates with formatting components to simplify ticketing.
- Freshdesk's free plan is comprehensive, offering you all the features you would need as a small business and then some.
- With Freshdesk, your team can collaborate with each other and resolve issues faster.
- The platform comes with a mobile app that enables agents to provide support on the go. It’s available for both iOS and Android devices.
- In addition to a generous free plan, Freshdesk's paid plans provide great value for money. It gives you several advanced features like gamification at affordable rates.
CONS
- Freshdesk’s marketing is slightly confusing. Most of its advanced features require an upgrade to the highest pricing tears, which users don’t realize until after signing up. Here’s a free vs. paid plan breakdown, so you don’t find yourself making wrong decisions.
- You cannot provide temporary access to seasonal hires, part-time workers, or other team members in the Free plan. While this feature is available, you’ll have to upgrade to the premium plans.
- Freshdesk doesn’t offer dedicated technical support. As a result, complicated issues take longer to resolve.
Freshdesk is a highly scalable, cloud-based help desk system for businesses of all sizes. It features a shared inbox where all customer support tickets from several channels are collated, customizable workflows, automated pop-ups that help deflect common customer queries, and comprehensive dashboards to monitor quality metrics. Freshdesk also offers a team huddle feature that allows you to bring in experts to resolve complex tickets, as well as a gamification feature to motivate agents and improve their performance.
Fiverr, HP, Decathlon, Panasonic, NYU, Henkel, Pearson, Thai Union, American Express.
Freshdesk offers four plans: Free, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise. The free plan is ideal for small businesses to get started with help desk software. The Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plans range from $15-18 to $79-95 per agent per month, depending on if you go with monthly or annual billing. All Freshdesk plans can be trialed for free for a 21-day period. Also, the enterprise plan offers 5000 bot sessions per month.
Best For
Companies of all sizes looking for a comprehensive customer support solution.
We use Freshdesk as our main customer support platform, handling all incoming inquiries from our customers through email, phone, and live chat. Freshdesk is used daily by our customer support team to manage and respond to customer requests.
One of our main workflows in Freshdesk is the ticketing system. When a customer reaches out, a support agent creates a ticket in Freshdesk and works to resolve the issue. Our agents also use Freshdesk's collaboration tools to communicate with each other and escalate tickets if necessary.
We also use Freshdesk's knowledge base and self-service portal to provide our customers with resources and information they need to resolve issues on their own. The ability to create custom macros and automations helps us respond to common inquiries quickly and efficiently.
In addition, Freshdesk's reporting and analytics capabilities give us valuable insights into our support operations, such as response time and resolution time, which allows us to continuously improve our processes.
Overall, Freshdesk is a crucial tool for our customer support operations and we rely on it heavily to provide excellent service to our customers.
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- Its user-friendly interface makes it easy for our agents to manage customer inquiries efficiently.
- The robust feature set, including the ticketing system, knowledge base, and automation tools, provides us with everything we need to provide excellent customer support.
- The analytics and reporting capabilities allow us to track our performance and continuously improve our processes.
- The ability to customize Freshdesk to fit our specific needs and branding has been a huge plus for us.
- The frequent updates and new features added by Freshdesk helps us stay ahead of the curve in terms of customer support technology.
Our organization decided to purchase Freshdesk as a way to modernize and streamline our customer support processes. We had a growing number of customer inquiries and needed a system that could handle a high volume of requests while providing a positive experience for both our agents and customers. After evaluating various options, Freshdesk stood out for its user-friendly interface, robust feature set, and high ratings from other users.
We have now been using Freshdesk for over 2 years and it has made a significant impact on our customer support operations. Our agents can now handle a greater number of inquiries in less time and our customers are more satisfied with the support they receive. We also appreciate the constant updates and new features that Freshdesk rolls out, which helps us stay ahead of the curve in terms of customer support technology.
- The load time for some pages can be slow, which can slow down our agents and reduce their efficiency.
- The mobile app could use some improvements, such as better ticket management and faster notifications.
- The integration with some third-party tools can be a bit tricky, causing some workflow disruptions.
- The pricing for some advanced features can be a bit high, making it difficult for smaller organizations to afford.
- The user interface could use some simplification to make it easier for new agents to learn and use.
Freshdesk stands out from its competitors by offering a comprehensive suite of customer support tools and features, including a ticketing system, knowledge base, and automation capabilities. Compared to similar tools, Freshdesk has a user-friendly interface and a wider range of integrations, which sets it apart.
I prefer Freshdesk over its competitors because of its robust feature set and customization options. Freshdesk also offers excellent reporting and analytics capabilities, which helps us track our performance and make informed decisions about our support operations.
Additionally, Freshdesk's constant updates and improvements, such as new features and improved user experience, show their commitment to helping customers succeed. This sets Freshdesk apart from competitors who may not be as focused on innovation and improvement.
Overall, Freshdesk's combination of features, performance, and commitment to customer success make it the clear choice for us over its competitors.
When buying a customer support tool like Freshdesk, there are several key criteria to consider:
- Features: Make sure the tool you choose offers the features you need to effectively manage customer inquiries, such as a ticketing system, knowledge base, and automation capabilities.
- User experience: Look for a tool with a user-friendly interface that will make it easy for your team to use and improve their efficiency.
- Integrations: Consider how the tool integrates with your existing tools and systems, and whether the integrations will meet your needs.
- Price: Determine your budget and look for a tool that offers value for the price, taking into account both the cost and the features included.
- Customer support: Look for a vendor that offers excellent customer support, as you will likely need assistance at some point during your use of the tool.
My advice would be to clearly define your needs and priorities, and then use these criteria to compare different tools and choose the one that best fits your requirements.
Freshdesk has evolved significantly over time to better meet the needs of its users. In the past, Freshdesk was primarily a ticketing system, but over the years they've added a wide range of features and integrations to become a comprehensive customer support platform.
Freshdesk has also made significant improvements to the user experience, with a focus on making the platform more intuitive and efficient for its users. They've also added new features such as a knowledge base, automation capabilities, and advanced analytics, making it easier for organizations to manage their customer support operations.
In addition, Freshdesk has also made efforts to improve the performance and stability of the platform, ensuring that it can handle the needs of even the busiest customer support teams.
Overall, Freshdesk has been consistently improving and evolving to meet the changing needs of its users, and this commitment to innovation and improvement is one of the reasons it has become a popular choice for organizations of all sizes.
Freshdesk is a versatile customer support platform that is well suited for a wide range of organizations, including small businesses, mid-sized companies, and large enterprises.
However, Freshdesk is especially well suited for organizations that have high volume customer support operations and need a comprehensive platform to manage customer inquiries effectively. Freshdesk's robust feature set, including a ticketing system, knowledge base, automation capabilities, and advanced analytics, make it ideal for organizations that require a comprehensive solution to manage their customer support operations.
Freshdesk's ease of use and customization options make it a good choice for organizations that need a flexible solution that can be tailored to their specific needs. It's is an excellent choice for organizations that need a comprehensive customer support platform that is both feature-rich and user-friendly.
Freshdesk is a versatile customer support platform that is suitable for a wide range of organizations, but it may not be the best fit for every organization.
Organizations with very simple customer support needs, such as those that only receive a small number of customer inquiries, may find Freshdesk to be too complex or over-featured for their needs. In these cases, a more basic customer support tool may be a better fit.
And organizations with very specific customer support requirements, such as those in highly regulated industries, may also find Freshdesk to be too generic for their needs. In these cases, a more specialized customer support platform may be a better fit.
Like most products within the Freshworks Inc. family, Freshservice is a robust, comprehensive, and easy-to-use product with a very intuitive interface.
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Freshservice is a cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) solution with a modern and user-friendly interface. Made specifically with enterprises in mind, Freshservice is ideal for companies looking for an ITIL-compliant solution with features for change management, incident management, release management, and much more.
NHS, M&C Saatchi, TeamViewer, Honda, Judson University
- Starter: This plan costs $19 per agent per month and is billed annually.
- Growth: This plan costs $49 per agent per month and is billed annually.
- Pro: This plan costs $95 per agent per month and is billed annually.
- Enterprise: This plan costs $119 per agent per month and is billed annually.
Best For
Freshservice can be used by companies of all sizes due to their tiered pricing but it is mainly geared towards enterprises. Small and medium-sized companies with less complex needs are recommended to use Freshdesk, Freshworks’ help desk solution.
ServiceDesk Plus is a very comprehensive ITSM solution that’s trusted by some of the thousands of businesses, including 9/10 of Fortune 100 companies.
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ServiceDesk Plus is a full-stack service management platform with both cloud and on-premise deployment options. With features for incident management, problem management, change management, and much more, ServiceDesk Plus provides midsize and large companies with great visibility and control over their IT issues to ensure that they suffer no downtime.
Disney, Honda, ABC, Etihad Airways, RBS, Dell, Siemens
ServiceDesk Plus has 3 plans: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. The pricing of those plans isn’t disclosed upfront. Contact ServiceDesk Plus’ sales team to get a custom quote.
Best For
ServiceDesk Plus is best for midsize and large companies.
JitBit is a provider of both self-hosted and cloud-based help desk ticketing solutions that are feature-rich, easy to use and very friendly to third-party integrations.
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CONS
JitBit is a customer service software with a clean user-interface that’s very easy to navigate; it has an inbox for all incoming tickets, a knowledge base for customers and agents to self-serve, and a reporting section with detailed dashboards, providing insights into all of your activities. Amongst JitBit’s features are automation rules and categories that allow you to stay organized and optimize a good number of tedious processes.
Microsoft, VMware, Adobe, Xerox, General Electric, HP, ESPN, Dell, Vodafone.
When billed annually, JitBit’s cloud-based software plans cost as follows:
- Freelancer: costs $24.92 and is capped at 1 agent only.
- Startup: costs $58.25 for up to 4 agents.
- Company: costs $108.25 for up to 7 agents.
- Enterprise: costs $208.25 for up to 9 agents, with $29 per extra agent.
JitBit’s self-hosted version is a single-time purchase starting at $1699 for small companies, $3499 for medium-sized businesses (up to 20 agents), and $4999 for enterprises with an unlimited number of agent accounts. This on-premise solution can be trialed with a 30-day moneyback guarantee.
Best For
Medium to large sized companies looking for a self-hosted customer service solution.
LiveAgent is a simple customer support solution. Their native live chat is easily accessible via a widget that integrates smoothly with your websites and apps, allowing you to connect with customers instantaneously.
PROS
- LiveAgent’s modern user interface looks aesthetically pleasing while being easy to navigate.
- LiveAgent is super easy to implement and use. Even if your team isn’t tech-savvy, the time to productivity is quick.
- LiveAgent empowers small support teams to easily handle large volumes of queries. Critical features like a universal inbox, a live chat widget, and a knowledge base enable you to address all tickets with greater efficiency.
- For LiveAgent, every user is a valuable client. Expect 24/7 customer support via phone, live chat, or email. The support agents are also in-house and not outsourced, which further ensures you’re given accurate answers to all your queries.
- LiveAgent takes feedback seriously and is constantly trying to improve the software, so you’re assured of a reliable tool.
CONS
- LiveAgent needs to work on its mobile app interface. While convenient to work with, it isn’t as at par with the competitors.
- LiveAgent offers limited integrations, which may be a hindrance for companies wanting to significantly boost support effectiveness and visibility.
- LiveAgent’s Free plan doesn’t allow for integrations with social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Viber — you’ll have to upgrade to the paid plans to get access. Therefore, you can’t offer customers omnichannel support and have to stay limited to email, live chat, and call center support.
LiveAgent is a customer service solution with a clean and user-friendly interface. It features a unified inbox where all customer support tickets are collected from different channels then assigned and prioritized according to your predefined workflows. Its native live chat is easily accessible via a widget that integrates smoothly with your websites and apps, allowing you to connect with customers instantaneously. LiveAgent also offers a knowledge base that empowers customers to self-serve, a built-in call center with IVR and unlimited call recording storage, and over 40 third-party integrations with popular solutions.
Huawei, BMW, Yamaha, O2, Slido, Forbes, AirBus.
LiveAgent offers a free plan with some limitations on the features that can be accessed and three paid plans with feature increases, competitively priced as follows:
- Ticket: $15 per agent per month for LiveAgent’s ticketing solution.
- Ticket+Chat: $29 per agent per month for access to LiveAgent’s ticketing solution and live chat.
- All-inclusive: $39 per agent per month for all of LiveAgent’s features without any limits.
Best For
Companies of all sizes looking for an affordable and easy to use customer support solution.
Zoho is a provider of all sorts of business solutions that are affordable yet on par with the market’s leading offerings. Zoho Desk exemplifies this, being a feature-rich customer service software that’s robust, intuitive, and budget friendly.
PROS
- With Zoho Desk, you get one of the most extensive feature lists of any help desk and ticketing system in the market.
- Zoho Desk is very flexible when it comes to pricing, as you can switch plans as you go if your team member count or necessities grow.
- It’s available in 22 languages.
- Lets you provide support across multiple channels.
- With Zoho Desk, you get one of the most extensive feature lists of any help desk and ticketing system in the market.
- Zoho Desk is very flexible when it comes to pricing, as you can switch plans as you go if your team member count or necessities grow.
- It’s available in 22 languages.
- Lets you provide support across multiple channels.
CONS
- Some of the product customizations can be hard to figure out, according to some users.
- The UX/UI can seem dated at times.
- Several users have reported that integrating the tool with several apps can be problematic.
- Some of the product customizations can be hard to figure out, according to some users.
- The UX/UI can seem dated at times.
- Several users have reported that integrating the tool with several apps can be problematic.
Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk software that allows you to provide context-driven support. It provides comprehensive features and workflows for ticket management, assignment, categorization, prioritization, escalation, and more. It also features a knowledge base for ticket deflection through self-service, as well as easy-to-use dashboards to track quality metrics such as customer satisfaction and overall team performance.
Zoho Desk has thousands of customers and many enterprise-level clients. The most notable include McAfee, Daimler, LycaMobile, and Rogers.
Zoho Desk offers four pricing plans:
- The Free version is available for three agents, with features that include email ticketing, customer management, help center, private knowledge base, predefined SLAs, macros, multi-language help desk, mobile apps, and 24x5 email support.
- The Standard bundle ($14/user/month) includes everything on the Free bundle, plus social and community channels, product-based ticket management, help center themes gallery, public knowledge base, SLAs & escalations, customer happiness ratings, 24x5 phone support, and more.
- The Professional bundle ($23/user/month) includes everything on the Standard bundle, plus multi-department ticketing, team management, telephony, automatic time tracking, round-robin ticket assignment, ticket templates, ticket sharing, and more. This is Zoho Desk’s most popular plan.
- The Enterprise bundle ($40/user/month) includes everything on the Professional bundle, plus live chat, an AI-powered assistant, help center customization, multi-brand help center, advanced process management, global reports & dashboards, and more.
It is worth noting that Zoho Enterprise is on par with most top-tier plans by other providers in terms of features and goes for a significantly low price. Also, you can try any plan for free for 15 days.
Best For
Zoho Desk is a good fit for companies of all sizes looking for a comprehensive yet affordable customer support solution. Customer service-centric teams can take advantage of the integrated ticketing system, together with companies looking for a more cost-friendly knowledge management solution. If your organization uses other Zoho products, this should be an easy addition.
Vision Helpdesk’s support solutions are offered over several pricing tiers and different deployment option, covering the diverse needs of companies large and small.
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CONS
Vision Helpdesk is an affordable ticketing solution that companies of all sizes can derive value from. It collects customer queries and incident reports from multiple sources and pools them - in the form of tickets - into a shared inbox that your support agents can respond to and solve. Among Vision Helpdesk’s features are task management, gamification, workflow automation, SLA and escalation rules, knowledge base creation, community forums, and surveys. It also features a collaboration tool called Blabby, for agents to communicate, share knowledge, files, presentations, and collaborate on ticket issues.
Vision Helpdesk has been used by over 20,000 companies, including Thomas Cook, Invest India, Baroda Mutual Fund, Quick Heal, AxisRooms, and more.
Vision Helpdesk has four products: Help Desk Software (a multi-channel help desk), Satellite Help Desk (a multi-brand help desk), Service Desk (an IT service management solution), and Live Chat Software (an online chat solution). The pricing of those products depends on how you choose to deploy them. For the cloud-based version, the 4 products are priced as follows:
1- Help Desk Software:
- Starter: $12 per agent per month billed annually / $15 per agent billed month to month
- Pro: $ 20 per agent per month billed annually / $25 per agent billed month to month
2- Satellite Help Desk Software:
- $24 per agent per month billed annually / $30 per agent billed month to month
3- Service Desk Software:
- Pro: $32 per agent per month billed annually / $40 per agent billed month to month
- Ent: $48 per agent per month billed annually / $60 per agent billed month to month
4- Live Chat Software:
Visit Vision Helpdesk’s pricing page to learn how much the above products cost if you opt for the self-hosted (on-premise) version, available on a per-agent per month bases or single license per agent (one-time purchase).
Best For
Vision Helpdesk can be used by companies of all sizes.
Created by Atlassian, Jira Service Management is a fantastic customer service solution with thousands of integrations, ensuring it can fit well in any tech stack.
PROS
- Easy issue tracking and great collaboration are the core features of Jira Service Management to provide customers faster, more efficient customer service.
- Jira Service Management allows customers to rate the quality of a knowledge base article, helping you identify improvement areas and update accordingly.
- Jira Service Management has a customizable user interface. You can also change the feel and look of the help desk center and portal to reflect your company’s branding.
- Incident and problem management is prompt and easy, thanks to Jira Service Management‘s alerts and email notifications.
- Jira Service Management’s mobile app support ensures you’re notified instantly about breached SLAs and all assigned, reported, watched, and mentioned requests.
- In addition to Jira Service Management's internal features, you can use its diverse range of integrations to further maximize functionality.
CONS
- Jira Service Management’s Free plan doesn’t offer customizable charts and dashboards.
- Jira Service Management has a rigid email notification system, so you cannot customize it, and your notification system may get easily cluttered. Modifying notifications per user or sending by batch isn’t an option either.
Created by Atlassian, Jira Service Management is a collaborative IT service management (ITSM) solution that enables your support team to create multiple projects to track and handle customer support requests and incidents.
Dominos, Square, Puppet, Twitter, Airbnb, Square, Sotheby’s, The Telegraph.
Jira Service Management offers a three-tiered pricing structure with its Free, Standard, and Premium plans. The Free plan offers access to a good number of the platform’s features and is capped at three agent accounts. The Standard and Premium plans start at $10 and $40 per agent per month and can be trialed for up to 7 days for free. Visiting Jira Service Management’s pricing page for more information.
Best For
Companies of all sizes looking for a robust customer service and project management system.
Geared mostly towards medium and large companies, HappyFox is a customer support solution that's highly customizable, easy to use and quick to set.
PROS
CONS
HappyFox is a web-based help desk that’s most notable for its easy and quick set-up. It integrates with several points of contact to collect tickets and organize them neatly on its Ticket List page. Tickets can be automatically assigned to available agents or specific groups and escalated to experts as needed.
HappyFox offers users customizability options to create workflows, views, canned actions, tasks, reports, and more. It also offers a self-service portal that’s connected to your knowledge base and an AI-powered Chatbot that helps customers with common questions, taking a considerable weight off your support agents’ workload.
Lowe’s, Whirlpool, LeapFrog, Harbour Air Seaplanes, Planned Parenthood.
HappyFox offers four pricing plans, Mighty, Fantastic, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus. Mighty and Fantastic target small and medium-sized businesses and start at $29 and $49 per agent per month, while Enterprise and Enterprise plus are more geared toward larger operations.
Best For
Medium to large sized companies looking for an easy to use customer service solution.
With standout features such as customer journeys and collaboration, Kayako is a great choice for companies of all sizes to gain better context about customers.
PROS
CONS
Kayako is a user-friendly customer support solution with cloud-based and on-premise deployment options. It packs many of the common features of ticketing systems such as omnichannel support for incident logging, live chat, a help center for self-service, an analytics dashboard, integrations with social media channels, and popular third-party tools, customizable business logic rules for workflow creation, process automations and more.
Kayako also offers some standout features such as customer journeys, a detailed record of everything the customer has been up to before logging a support ticket, which allows you to provide context-driven customer service. Another notable feature is the ability to add collaborators, i.e. other employees besides your customer support agents and managers that can access customer data.
GeneralElectric, Warner Bros, Toshiba, FedEx, Sega, Peugeut, MTV.
Kayako offers three plans: Inbox, Growth, and Scale. The Inbox plan starts at $15 per agent per month, while the Growth and Scale plans cost $30 and $60 respectively per agent per month.
Kayako also offers free 14-day trials for all of its plans as well as demos upon request. Check out Kayako’s pricing page for more information on their available plans and features.
Best For
Companies of all sizes looking for an easy to use customer support solution.
SolarWinds Service Desk has one of the widest feature sets in IT service management, complete with a 30 day free trial to ensure you like it before you buy.
PROS
CONS
SolarWinds Service Desk is an IT service management (ITSM) solution that goes beyond just ticketing and incident management. Besides allowing you to assign, prioritize and escalate tickets collected from different sources, it offers features for self-service, live chat, scheduled reporting, asset management, change management, network discovery, API access, and more.
Adler Planetarium, The Bloc, DPR Construction, Betfred.
SolarWinds Service Desk offers a tiered pricing model of four plans that can be tested for free for up to 30 days. When billed annually, SolarWinds Service Desk’s plans cost as follows:
- Team: $19 per agent per month with an additional $0.10 per device per month
- Business: $39 per agent per month with an additional $0.30 per device per month
- Professional: $69 per agent per month with an additional $0.50 per device per month
- Enterprise: $89 per agent per month with an additional $0.70 per device per month
Best For
Medium to large companies looking for an ITSM solution with asset management capabilities.
Spiceworks is perhaps the only vendor in this space to offer both cloud-based and on-premise versions of their help desk ticketing system, completely free of charge.
PROS
- With Spiceworks, you can offer your customers omnichannel query collection to submit queries and share concerns across channels. You don't have to worry about how much it costs, thanks to the free service.
- Spiceworks offers both cloud-based and on-premise versions of its free helpdesk ticketing system, which is quite rare in the customer support niche.
- Spiceworks’ help desk isn’t only limited to your desk — it’s also available as an app for Android and iOS users. Thanks to this, you can manage support tickets on the go.
- Spiceworks provides an unlimited number of service tickets for each user. You can create as many decades as a situation needs, eliminating the need to delete tickets and allowing you to retain chat history. This also gives your team a reference point that they can go back to whenever similar issues or topics resurface.
- Spiceworks‘ large community is backed by dedicated IT professionals, specialized tech vendors, and other kinds of individuals willing to share their expertise when it comes to IT-related issues and help each other out. This ensures every member receives accurate and prompt responses to all their queries.
CONS
- Due to Spiceworks’ limited feature set, it isn’t very flexible. It lacks some of the more desirable features, such as knowledge base management, interaction tracking, and prioritization.
- Spiceworks doesn’t offer advanced reporting options, which restrict your view into agent productivity and the kind of support your customers are receiving. Additionally, you have to streamline reports to remove redundancy.
- To enjoy Spiceworks’ free help desk, be ready to view forceful ads and receive promotional emails — lots of them.
- Spiceworks' direct customer support is limited to email. So you don't get chat, phone, and social media assistance options.
Spiceworks is a free of charge ticketing system with cloud-based and on-premise deployment options and mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. Spiceworks packs all the features you’d expect from a help desk ticketing system, like omnichannel support, automatic ticket assignment and management, a self-service portal, and more - all without any limitations on the number of agent accounts, customers tickets, data storage, etc.
As far as pricing goes, Spiceworks stands out from competitors by offering all of its products for free. The company makes its profit from ads that appear in the backend and are sponsored by numerous IT vendors.
Best For
Small and medium sized companies looking for a FREE customer support solution with cloud-based and on-premise versions.
Benefits of Using a Help Desk Ticketing System
Investing in a good ticketing system allows you to:
- Improve your team’s productivity: Help desk ticketing systems offer a host of features to save you time and enhance your team’s performance. They integrate with all of your customer contact channels to collect tickets then route them to a centralized location for your agents to pick up and resolve right away without needing to constantly monitor several channels and devices. Help desk solutions also allow you to customize workflows and automate many of your team’s manual tasks such as assigning, escalating, prioritizing, and categorizing tickets.
- Increase customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI: It’s a well-known fact in business that great customer service retains customers, and bad customer service drives them away. You might have a fantastic range of products, but it won’t mean much to your bottom line when your customers are unhappy because you’ve been taking too long to respond to their queries and incident reports or worse, missing their messages completely due to your overwhelming ticket influx from several contact points.
Using a help desk allows you to stay on top of all your customer interactions and deliver speedy support, which not only enhances customer experience and retention rate, but also turns your customers into your promoters, spreading the word about your reliability as a provider and eventually earning you more leads and successful signups. - Continuously fine-tune your support operations through accurate data: Manually monitoring your customer support KPIs is an impossible job and luckily, you don't have to do it. The majority of ticketing systems available today offer powerful analytics dashboards that provide you with detailed insights into what your team is doing well and what needs to be improved for you to continue observing your service level agreements (SLAs), drive customer satisfaction and deliver world-class service.
Common Mistakes Made When Buying a Help Desk Ticketing System
It’s very easy to make mistakes when choosing a help desk solution if you don’t thoroughly research what's available on the market and carefully consider the needs and budget of your business. Here are some of the most common mistakes businesses make:
- Spending money on features you don’t need: ‘Premium’ doesn’t always mean ‘better’. Many small and medium-sized businesses select a premium, enterprise-grade plan because of all the feature additions they usually come with, but in reality, only half of the features end up being used. We advise that you always invest selectively and wisely.
- Not accounting for future circumstances: Your business may see exponential growth within just a matter of months. It may also experience financial hardships, requiring you to downsize your operation. No matter what the future holds for your business, you’ll definitely need your help desk plan to grow or shrink accordingly. Buying a help-desk solution that isn’t very scalable can be a costly mistake in the long run.
- Buying an all-in-one suite when all you need is just one or two specific solutions: This one is quite self-explanatory; if you only need a ticketing solution, opt for a provider that offers just that or selectively purchase a ticketing solution from an all-in-one suite vendor; never buy the whole suite.
- Making long-term commitments before thoroughly testing a solution: Some help desk vendors offer perpetual licenses that are purchased once only. While this cuts down on recurring costs and can save you a significant amount of money over time, you should only do this after thoroughly testing the help desk solution and verifying that it’s the one for you. Otherwise, you will end up going back and forth with the vendor on their cancellation and refund policy.
Pricing Models
Just as the cost varies from help desk vendor to another, pricing models can vary too. Here are some of the most common help desk pricing models you can expect:
- Per agent: The most common pricing model for help desk ticketing systems is a ‘per agent account per month’ fee, billed either on a monthly basis, or annually for a decent price reduction. Some help desks charge fixed fees in scales, e.g. ‘$$ for up to 5 agents’, “$$$ for 15-20 agents’ and so on. The per agent pricing model is the most cost-effective option for small businesses that are new to using a help desk system.
- Per device: This pricing model is most ideal for businesses that don’t require all employees to have access to their help desk software. Before opting for a help desk with a per-device pricing model, make sure you have an accurate estimate of the number of devices your customer support team uses.
- Per ticket: Though very few, some help desk vendors use a ‘per ticket per month’ pricing model. Before selecting a provider that charges per ticket, ensure you have an accurate estimate of your ticket volume and that you select a scalable help desk vendor that can provide you with more ticket coverage should you need it in the future.
- Per license: Some on-premise help desks offer perpetual licenses that are purchased once only, without limits on agent accounts or customer tickets. While this cuts down on recurring costs, it’s long term commitment that needs to be thought through before making a decision. It’s also important to note that while you only have to pay once for the license, you may have to pay additional fees down the line for product maintenance and upgrades.
Features of a Help Desk Ticketing System
Help desk ticketing solutions on the market today come with different selling features and price points. Though the exact number of features may vary from one solution to another, here are the main ones you can expect:
- Multi-Channel Support: Customers should be able to easily reach you through different channels including email, live chat, phone, social media, and more. A good ticketing system integrates seamlessly with all of your contact points to collect tickets and pool them into a single shared inbox. This way, your agents are able to instantly receive and work on tickets on one platform, without needing to frequently monitor several channels and devices.
- Customizable Workflows and Process Automation Options: The majority of ticketing systems offer features for you to create an efficient workflow and automate processes, eliminating a considerable chunk of your tedious tasks. Often with the help of triggers, you’re able to automatically set a ticket’s status and priority, assign and escalate tickets to specific groups within your organization, send automated responses and follow-ups, and notify customers and agents of certain updates. Some ticketing systems also allow you to create tags for tickets, which comes in handy with search optimization and enables you to instantly retrieve specific data for report creation.
- Knowledge Base: A knowledge base functions as an extensive library of information on your products and/or services that customers can access 24/7. It integrates with your website and ticketing system for customers to find answers to their questions as well as information on particular features and processes.
Studies conducted on the efficacy of help centers have shown that over half of all customers prefer self-service options for convenience and speedy resolution. This is also great because the more customers self-serve, the more you’re able to deflect tickets, which frees your agents to focus on other tasks that are more urgent or of higher importance. Additionally, a knowledge base is also a valuable resource for your in-house staff too to access product documentation, FAQs, internal guides, and playbooks at any time. - 3rd Party Integrations: Not only should a good ticketing system integrate with several contact channels, i.e. email, social media, phone support tools, live chat, etc, but it should also offer integration options with popular customer relationship management (CRM), asset management and team collaboration tools such as Salesforce, Slack and more to further enhance your operations. You can usually find out if a help desk integrates with your favorite products by checking their pre-built integration modules, usually listed on their websites.
- Scalability: Scalability entails whether or not a software product can grow with you as your business does. Your company’s size may double within a short period of time and it's crucial for all of your daily-used tools to still accommodate you. Besides being mindful of a help desk’s cost for bigger teams, it’s important to consider its ability to store large data records, the maximum number of user accounts that can be created on it as well as the maximum number of teams and customers it can handle.
- Reporting: Reporting is a crucial function of a help desk software. Through accurate, real-time data, a good help desk software allows you to monitor how your team is performing against your predefined service level agreements (SLAs) as well as the average time it takes them to respond to customers and resolve their tickets.
Furthermore, a good help desk solution should offer some methodologies for you to collect feedback from customers and measure their satisfaction. The good news is, several solutions offer net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys that can be automatically sent to customers upon ticket closure.
Demo Questions
Before deciding on a help desk for your business, it’s recommended that you schedule demos with different vendors to make sure their solution has all the needs of your business covered. Here are a few questions you can ask during your demo sessions:
- What communication channels does your solution integrate with?
- What customer support processes can I automate through your software?
- How does your software facilitate self-service?
- How does your solution measure customer satisfaction?
- How can I track my team’s performance through your software?
- Can I charge my customers for support given per ticket through your software?
- How much does the software cost for my team size?
Implementing a Help Desk Ticketing System
The majority of help desk ticketing systems are cloud-based, delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructure. Getting started with a cloud-based solution is very quick and easy as they all allow you to create an account and start configuring your instance right away once you’ve purchased a plan. On the other hand, on-premise help desks take longer to set up, and depending on your chosen vendor, you may need to consult them regarding their solutions’ compatibility with your current hardware and installation process or better yet, have them do the installation on your behalf.
Help Desk Ticketing Systems FAQ
What is a help desk ticketing system?
A help desk ticketing system is a software solution that gathers customer questions, requests, and incident reports from different channels and pools them into a single inbox for customer support agents to respond to in a swift and efficient manner.
Who needs a help desk ticketing system?
Any company that wants to streamline their customer service operations and offer speedy support to their customers needs a help desk ticketing system.
What are the benefits of using a helpdesk ticketing system?
Using a helpdesk ticketing systems allows you to:
- boost your team’s productivity by automating manual tasks such as ticket routing and assignment,
- resolve tickets faster which in turn, increases customer satisfaction and retention, and
- continuously fine-tune your support operations through accurate performance metrics data.
What are the features of a help desk ticketing system?
The most common features of a helpdesk ticketing system are:
- Multi-channel support (email, live chat, phone, social media integration)
- Automatic ticket routing and assignment
- Canned responses
- Knowledge base
- Performance analytics
- SLA management
- CSAT surveys
What is the best help desk ticketing system for small businesses?
Zoho Desk and Freshdesk are two robust ticketing systems with free tiers as well as affordable plans that startups can use without breaking the bank. Both Freshdesk and Zoho desk are also quite scalable, meaning that you can upgrade to more extensive plans as your business grows.
How much does a help desk ticketing system cost?
The majority of help desk ticketing systems use a ‘per agent per month’ pricing model. Depending on which help desk you use and the features you require, the ‘per agent per month’ fee can range anywhere from $5 to $199.
Final Advice
Choosing a help desk ticketing system can be a long process, but we’re confident you’ll make a good selection if you:
- Carefully consider your needs and budget and make purchases accordingly.
- Sign up for a trial period to experience the help desk first-hand and see if it’s the right fit for you.
- Schedule demos with different help desk vendors to get all of your questions answered
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