Top 14 Helpdesk Software Options for Small Business

Imagine this: you bought a new mobile phone. You went home and started to unpack the box, and suddenly you realize one of the complimentary earplugs isn’t working. What would you do? 

Contact their customer care number and let them know about the problem. Correct? But what if no one picks your call? Or knows what to do in your case to solve the problem? Would you be happy or purchase from the same online store again? Short answer—no!

The success of any product or service is largely dependent on the customer service provided by the organization. A customer feels at ease and develops a bond of mutual faith with the brand if their queries are addressed properly. 

The key to a successful brand is a happy customer. However, keeping all the queries streamlined and addressing them effectively requires robust support and task management. Often, small businesses commit the mistake of depending solely on their agents for customer care. Or they choose a tool that doesn’t fully meet their requirements. What they need to make their customer service a hassle-free, streamlined process is good help desk software. 

In this article, we will discuss help desk software, its uses, and which one you should pick for your organization.

 

What is Help Desk Software?

In simple words, help desk software helps you keep track of all your customer queries across all communication channels on a single platform. It also helps you in handling customer requests efficiently because, in today’s age, businesses communicate with their customers on various platforms.

You can get a customer response or question on your social media pages, via email, through your website or phone number. That’s why it becomes difficult for your customer care team to be efficient in their process. Help desk software assists their work and even reduces queries with its automated response. 

 

Why Do Small Businesses Need Help Desk Management Software?

Do you know that 52% of organizations admit that technology has helped them deliver better customer service? 

Once you choose the right help desk management software, your small business can: 

• Prioritize tasks based on the urgency of queries if all your queries are listed on a single platform
• Automate responses and prompts which can help you save your time on redundant tasks
• Maintain a simple FAQ section based on the data collected which can help customers instantly
• Help your employees increase their productivity by giving them a virtual assistant
• Track the average time taken to respond to a query

Most small business owners believe that help desk management software will only add to their cost. But the aforementioned advantages contribute greatly to the growth and efficiency of a team in the long-run. 

Moving further, we will discuss the top 14 help desk software most suitable for a small business. 

 

#1 ProProfs Help Desk

Topping our list is ProProfs Help Desk. This is one of the best help desk software for small businesses. ProProfs Help Desk enables efficient help desk management, smooth ticket management, and unified customer care onto one platform. 

This help desk software also enables you to monitor agent performance and ensure your customers give feedback post customer care calls. This way, you can listen to your customers and make the necessary changes to your customer support process. 

Here are the advantages of ProProfs Help Desk in a nutshell:

- It has the facility of a shared inbox which helps improve team collaboration 

- It offers the feature to split complex tickets into child tickets, making it easy to resolve them instantly

- It unifies all support agents with the help of features like internal notes and labels

- It features ticket prioritization, making it easy for agents to start working on tickets that need immediate attention

- It prepares instant reports based on the data collected over a certain period of time. These smart reports help you in the performance appraisal of your agents and the overall performance of your team

 

#2 JIRA Service Desk

Jira Service Desk is a product of Atlassian that has helped many IT projects to be delivered smoothly. It reduces the number of bugs, tracks the speed of delivery, and provides a streamlined ticketing system. It is a lifesaver when it comes to probable technical glitches. Jira Service Desk stands out with:

- ITIL-ready templates so users don’t have to worry about customization

- An effective ticketing system that tracks not only the work done but also the time taken to complete a task. You can upload files, tag your team, and ask for updates 

- An interactive dashboard that keeps every individual in your team updated about their tasks and status 

 

#3 xSellco Help Desk

xSellco is a dream come true for e-commerce businesses. It combines the data from all the sales channels in one platform so that you can find out the root cause of a query. It also helps turn all your data into meaningful insights which become your intelligence in the long-term planning. You might want to choose xSellco because:

- It integrates every platform by connecting to the vendor’s system. From there, the software gets the data regarding feedback

- It brings every form of data to a single dashboard, which means better streamlining

- It’s the only help desk software that unifies the data from a shopping cart, a social media channel, and a business website in one platform 

 

#4 Vision Helpdesk

Vision helpdesk is another fantastic tool that brings together customer conversation from all channels to a unified platform. It can also be integrated with ITIL or ITSM. The tool has other perks too:

- It is highly scalable. You can always expand support for services like asset management and change management

- It offers a single platform for all your queries from various channels like Facebook, Gmail, or your website 

- It makes team management a fun process through Blabby, Vision Helpdesk’s in-app social medium

 

#5 Nectar Desk

Nectar Desk is meant for your call center. It records your inbound and outbound calls and helps you rate your employee performance and set their KPIs. It has the facility of delivering intelligent reports that make planning and decision-making easier. 

Here’s a quick overview of the tool:

- One of its best features is that it is cloud-based. This reduces the cost considerably as you don’t need any software license management tools, major hardware services, or a maintenance team

- It helps you with performance appraisal as you can easily discover poor performers and where they’re lagging

-  It allows call recording which is a great tool for quality analysis 

 

#6 Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based help desk solution that is mainly designed for small businesses but can also be used for large enterprises. This tool offers a number of important features, including multichannel capability, integrated game mechanics, multiple SLA policies, and self-service portals. Freshdesk has other benefits too:

- It enables customers to answer their questions themselves with an internal knowledge base

- It offers efficient ticket management, easy ticket monitoring and assignment 

- It also offers a smooth email to ticket conversion option, simplifying the ticket resolution process

 

#7 TeamSupport

A great tool for small businesses, freelancers, and remote employees, TeamSupport is well suited for B2B markets. It brings together all clients and the tickets related to their issues on one platform and helps with collaboration, customer service, and reporting. TeamSupport is known for other perks, like:

- A hierarchical system that allows you to collate different tickets related to a client under one specification

- A multi-brand feature that helps you connect a particular client to the product they’re using 

- It assists you in long-term planning and improving your services by identifying the most common problems and demands

 

#8 Zendesk

Zendesk is help desk software that offers a number of features to streamline customer service processes. Among such features are ticket management, multi-channel communication, and call center functionalities. With this platform, you can easily streamline your workflows and improve collaboration among agents, because:

- It helps you boost CX levels by promising seamless ticket routing, done as per a round-robin basis

- It offers you insights into agent performance

- It offers great help during customer support operations via 100 out-of-the-box integrations

 

#9 Wix Answer

Wix Answer comes with a built-in call center, a ticketing management system, and a knowledge base that results in self-service customer service. It already has over 150 million users and has been helping brands improve their service with a great set of features:

- It is easy to manage and set up, and can be adopted easily by any team

- It has a customizable layout, and you can select a template most suitable for your brand

- It brings the queries of customers to one platform

 

#10 JitBit Help Desk

This one employs machine learning to automate responses and improve customer care over time. It comes with a REST API which means you can easily integrate with your existing CRM tool or any other third-party app. JitBit Help Desk has a bunch of benefits:

- A simple, user-friendly interface that has all the features you need for a robust system

- It can be accessed from anywhere and helps you provide 24/7 customer service

- It is protected by SSL encryption and secures your information from leaking out 

 

#11 Hiver

If you’re looking for a customer service software that works within Gmail, then Hiver would be an ideal option for you. It has an easy learning curve—owing to the fact that it intuitively fits inside Gmail’s native UI and helps teams collaborate on customer queries efficiently. Here are a few other features of Hiver that you’ll love:

 - It allows you to delegate customer queries to team members in a single click

 - It offers collaboration on customer queries by using Email Notes

 - It helps to get clear insights on your team’s performance and track key customer metrics

 

#12 Support.cc

Support.cc is cloud-based help desk software that converts requests received by email, phone, chat, and social media into tickets. To remain on top of all customer support concerns, you can automate processes, allow self-service, manage analytics, and monitor SLAs. Support.cc has a bunch of benefits:

- Allows to manage and convert emails, phone calls, LiveChat (NinjaChat), and WhatsApp messages into support tickets

- Helps automate the handling of tickets to get immediate responses and answers

- Provides your customers with a customizable knowledge base for self-service

 

#13 LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a multi-channel help desk software with a wide variety of features and a large number of integrations. It includes a ticketing system that handles emails, live chat, calls, customer portal, and social media support. Each communication channel is supported by its own set of useful and reliable features. LiveAgent makes a great solution for most businesses because:

 - It offers a wide and reliable toolset with great features and dozens of integrations

 - It has an easy and fast setup, a low learning curve, and it’s easy to use even for beginners

 - It offers 24/7 customer support for every client

 

#14 InvGate Service Desk

Due to its flexibility and customization features, InvGate Service Desk works for small and big businesses alike. Amongst its strong points, the solution includes an intuitive ticketing system, ITIL-certified capabilities, and robust workflow automation capabilities. In short, InvGate Service Desk is your tool if you’re looking for:

- A central hub with outstanding service to end-users

- Simple configuration with Low-Code/No-Code capabilities

- An intuitive UX for end-users and agents

 

Wrapping Up

And there you have it! The above-mentioned help desk solutions are some of the best tools available on the market. But before you go on to make your decision, ask yourself: what are your company's needs?

• Do your agents have any difficulty in dealing with the customers?
• What are the difficulties? What tools can help alleviate these hurdles?

Keep everything in mind and choose a tool that best fits your requirements.​

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