11 Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems for 2023 - Help Scout (2023)

Choosing a help desk ticketing system can be difficult.

With so many options and features to consider, it's easy to get overwhelmed and overwhelmed. A step-by-step approach to choosing the ideal system helps everyone stay on track and ultimately benefit from the tools they need to get the job done.

Below, we'll walk you through the best questions to ask and provide some additional tips to help you find the best support ticket system for your company.

11 Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems

If you've decided it's time for your team to switch to help desk, here are 11 of the best help desk ticketing systems to add to your short list.

1. Help the scout

Best for growing customer support teams.

Help the scoutis the ultimate customer support tool. Fromshared inboxesicustomer management toolsdoworkflow,reporting, ilive chat, Help Scout has it all.

What's more, it's incredibly easy to sign up and start providing customer support right away, so teams of all sizes can benefit.

Features:

• Use a shared inbox to collaborate with your team members and ensure everyone is aware of important conversations and customer issues.

• Manage customer conversations in one seamless inbox, whether they contact you via email or in real time via live chat.

• Set up workflow and automated responses to reduce response time and start helping customers faster.

• Build oneknowledge basewith short guides and instructions that show how users can use your product.

• Access reports and analytics to track your support team's performance.

Companies:Starting at $20 per user per month.

2. Prof

Best for teams that need a central location for customer requests and IT support.

profhas a number of software, one of which is an IT help desk tool that teams can use to easily submit issues and requests to the IT department and track when they are completed. This is a great opportunity for technology companies with really hands-on IT departments.

Features:

• Use ticket round robin to evenly distribute support tickets to agents.

• Create pre-written responses that allow faster response times.

• Find important customer support metrics in your help desk reports.

Companies:From $10/user per month.

3. Zoho Desktop

Best for teams using other Zoho products.

Zoho desktopis part of the Zoho suite of business tools (think Zoho CRM, books, etc.). It is a ticket management software that enables your customer support team to communicate with customers through various channels.

Features:

• Receive and reply to messages from multiple channels in one inbox.

• Connect with a wealth of integrations with the tools your business already uses to create a seamless user experience.

• Create a self-service portal with guides and FAQs that users can search for themselves.

Companies:Free for up to 3 agents.

4. Zendesk

Best for enterprise customer service teams.

Zendeskenables customer service teams to manage conversations across platforms. Support agents can flag issues, choose a channel to respond to, set priorities, track interactions, and more.

Features:

• Use cross-channel communication to reach your customers where they are, whether it's email, Facebook, Twitter, live chat, etc.

• Use AI-powered chatbots to make it easier to customize automated responses until an agent is available to help.

• Create a help center or knowledge base for customers who prefer a more do-it-yourself approach.

Companies:From $19/agent per month.

5. HubSpot Service Center

Best for teams looking for a central, multi-functional toolset.

HubSpotis another feature-packed tool for sales, marketing, and customer service teams. Companies can choose the tools they need, which means HubSpot can be a great all-in-one tool for all departments.

Features:

• Use the video messaging feature to create personalized help videos for your customers.

• Connect email inboxes, live chat, Facebook Messenger and more into one shared inbox for seamless communication.

• Create and send customer satisfaction surveys to measure the performance of your support team.

• Use popular help desk features like ticket management, knowledge base setup, live chat, and automation.

Companies:Free plan available.

6. Freshdesk

Best for call center focused teams.

Freshdeskis helpdesk software that enables teams to truly unleash the power of artificial intelligence to automate and simplify customer support. With the ability to recommend related knowledge base articles to agents and close closed tickets, its AI (named "Freddy") can be an asset to your team.

Features:

• Use collaborative ticketing to allow agents to work together to complete a service request.

• Automatically assign tickets to the best agent for the job using their AI feature.

• Customize dashboards to display team performance metrics and analytics.

Companies:Free plan available.

7. Cover

Best for email-only support teams.

Foris a hub that combines your customer service and communication in one online space. This application is a great way to improve team collaboration in solving user problems.

For example, even if an agent has started working on a ticket, other agents can still see the ticket's progress and step in to help if they can.

Features:

• Share email drafts with teammates to gather feedback before sending them to clients – perfect for training.

• Use workflows that allow your team to respond to customer messages faster.

• Explore analytics that provide deeper insight into the volume of requests your team receives, your overall user experience, and more.

• Prioritize VIPs so top clients are escalated immediately.

Companies:From $19/user per month.

8. Jira Service Desk

Best for engineering teams.

Iis Atlassian's all-in-one tool for IT and development teams: asset management, change management, incident management, project management, and more. Jira Service Management is an aspect of the tool that focuses more on requirements management.

Features:

• Create custom plugins using the Jira API.

• Access a library of different automation rules to get the most out of your tool.

• Connect with your project management tool to reduce the learning curve for your IT team's software.

Companies:Besplatno za do tri agenta.

9. Fresh service

Best for enterprise IT support teams.

Fresh serviceis owned by parent company Freshdesk, but this tool is more for IT services than customer service. IT service desk, IT project management and even IT training management comes with this tool.

Features:

• Set policies based on hours of operation, ticket categorization, and more using service level agreements (SLAs).

• Submit ticket tasks directly to the integrated project management dashboard.

• Use reporting tools to measure the overall performance of your help desk.

Companies:From $19/agent per month.

10. Vision Helpdesk

Best for ITIL/ITSM.

Vision Helpdeskoffers a range of customer support products perfect for customer service and IT teams. From its satellite help desk to its ITIL/ITSM (IT Infrastructure Library and IT Service Management) compliant desk, this tool is ideal for teams that need an emphasis on the security of their user data.

Features:

• Use a mobile app to communicate with customers on the go.

• Leverage live chat software for sales and customer support teams.

• Manage customer conversations via live chat, social media, email, phone and more.

Companies:From $12/agent per month.

11. JitBit

Best for teams that want self-hosted software.

JitBitis help desk software built for IT, SaaS, email and more. With the option to host with JitBit or download to your own servers, this is a great option for businesses that require security and privacy, especially when dealing with customer service.

Features:

• Host JitBit on your own servers, ensuring your customer support is as secure as possible.

• Access an email marketing system for businesses that rely on email above all else.

• Save answers and respond quickly to clients without having to type the same thing over and over again.

Companies:JitBit hosted plans start at $29 per month. Self-hosted downloads start at a fixed price of $1699.

What is the help desk ticket system?

A help desk ticketing system is software that tracks customer issues so your support team can resolve them in a timely manner. It gives the team the everyday tools they need to do their job well, from answering tickets to collaborating with other team members.

Ideally, your help desk should be the hub of your support team—the command center, if you will. It gives your team the tools they need to do their job well, from answering tickets to collaborating with other team members, so you have nothing but satisfied customers.

Typically in ticket systems, a user contacts the help desk with a problem, the system automatically creates a ticket. Each ticket is given a unique ID so that it can be easily tracked throughout its lifecycle. The ticketing system stores all relevant information about the problem, including the customer's contact details, the nature of the problem, any attempted solutions and the status of the ticket (eg open, pending, closed).

A key feature of help desk ticketing systems is their ability to categorize and prioritize. They can classify tickets based on criteria such as problem type, client importance, or problem severity. This allows support teams to be the first to respond to the most critical issues, improving response times and ultimately keeping your customers happy.

The benefits of investing in a help desk

A help desk system helps you turn potential challenges or complaints into positive customer experiences.

If your team members have the training and support they need to provide empathetic, efficient and effective customer support, they can leverage the help desk to change retention rates and collectively take ownership of a certain aspect of the revenue stream.

Without a help desk, a small team can still provide great support, but it's difficult to adapt to users, and it's even more challenging to measure the success of the team's efforts.

The help desk is not just a tool for support professionals; it's also how managers and business leaders can evaluate and optimize the customer experience.

Think about the type of information support professionals receive every day. Not only can a help desk centralize irreplaceable metrics about individual and team performance, it's also a treasure trove of data that can drive every aspect of a business, from product to sales.

Imagine making a change to one of your most loved products. If your help desk experiences a flood of negative customer feedback, it's business intelligence that would otherwise be difficult to analyze and present in a digestible form.

In this scenario, support managers can share clear, up-to-date data that managers can use to adjust or strengthen their future decisions. In other words, the help desk becomes a catalyst for collaboration between departments and ensures the company's adaptation to customer needs.

Signs You're Ready to Invest in a Help Desk Ticketing System

If your day-to-day support team efforts aren't translating into a positive customer and employee experience, it's time to consider moving to a help desk.

Everyone in this industry works hard. But when there's a real gap between a company's ambitions and the support team's ability to serve people well, it can cause high employee turnover and low customer satisfaction.

Most small support teams start with a simple, low-cost solution like oneemail distribution list. It seems to work well until your business starts to grow. It only takes one help request to fail to lose the trust of an important customer.

This is where the help desk comes into play. If you can empower your team with a support set that gives them transparency, insight, accountability and space to collaborate, they actually have a chance to make people's lives better.

Here are some indicators that your team is ready for a new way of working:

• Support tickets keep coming in.

• Team members post duplicate answers to the same card.

• You don't know who worked on a complicated support issue.

• You don't have support-driven insight into how satisfied your customers are.

• Morale is low; your best support professionals are frustrated with the current system.

• Team feedback is completely subjective and not tied to metrics.

• Real-time collaboration with ticket transparency is impossible.

• Your boss wants you to improve or bring consistency to the customer experience.

The selection process shouldn't just be about reviewing the technology your support team is using and what they need going forward. A greater assessment of what works and what does not work with the overall support strategy should be included.

Great tools are only useful if they are implemented with a customer-centric approach that values ​​the work of support teams. A help desk solution can help you track all customer interactions in real time, but the tool isn't enough if you don't have a robust customer service guide and an empathetic approach to it.

Use this process as a time to engage your team members and explore their experiences at work. They know better than anyone what makes customers happy and how to create an outstanding customer experience.

Ask these support staff to be as detailed as possible about what isn't working so you can pick a system and build processes that turn these tangible pain points into solutions for your end users. The best part? A good help desk will provide you with data to track these measurable improvements so you can change and adjust them on the fly.

What to look for in a help desk ticket system

As you evaluate these options, consider how your customers prefer to interact with your company. Do they prefer to call or email? How quickly do they expect a response from your team? Are they comfortable using self-service tools? If your customers could wave a magic wand and satisfy their needs, what would it look like?

Even if your current system doesn't have an easy way to answer these questions, your board team can review old support requests and talk to the rest of the team about it.

In the same way you explore your customers' priorities, you need to assess your team's needs. Make a short list of capabilities or features that you must have in a help desk or support service.

For example, your company could benefit from a ticket routing feature where support requests of a specific category are automatically forwarded to the right team. Or you might need it to integrate with your CRM software or in channels like Slack to receive real-time notifications.

These questions are a starting point that can help you evaluate each feature your team wants to prioritize:

• What value does this feature add to our customers and our team?

• Should we bundle this feature with other products or services? If so, is it possible?

• Do we have to comply with technical requirements, such as data formatting?

• Are there legal requirements that we must meet as a team (eg data storage)?

We recommend that support teams look for three key characteristics in these different functions and support sets:

• Transparency: A good support ticket system lets you know when a support agent is already working on a ticket, so customers don't receive more messages.

• Responsibility: The ability to assign tickets means nothing gets lost in the shuffle, especially when a team member takes time off or leaves the company.

• Insight: Insight into your team's performance and customer satisfaction can change the way you do things. Look for easy-to-use reporting features that include the busiest days and times for support requests, the most popular topics people contact you about, and options to automate the process.

Include these top three priorities in your feature list. From there you can start filtering through the available help desks and integrations in the market. Look for solutions that align with your priorities before delving into the small details of the product.

For the final choice

Once the team comes up with a short list, have fun: test each help desk ticketing software.

Ask everyone to work with each help desk from a customer and team member perspective. Collaborate on "dummy" tickets and get a feel for how this system will affect your ability to collaborate.

You'll also pay close attention to the reporting options - both the level of detail and the usability of the metrics are important.

Here are some questions to consider:

• How can this help desk expand with a growing team?

• How does the user experience align with your brand? (At Help Scout, for example, customers only receive personal email.)

• How comfortable is your team using it? (Look for details like fast load times and great search functionality.)

• How detailed and easy to use is the report data?

• What is the support experience like? Chances are the best ticketing solution for you also offers teams good support.

• How useful is it for managers?

By following these steps, you'll arrive at a help desk ticketing system that prevents internal challenges and increases your team's ability to meet the needs of your customers every day.