Easy to Use Help Desk Software: Is Zendesk the Top Choice?

Help desk software is used by companies to address customer questions and problems. Often interchanged with customer service or customer support because of similar functions, help desk software is also sometimes  bundled with a CRM package.

We take a look at one of the most popular solutions in the market and compare it with four other easy to use help desk software players in the niche. Specifically, we examine the key features of each app. We zero in on three core components that comprise these systems. These are:

1. Automation ensures that customer queries are routed to employees most capable of answering them.
2. Ticket management allows the system to pull emails, log them, and organize them by topic or priority so that support teams can respond immediately and accordingly.
3. Reporting and optimization gathers all information from critical areas of the system such as resolution rate and turnaround time, enabling managers to pinpoint bottlenecks and improve processes.

Why is it important to get the best help desk software? Because customer support plays an important role in keeping your customers happy. After all, 78% of consumers have abandoned a transaction because of poor service. (American Express). Likewise, 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. (McKinsey).

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Is Zendesk the top choice?

We’ve reviewed five leading help desk solutions to answer the question: Is Zendesk the top choice? After assessing the key features and not the least pricing terms, we can safely say Zendesk is definitely the top choice on the market. It has all the essentials to keep your customer service support team efficient and responsive to customer queries and concerns. Furthermore, it can scale from small business to enterprise, making this software ideal for fast-growing companies. If mobile support is a must for your customer service operation, then this app surely delivers.

Nevertheless, there are also many other solid choices that will give your great features and capabilities, also at budget-friendly prices. It is vital that you determine exactly and weigh carefully your company’s help desk needs vis-à-vis the offerings and advantages of the product. Zendesk can be your top choice, but so can all others that we have included in this line-up.

We’ve highlighted each of the product’s key features and functionalities, important benefits that you can derive from them, and included links to full reviews of the products in our database if you want to learn more about them. This guide on easy to use help desk software is meant to narrow down your selection and help you find the most suitable solution for your business.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is a solid option for companies looking for robust yet easy to use help desk and customer support software. In fact, more than 40,000 organizations all over the globe – from SMBs to multinational corporations – rely on Zendesk for their customer support needs. It is reliable, flexible and easily deployable, helping you to enhance your team’s productivity, lower company cost, and ensure the all-important customer satisfaction.

There are four primary modules of the software: Support, an integrated customer support solution with ticket management; Chat for live chat and messaging; Call, a call center platform; and Guide, a customizable knowledge center and customer portal. All these can be purchased separately and added one at a time, or you can get them as a bundled package. Chat, Call and Guide have free versions with basic features but you can upgrade anytime to several plans with more advanced functionalities to fit your team, size of business, and scope of support operation.

Some of the advantages and capabilities of Zendesk include:

1. Easy set-up and fast deployment
2. Can handle 5 to 500 agents and thousands of tickets daily
3. Connects all support channels (email, web, chat, social media, etc) into one platform
4. Branding and customization options
5. Robust analytics and reporting
6. Dozens of integrations with popular business apps.

Zendesk is designed for speed and efficiency, allowing businesses to be more reliable, flexible, and scalable. It helps boost customer and company communication and gives you relevant insights from the massive amount of data it collects from all channel sources. Overall, the software enables your business to transform customer interaction and engagement into lasting relationships. So, is Zendesk the top choice? Yes, if scalability, free versions and pricing terms are your major buying factors.

2. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is another easy to use help desk software, a highly-regarded help desk solution intended to meet the requirements of both small businesses and large enterprise. The award-winning, cloud-based platform comes with standard features such as help desk ticketing, knowledge base, and community platform. It allows you to turn your support emails into tickets which you can track for timely and accurate response. Likewise, it can automatically link forum queries to a ticket, or the other way around, for simpler ad faster replies.

Among its major features are:

1. Multichannel capability
2. Smart automations
3. Multiple SLA policies
4. Self-service portals
5. Gamification to increase agent productivity

With Freshdesk you get to efficiently manage customer queries; implement a smart and easy to use ticketing system; boost team productivity with intelligent automations; customize the system to define ticket priorities, response and resolution times; and carry corporate elements to distinguish your brand, among others.

Freshdesk shines in its social media integration that supports Facebook pages with an in-sync FB support center that monitors conservations and streams about your company, enabling your to respond quickly for any customer problems and issues. Moreover, the software works with legacy productivity tools and your CRM when you need to pull out customer information, and integrates with popular help desk and multimedia apps as well as other widgets to further broaden your knowledge base.

3. Samanage

Samanage is a popular IT help desk and service management solution that automatically collects all IT asset configuration to provide your IT support team with comprehensive reporting and alerts. This lets users to submit inquiries and requests online and provides the IT support team with quick access to related asset configuration, translating to faster resolution time and improved productivity. The solution is classified as multi-tenant which means that users have a single, always new instance of the software for fastest time to value and superb user experience.

The software is noted for its numerous capabilities such as:

1. Streamlining tickets, service requests, and fulfillment processes
2. Resolving user issues on their own via knowledge base
3. Monitoring and controlling assets across your business
4. Accurately monitoring all your contracts and software licenses
5. Continuous monitoring of all hardware and software for possible risks
6. Integrating email with self-service portal
7. Creating SLA goals and monitoring their progress
8. Integrating with popular business apps

Samanage empowers companies of all sizes with the ability to deliver superior IT service to their organizational units with a modern help desk that automates everyday tasks. It enables your IT team to deliver value to the organization by streamlining business service requests and delivery processes with agility and efficiency, resulting in reduced support workload and enhanced productivity.

In addition, Samanage’s integrated IT asset management solution allows you to oversee your company’s entire asset lifecycle from the time of provisioning to the day of disposal. With its ability to track asset configuration, operating system and software, physical location, as well as monitoring changes to the device, Samanage gives you a level of visibility like no other.

4. Freshservice

Freshservice is well-known cloud-based IT service desk platform that comes with a ticketing system, knowledge base, and asset discovery functions. It has features for vendor management, incident management, problem management, change management and release management. The software is designed to enable companies of all sizes to extend efficient customer service through plug and play ITIL that complies with best practices, effectively eliminating expensive consultations or outside experts.

Some of the highlights of Freshservice include:

1. Easy to use system, scalable system
2. Service desk accessibility from multiple channels
3. Tasks automation
4. Team collaboration for each query
5. Self-service portal
6. Planning, tracking and rollback of changes
7. Potential impact and risk analysis
8. Rules-based customization

With Freshservice, you can automate end-to-end service request processing to unburden your IT team from administrative tasks while providing company employees who need IT support access to a catalog of services from basic to complex, all with detailed information. Email waiting time is drastically reduced with instant notifications and proper approvals all undertaken inside the service desk.

When an employee submits a request, you can set the system to lead it through the proper workflows and multiple approval channels, then to the service provider for fulfillment and back to the user with notifications. This defined workflow gets rid of inefficiency, speeds up the process, and boosts productivity for both end users of the system. The IT service fulfillment feature of Freshservice allows you to trace incidents or troubleshoot issues across the process for faster resolution.

5. TeamSupport

TeamSupport is an integrated customer support suite intended to enhance communication and collaboration between all departments, enabling to provide accurate and faster response to customer queries. With the solution’s advanced capabilities, you’ll be able to have separate departments and teams work as a single unit to address customer concerns. You can have your support team can work together with sales, finance, or technical groups for far better and more effective customer service.

The following are some of the benefits you can gain from using TeamSupport:

1. Intuitive, easy to learn interfaces
2. Internal chat for real-time conversations
3. Streamlined collaboration between agents and department
4. Evaluation of agent performance in real-time
5. Customer self-service
6. Integration with third-party apps and services
7. Turns data into operable intelligence

TeamSupport brings with it scalable features meant for small businesses and large enterprises. Some of its best features include top-notch reporting, screen recordings, live chat, ticket management, ticket automation, and advanced customer self-service portals. Its automated help desk management features and intuitive interfaces make it ideally suited for startups and small businesses which have no service delivery experience. In addition to offering reasonably priced plans, the platform is completely in cloud, requiring no complex installations or expensive maintenance.

By Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He’s a strong proponent of the GTD model. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company.