Help Desk Software Shopping Guide
Having a Help Desk Software in an organization is today almost an obligation to be able to take advantage of the sales opportunities of digital consumers.
The digital revolution in business forces managers to adapt to new communication channels. Today customers can make purchase decisions through social networks, web pages and e-commerce platforms, without leaving their homes.
To have a customer service team prepared to attend to a large flow of requests, from different channels, it is necessary to have a help desk program or service desk. Today you will know what it is, what its functions and characteristics are and what elements to take into account when buying one.
What is Help Desk software?
The Help Desk Software is a system that allows you to manage customer communications and queries in an efficient and multi-channel manner. With these software, you can provide a comprehensive service experience through personalization and immediate problem resolution.
This type of program improves the performance of the service department, centralizing all customer information in a comprehensive system to facilitate the agents’ daily tasks of resolving questions and queries, tracking interactions, providing technical support, scheduling messages and answering chats. on-line.
With this tool, you will be able to track and control interactions and problem resolutions. Ticket management allows queries to be delegated to specialized agents, to personalize responses to customers and prioritize higher-profile issues.
Increase user satisfaction, commitment and loyalty with a good customer service experience and the resolution of any type of problem in real time.
The objective of this type of software is to facilitate communication so that the customer experience is optimal. It allows you to respond in real time to any query and coordinate the team of agents so that they achieve fluid contact between customers and the different areas.
In addition, they allow you to create metrics to analyze the number of inquiries that come in, the response time, the resolution rate per customer service representative and determine the performance of the team.
How does a help desk program work?
Help desk programs provide a means of contact for help through a «ticket system.» This system makes a record of all the tasks or incidents that enter.
Each incident is an activity that the customer satisfaction team must be able to manage. Management consists of:
- Document all incidents.
- Follow up.
- Assign incidents to the different service levels of the department.
- Prioritize those cases that are urgent.
- Resolve customer concerns or conflicts.
- Being able to recognize the category of incidence, to derive the ticket to the appropriate area, for its resolution.
Once the ticket is created in the service desk, the Help Desk agents can communicate through different means such as email, online chat or telephone.
This communication is extremely agile with help desk software, since it offers live chat tools, automatic responses, chatbots, and many more, to be able to attend to customer service requests.
The speed of solving minor incidents is one of the great advantages. Anything that can be automated, help desk software will automate it. Above all, the simplest tasks that occur daily with customers, guaranteeing their satisfaction and improving the customer service KPI.
Help Desk Software features
The different software that you will find in the ComparaSoftware list have functions that may vary. Free help desk software has many limitations in this regard. However, professional programs generally have the following features:
- Contact customers through different channels: messaging, live chat, social networks, email or voice.
- Create help center pages and communities, so customers can find answers to their problems on their own.
- Store customer data and history, to manage your claims in a personalized way, with bots and Artificial Intelligence.
- Creation and monitoring of the ticket system.
- Access to customer history.
Integration with social networks and widget for web pages. - Automatic generation of monitoring reports, in real time.
Help Desk benefits
You already know what help desk software is and what it is for, now you know the benefits you get by implementing help desk programs.
1) Immediate solutions
With the help of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, help desk software offers automatic responses, and in record time, to customer problems.
2) Process automation
Every time a user contacts the customer service department, a record will be created with their data and the situation they present. This will optimize and accelerate the workload of the agents, who will be able to attend to more incidents, in less time.
In addition, customer satisfaction agents will be able to focus on more complex incidents, leaving the system to handle basic service requests.
3) Continuous support
Because support is online and remote, most of these software are set up to be in service 24/7 through chatbots, FAQ centers, and automated actions.
Although this may vary in some free help desk software, as they do not usually have complex automation options.
4) Customer loyalty
Knowing and understanding your client is vital to know how to satisfy their needs and understand their behaviors. Help desk software allows you to document this data, recording the path that the user took to resolve their needs.
With this data, organized in automatic reports, you will be able to refine future marketing campaigns, and thus improve the customer experience with your product or service.
5) Better internal communication
One of the great benefits of help desk programs is that the entire customer support team has access to the same dashboard. From there, they can find out the current status of tasks and communicate with each other and with their superiors.
6) Monitoring and evaluation
Monitoring and evaluating customer service is really easy with a help desk.
Every time a ticket is generated, a record of the interaction will be created and you will know if it was successful. Everything can be evaluated and monitored:
- Response time.
- Number of incidents.
- Agent effectiveness.
- Resolution KPI.
In this way you will be able to guarantee the correct functioning of a help desk and you will also be able to see the performance of the technicians.
Help Desk Software Features
- Alerts and lift
- Real-time chat
- Multichannel communication
- Customizable branding
- Automated routing
- Knowledge base management
- Ticket management
- Email integration
- Self-service portal
Help Desk Software Pricing
Pricing plans change based on each software offering. But three types of plans were detected.
Plans | Price per agent/month |
Basic Plan | $15- $30 |
Standard Plan | $31- $55 |
Enterprise Plan | More than $55 |
*Prices are in USD.
For the most part, it is priced per agent or user and as the plan increases, extra features are added. In turn, some services scale by plan, for example:
Functionalities | Basic Plan | Standard Plan | Enterprise Plan |
Automated responses | 50 | 100 | 500 |
Answered calls | 2000 minutes | 3000 minutes | 5000 minutes |
Bots sessions | 2000 | 3000 | Unlimited |
Mailboxes | 2 | 5 | Unlimited |
File storage | 500 MB | 5 GB | 20 GB |
Integrations | 150 | 200 | 400 |
In conclusion
With help desk software, you can track customer inquiries and interactions through a comprehensive system to make agents’ daily tasks easier.
When selecting some software of this type, do not forget to contemplate the functionalities you are looking for and their capacity. Hire the plan that best suits your budget considering the number of agents that will manage the tool, whether they are first level or high level of attention.










