What Is Help Desk Software? Everything You Should Know

A company’s products could be top-notch. Its software could be cutting edge, intuitive, and powerful. It could even provide industry-leading service offerings.

Many businesspeople know that strong customer support is a must to stay competitive. In fact, 80% of executives with service oversight (for example, CEOs, service VPs, and so on) say customer service is the primary vehicle for improving the customer experience.

Consumers have the power to rate products, request answers, review companies, and rave about experiences across almost any channel — instantly. Because we live in a consumer-centric age, companies have to be ready to handle customer support cases and complaints quickly while keeping service teams working smoothly.

Help desk software can become the cornerstone of your customer support strategy.

Consumers can @mention a company on Twitter to ask questions. They can pick up the phone to voice complaints. They can even send emails or strike up a live chat with a customer service representative (or in many cases, an AI-enabled chatbot).

That means customer service teams need to have a way to manage requests across all communications channels and keep them organized. A help desk can provide multichannel support, so agents can work more efficiently, resolve issues faster, and offer amazing service.

Help desk software is used to manage, track and resolve support requests efficiently by automating ticket creation, assignment and resolution processes. It facilitates interaction between support teams and users through multiple channels, while also providing self-service resources like knowledge base articles and FAQs. The software also provides reporting and analytics to monitor performance, helping organisations improve service quality and response times.

Help desk software plays an important role in customer service experience. Now imagine yourself in a customer's shoes as we walk through the software in action.

Step 1: The customer has questions

You've just bought a new pair of wireless earbuds for your smartphone. They're easy to use and the sound quality is superb. But after a few days, you notice their batteries draining much faster than the manufacturer promised. You go to the electronics retailer’s website where you bought them to figure out what to do next.

Step 2: The customer starts looking for answers
Your online retailer has a chatbot a for simple customer enquiries. You ask the chatbot if it has any information about your new earbuds. An automated process connects the bot to the retailer's help desk software, which has a knowledge management base with lots of articles about earbuds. But since your earbuds are brand new to the market, so the chatbot can't answer your specific question from any of the articles. It can escalate the interaction to a human support agent.

Step 3: An agent creates a support ticket

The chatbot connects you to a contact centre agent, who creates a support ticket in the help desk application. The ticketing tool captures your name, contact information and details about the faulty earbud batteries.

Some organisations call this process incident management, but the intent is the same: creating a single, unified record for your help request. This prevents duplication of effort and documents everything done to help resolve your problem. The agent tells you what they know — which isn't much at this point — and tries to resolve your problem.

You can choose between getting a refund or waiting for a new pair of earbuds when the problem is fixed. You take the refund. Maybe you're still a little miffed, but you know the retailer cares about your business.

That helps — and you're not alone in feeling that way. Our research shows that 88% of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase from that business again.

Step 4: Managers and leaders notice a trend

The earbuds' manufacturer sold thousands of these new models in the first week and bad-battery reports from retailers and customers are pouring in on every messaging channel: phone, SMS, social media, email and user community forums.

Your online retailer and the manufacturer have help desk software tools for feedback management, tracking the messages coming in and all the channels customers use. This helps them to fine-tune their customer service operations and track customer sentiments.

Step 5: Issues get resolved

Support tickets from around the country help the manufacturer diagnose the earbuds' problem and figure out how to fix them. While you're not pleased that your new earbuds had a design flaw and you had to get a refund, the help desk software gave the retailer a fast, easy way to keep you satisfied. You stick with the retailer because you trust them to support you. And the manufacturer uses data from your interaction to prevent design flaws down the road.

Ticketing tools create a trackable record of all the interactions between a customer and an organisation. If a customer has a dispute with a company, the support ticket becomes the go-to document because it provides a common point of reference for both sides.

Next, let's look at how a help desk ticketing system helps your business. After that, we'll check out the essential features in the leading ticketing software applications.

The best help desk software allows you to:

• Standardise complex processes: A help desk ticketing platform makes sure everybody follows the same procedures. Customer interactions unfold consistently, so it's easier to scale up your help desk operations and move them into new markets.
• Eliminate inefficiencies: Automation instantly creates help tickets and assigns them to support agents with the right training and experience. It also keeps you updated on the status of each ticket so you're tuned in to how well your support operations work. The most advanced ticketing tools create workflows for you, making it easy to automate processes among agents, managers and customers.
• Elevate the customer experience: The software ensures every customer contact gets addressed as soon as possible in a manner the customer prefers. If people want to contact you on social media or email, ticketing software gets their messages to the right support agents. You also can update people on the status of their support requests, so they know where they stand and what to expect.
• Integrate with other tools: A big company might have knowledge bases scattered across multiple divisions. Ticketing software can connect them all, giving agents a complete library of product, service and technical information. The software also can plug into your customer relationship management (CRM) platform to give your support agents critical background on the people they're engaging with. Salesforce's Unified Knowledge does this, for example, aggregating information from various third-party solutions into a CRM.
• Comply with policies and regulations: Ticketing tools can be configured so interactions don't violate privacy, security and workforce protection regulations. They also can help you to abide by service level agreements (SLAs), ensuring that you're delivering services to customers as promised.
• Make data-driven decisions: Every interaction provides rich insights on customer habits — how they use products and what's triggering the most frustration. Product teams can analyse ticketing trends to find product flaws and anticipate changing market tastes. Ticketing tools ensure that you don't just guess. You're basing decisions and strategy on hard data.

Industry-leading help desk ticketing software includes:

• Ticket management with visibility into the status of help requests, plus options for prioritising tickets and routeing them to specific agents
• Integration into a CRM and other customer service tools
• Knowledge bases to give agents all the information needed to resolve issues
• Customised workflow tools and broad configuration options to align the software with your company's most common support scenarios
• Connectivity to customers' favourite digital channels: voice, SMS, email, social media and more.
• Customised analytics reporting that lets you find inefficiencies, track customer sentiment and assess operational effectiveness
• Complete training for agents and managers
• Free or low-cost tiers to familiarise yourself with the software

Other features include:

• AI-based chatbots that use large learning models (LLMs) and generative AI to better understand what customers want
• Live chat to let agents solve problems directly from website interactions
• Mobile apps that work on any Internet-connected device
• A self-service portal to let customers help themselves
• Support widgets that easily plug into website pages
• Gamified features that tap agents' competitive spirit to improve customer support