Top 5 help desk software apps

Making your business standout with support and service

In today’s world, tech and technology aided design has standardized how things are made and means we have become accustomed to excellent physical as well as service-based products that do their jobs as intended. Using Quality Assurance as part of the way products and services are brought to market simply means that the things we sell, or license perform consistently and meet expectations.

If we wanted to maximize the efficiency of our businesses, we could simply produce great products and deliver services that don’t require support.

This would reduce costs, but the idea is unrealistic. Quite simply, for the vast majority of products and services, at some point in the lifecycle, customers are likely to have some need to refer back to the vendor in search of customer service.

Supporting customers is now one of the most important areas where a business can actively direct its efforts to create standout and mark itself out as different from its competitors.

It’s a business strategy!

Indeed, this principle has shaped and continues to influence strategy for many businesses and organizations. And today, we can see there is a very strong trend for redesigning business operations and processes to focus on giving customers a pleasantly memorable journey, delivering great customer experiences that reflect positively on your brand.

It’s one thing to aim to deliver great experiences through great customer service experience; it is entirely another matter to achieve it.

Many larger brands are now focusing on the Customer Satisfaction (CSat) key performance indicator (KPI). Customers now seem to have all the power and the slightest interaction that doesn’t go the customer’s way may invite a negative review or comment on social media.

As a result, a lot of leading businesses now deploy social listening tools to identify unhappy customers. The aim is to reach out to them to try to reduce the effect of negative social comments and prevent poor reviews spreading and turning other potential customers away.

But it has to be said, prevention is better than cure! No matter how quick the response, some negative comments cannot be taken down and mud sticks. Essentially, organizations should focus more on getting service and support right first time, rather than waiting for negative comments and then try to put things right.

Delivering great customer service is composed of two main elements:

• Technology tools that enable service to be joined up across channels, departments and people
• A service ethic and organizational culture dedicated to putting customer satisfaction first

We’re going to look at the first one here - the second one is a whole separate discussion!

Apps for help desk and customer support

The rise of online applications for managing customer support issues is one of the success stories of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model.

The benefits of today’s best help desk software solutions are truly transformative. Essentially, such software empowers and enables the support effort to produce a fully joined up response. Companies of all sizes – from multinationals with billions of customers to an early-days startup consisting of two founders, can delivering customer service provide great support.

Here we take a quick look at 5 top help desk and customer support applications that join up support and prevent customer issues falling through the cracks, helping you to project a polished and professional attitude to customer support.

Groove

Groove is simple but powerful, all-in-one Help Desk for Small Businesses that provides you with everything you need to provide personal support: Ticketing, Knowledge Base, Live Chat, Self Service. 30+ integrations with your favorite apps like Slack, Twitter, Facebook and Zapier. Breeze supports Zendesk integration with the Breeze app available from the Zendesk Marketplace.

Breeze supports Groove integration with a simple, powerful and elegant solution that lets you ink all your Groove support tickets to Breeze tasks with a single click. Groove’s trouble ticket system looks and feels personal exactly like email to your customers. They'll never know you're using a help desk!

Pros

• Really easy to use and it doesn't feel robotic and clunky to customers
• Allows multiple users to users to view the same ticket

Cons

• Room for improvement in a couple of areas – search & Gmail integration
• Notes feature doesn’t support rich text formatting options

Price from $15.00 month

Zendesk

Zendesk lets you give customer support by email, social media, voice, and mobile phone with complete data reporting. It has achieved TRUSTe certification and there are in excess of 90 integrations available so you can use your other favored platforms efficiently alongside and within Zendesk.

Zendesk is geared towards driving better customer service. Above it works to help turn interactions into lasting relationships. More than 200,000 companies such as Uber, Groupon, Box, Airbnb, and Disney use Zendesk to lower support costs, raise productivity, and increase customer satisfaction.

Pros

• A simple and clean user experience
• Customization - fields, automate workflow, limit access to fields with permissions

Cons

• Outages - some report instances of taking hours to get back in to the tool
• Innovation is lacking - the product has achieved a plateau of functionality of features

Price from $5.00 month

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based help desk software that streamlines customer conversations across multiple channels including email & phone. With Freshdesk support team collaborate faster and give quicker responses to your customers. 150+ integrations, means it is simple for businesses to provide superior customer support. It’s trusted by 100,000+ companies across different industries.

Freshdesk is the latest in cloud-based support tech that comes with everything you need to track and manage support projects. Freshdesk offers an array of features like issue tracking, SLA management, smart automations, SEO ready FAQ section, Knowledge base and customizable Self Service Portals, which helps increase agent productivity and reduce burnout.

Pros

• Advanced integration allows telephony system to automatically create Freshdesk tickets
• Works well for complex conversations via email that require multiple help desk people

Cons

• A few missing features and occasional speed/access issues
• System not able to identify spam messages or automated replies

Price from $19.00 month

Help Scout

Help Scout is a help desk application for teams that insist on a delightful customer experience. It scales like any other customer support software, but the customer experience is personalized like a normal email.

Help Scout works well for companies of all sizes, but really excels when used in companies with 11+ users. Help Scout's clutter-free features are designed to keep teams, small and large, on the same page. With best in-class-reporting, an integrated knowledge base, tons of integrations, and a robust API, Help Scout lets your team focus on what really matters: your customers.

Pros

• Treats communication like human beings do and provides a personal feel
• Use it for business and personal tasks and properly organize each day

Cons

• A lack of integrations
• Primarily focused on email so is not that helpful for tracking chats and calls

Price from $8.00 month

HappyFox

HappyFox is a web-based customer support software hosted on the cloud. It’s simple help desk software that works well and upscales easily to match increases in size as as your business grows. It enables you to provide customer support on multiple channels like email, voice and mobile with apps for both iOS and Android.

It helps to track and manage all customer support requests across multiple channels like email, chats, social media and phone in a centralized ticket support system. Integration with other web apps like CRM, live-chats, voice and bug tracking apps makes it practical as a help desk solution. Similar customer support queries can be handled using canned actions and smart rules to automate responses. There is also support for community forums for helping customers connect.

Pros

• Plenty of integrations
• Smart Rules are useful for allowing various actions to be performed

Cons

• Limited in what it can offer, especially the free version
• Functionality can be lacking and it could do with more customization features

Price from $29.00 month