While it’s common for end users to run into problems with products or services, they expect a prompt and seamless support experience. The help desk function acts as a central point for this experience and plays a prominent role in helping small businesses achieve end-user satisfaction.
To run an effective help desk, leverage help desk software that helps streamline the ticketing process and deliver a seamless support experience.
Beyond standard ticketing features, it’s also important to implement a self-service portal with a comprehensive knowledge base. This enables end users to find solutions for known issues or common requests quickly and help themselves without waiting for a support agent.
This article discusses some of the best help desk software solutions in terms of their capabilities and ability to help small businesses operate their help desks effectively.
SolarWinds Web Help Desk
SolarWinds® Web Help Desk® (WHD) is an ideal IT help desk for small businesses looking to self-manage their help desk solution and buy perpetual licenses to optimize costs in the long term. The solution helps implement simplified processes from ticket creation to resolution. It can automatically convert incoming service request emails into tickets and integrates with third-party IT monitoring tools to convert alerts into tickets.
WHD helps categorize tickets based on priority, users, teams, and sources, so agents can focus on the most pressing issues and resolve them as soon as possible. You can also automate ticket routing, assignment, and escalation processes to reduce manual interventions and improve productivity.
The solution helps you track agent performance to optimize resource allocation and address performance lags. You can also create workflows to maintain service level agreements (SLAs) and set alerts when an SLA breach is approaching. This helps you escalate and prioritize tickets, which can be daunting when dealing with an unexpected surge in service requests. Accordingly, the solution generates SLA reports to help you understand whether ticket resolutions are given within committed timeframes or how frequently SLA breaches are occurring.
Beyond ticketing management and standard help desk capabilities, SolarWinds Web Help Desk offers IT asset management. With this capability, you can discover and manage your IT assets efficiently and avoid purchasing excess inventory. WHD integrates with third-party asset discovery tools like Microsoft SCCM to enable more accurate asset management. It can also help associate service requests to IT assets to provide visibility and transparency into asset management.
HappyFox
HappyFox is a versatile help desk for small businesses looking for a simple and reliable solution to enable customer support and internal communication. It logs tickets from multiple channels, including Facebook, Twitter, email, chat, and phone. HappyFox can organize tickets based on custom criteria like categories, queues, status, and priority. Moreover, you can search and filter to find specific types of tickets and apply bulk actions.
The solution offers collaboration features to improve agent productivity. It identifies collision if two agents are working on the same ticket and helps avoid effort duplication. Moreover, agents can leave private notes on tickets to communicate efficiently with other agents.
HappyFox also offers a canned response feature for agents to use prebuilt responses for frequently raised requests. This improves agent productivity and helps ensure end-user satisfaction.
With this solution, you can create simplified tasks for resolving specific tickets. This helps address service requests more productively and timely. Moreover, you can split, merge, clone, and relate tickets to manage complex requests efficiently.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a SaaS help desk solution that can create tickets from email and social channels. It automatically prioritizes tickets based on keywords scanned from the ticket’s content and attributes. Furthermore, you can create automated workflows to assign tickets to an agent or group based on the ticket type.
If a ticket requires work input from multiple teams, you can split the tickets into sub-tickets. This enables multiple teams to work on the ticket simultaneously and expedite issue resolution. Similarly, you can connect tickets related to the same issue and resolve them quickly. You can also track agent and system activity on each ticket if there’s end-user escalations or internal auditing.
Regulatory compliance can become a time-consuming task for small businesses with limited resources. Freshdesk offers GDPR-ready features and simplifying HIPAA compliance.
The solution also offers security features such as IP whitelisting, which can restrict from where agents or end users can log in. This helps prevent unauthorized access and protects from malicious attacks such as credential stuffing and brute force attacks.
The Freshdesk marketplace facilitates integrations with a wide range of apps and platforms in domains such as sales, marketing, e-commerce, data migration, and file sharing. Some of the apps it integrates with include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mailchimp, and Zoho CRM.
Conclusion
Small businesses thrive on solving customer problems on a more personal level and aim to achieve customer delight. However, small businesses have limited time, money, and personnel. An efficient and suitable help desk software plays a vital role in using these limited resources more efficiently and satisfying customers. I believe SolarWinds Web Help Desk is an apt help desk for small businesses since it’s straightforward to operate and offers perpetual licensing to limit help desk software costs.