Guide to selecting the best help desk software
Quality customer support over multiple channels is critical to maintaining high customer satisfaction, and more importantly, repeat business.
This makes companies to more dependent on the best help desk software. The quality of this software matters a lot, and is well worth your research before you make a purchase.
This guide will help you arrive at exactly what you're looking for, and how to find it.
“I’ve heard about using help desk ticketing software for handling customer support. But will it actually solve my problems?”
You’ve come to the right place.
What should you factor in before a purchase?
Before you purchase customer support software that fits your company properly, you need to:
- Decide on your requirements
- Figure out your budget
- Evaluate the software by trial
- Measure the impact on your team
1. Decide on your requirements
Take the time to analyze your current support processes:
How long has the company you're buying from been in business? The longer they've been around, the more credible they are.
What's their software's uptime?
List areas where you want to apply automation and cut down redundancies.
Revisit your customer contact points (e.g., email, forums, phone numbers, etc.) and see if you can add a few more for ease of access.
Though help desk software solutions offer a number of amazing features, you'll have to do your own research to select the best one for you.
2. Figure out your budget
When you're ready to purchase help desk software, choose an application which is both sustainable and allows you to scale. Not everything that's good needs to be expensive; your company might even do better with an open-source solution. To help you make an informed decision about purchasing a help desk, we've assembled a quick checklist for you to go over before taking the plunge:
Once you decide the size of your team, you can pick the plan that offers most of the features you need at a low cost per person. If you're just starting out with a small team, though, you might want to find a plan that will also accommodate future hiring.
Analyze your business, decide how important support is to your system, and exercise caution when allocating a budget for help desk software.
Make sure you know what integrations you need for your help desk software to run smoothly, and budget for the cost of those integrations too.
Check that the software you're considering works well with the other applications you use to run your company.
3. Evaluate the software by trial
Plenty of help desks advertise robust ticket management features. Some systems provide more in the way of ticket management than others. See that the capabilities offered match your requirements:
Start by defining the scope of service that you're looking to provide.
Calculate how much it would cost you.
Take a free trial of the product and see if it fits your company well.
Get access to product education materials, and explore all the functionalities.
Pro tip
If you're ready to test out, sign up for a 15-day free trial of Zoho Desk software now. Then walk through the features and explore the advanced automation, Meet Zia - The AI assistant, Draw a Blueprint to advance process automation, Enjoy the easy UI, and then decide which edition you want to buy.
4. Measure the impact on your help desk
Once you've made a thorough assessment, purchased a help desk software, and put it to work, you'll want to know how it has enhanced your customer service. This way, you can tell whether the help desk is serving its purpose effectively. It isn't that difficult to find out the parameters that determine the impact are present in your help desk itself:
Pay attention to customer feedback
Keep a tab on the average agent response time and average the duration of customer interactions.
Make note of the average first response time and ticket resolution time.
Find the number of overdue tickets before and after implementing SLAs and workflows.
Keep track of the number of open tickets and escalated issues.
A Beginner-friendly Guide for your businesses
Check out our help desk guide to prepare in more detail and make an informed decision.
industry’s first context-aware help desk software, with multi-channel capabilities that provide smart multi-lingual support. Start with the free plan now, and switch to a paid version easily as you grow. You can have a free trial of 15-days on any plan.
Trusted by users around the globe, Desk offers advanced automation, an AI assistant - Zia, a simple and easy UI, multi-department collaboration, real- time analytics, self-service help center and multiple editions to meet your needs.