Do you want to improve the customer support system? Are you looking for the best help desk software to help customers with their queries in real-time? Try Freshdesk and Zoho Desk our top picks!
Help desk software is pivotal for providing an excellent post-purchase customer experience. It streamlines all the incoming messages, generates tickets for each issue, and automatically routes the chat to desired agents so that users can get their queries resolved instantly.
Besides, with centralized management, you get complete information on all internal and external queries, which contributes to boosting the efficiency of your customer support team.
In this article, I reviewed and ranked some of the best help desk software for small businesses that you can consider for your business.
Ready to dive in? Let’s get started.
Freshdesk is a comprehensive help desk software with an easy-to-use interface to manage growing customers at scale. Using Freshdesk, you can accomplish a 75% reduction in ticket resolution time and save approximately 54hours via automation. That’s why it has won the trust of more than 50k+ businesses.
You can work together as a team and remove all the chaos from your support process. With seamless collaboration, Freshdesk helps you resolve multi-stage issues, link related tickets, view team progress, and assign tickets to agents based on their current workload.
Though you have a dedicated team to respond to queries, sometimes answering the same boring questions will significantly affect your agent’s productivity.
This is where Freshdesk enables you to build a knowledge base with integrated forums to find solutions quickly. You can place it across multiple channels, translate it into 35+ languages and create moderation rules for forums to foster healthy conversations.
This is a win-win as customers can resolve their issues quickly and your team can reduce the number of support calls.
To further leverage, you can use customer segments to provide personalized support based on how they’re classified. For example, you can categorize based on subscription plans, region, location, industry, etc. Exclusivity is what makes a striking impact in enhancing customer experience.
Altogether, if you’re looking for a Zoho Desk alternative and a one-stop solution to deliver exceptional service, there’s no better option than Freshdesk.
Key Features –
Pricing & Plans – Freshdesk has a free plan that allows unlimited agents, email & social ticketing, knowledge base, ticket dispatch, team collaboration, and ticket trend reports.
With that being said, let’s have a look at its 3 major pricing plans –
Want to try? Freshdesk also offers a 21-day free trial to any of its paid plans. So, get a free account to sign up for a free trial for advanced features.
Zoho desk is an award-winning help desk software bundled with out-of-box capabilities. It allows you to streamline and respond to all the conversations from multiple channels like email, chat, phone, social, and your site to never miss out on any potential leads.
It enables you to manage processes and automate repetitive activities to boost productivity. You can create intuitive workflows, manage complex cross-functional service processes, and ensure that every ticket is automatically assigned to the appropriate agents.
As an agent, it becomes challenging to provide support 24×7 due to increased requests. In such cases, you can seek the help of Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered assistant.
Your customers can chat with Zia, and it processes all their questions by providing relevant suggestions quickly. It also sentimentally analyses the customer’s feelings while having the conversation to understand their mood. You can also train Zia to perform actions specific to your business.
On the whole, Zoho Desk is an all-in-one help desk software with lots of features at a great pricing scale. Even if you’re a newbie, you’ll feel the ease of handling & processing all customer support operations.
Key Features –
Pricing and Plans – Zoho Desk offers a free plan which allows upto 3 agents, email ticketing, customer management, a help center, a private knowledge base, and many more.
Now let’s view the breakdown of its paid pricing plans –
Every plan is packed with a suite of features designed to accelerate and enhance the customer support process. However, you can either start with the free plan or sign up for a 15-day free trial to explore advanced features that come with paid plans.
HubSpot Service Hub comes with a free help desk and ticketing software that lets you build end-to-end customer relationships. You can manage conversations through a collaborative inbox that easily aggregates all customer information and makes it accessible to your entire team at their fingertips.
By adopting a centralized way of managing things, you get a complete picture of what’s going on with the tickets. Coupled with routing & automation, you’ll be spending less time on manual work and more on interacting with your customers.
You can also create team-wide email aliases that automatically turn incoming emails into tickets to respond incredibly quickly. Besides, you can stay on track and respond to queries anywhere at any time via the clutter-free mobile inbox.
Overall, HubSpot’s help desk software catered to enlightening customer experiences across every touchpoint. As a matter of benefit, improving functionality via integration is a cakewalk if you already use other Hubspot software.
Key Features –
Pricing & Plans – You can get started for free. However, if you wish to access more advanced features, consider opting for any paid pricing plans. They are based on the number of paid users you require.
In every individual plan, you can include more users with the increase in the plan price. However, getting started is much easier as it offers an ample number of useful features for free. So signup now to explore HubSpot.
If you’re an online store owner and want to streamline all the conversations related to product inquiries, orders, purchases, returns, refunds, or anything, Gorgias is our best recommendation for you.
It is an eCommerce customer support software that combines live chat and helpdesk features to provide top-notch service. Whether your customers chat through email, phone, Facebook, or Instagram, all the messages are centralized, so you get a unified view for tracking and managing them efficiently.
When lots of requests raise via tickets, it becomes difficult for you to view them separately. This is where Gorgias eases the process by letting you assign tags to the tickets. These tags can be merged, edited, and deleted, so everything becomes clean, neat, and well-structured for following up further.
As an online store owner, it would be amazing to understand your customer’s emotions and perceptions of your products/services.
Gorgias strives to make this magic happen by performing sentiment analysis. It lets you identify the tone in which customers communicate with you. On top of all, you can automate customer sentiments by creating a rule.
For example, when a customer poses a negative opinion, you can automatically create a rule to detect and resolve it. In this way, you get better recognition and build trust, loyalty, and credibility.
On the whole, if you run an eCommerce store on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento and want to deliver an outstanding customer experience, you can blindly select Gorgias.
Key Features –
Pricing & Plans – Gorgias offers a 7-day free trial on all its paid plans, which are as follows –
Note that if you want to add automation to every plan, you’ll have to pay $26/month in addition to the plan price. Also, you get 2 months free by subscribing to yearly plans.
Help Scout is an all-in-one help desk software packed with a shared inbox, live chat, and a help center. It is very easy to use and helps in scaling your customer service via 50+ integrations and automation capabilities. It has been voted as the “Best ROI” consecutively by its users on G2.
You can easily toggle between email and chat conversations within seconds and instantly view newly added requests. With its built-in CRM, you can view complete customer data, chat status, previous conversations, and activities to offer better-personalized support.
Instead of making your customers search your site for resources, you can bring those helpful articles directly into the live chat. You can recommend articles based on the page they’re viewing currently. If they cannot find a solution, an immediate conversation with your team can be initiated simultaneously.
Help Scout’s neat customer-focused features are best suited for any size customer support team. With an integrated knowledge base, API, and free iOS & Android apps, optimizing your customer service is just a few clicks away.
Key Features –
Pricing & Plans – Help Scout offers a 15-day free trial on all its paid plans which are as follows –
For in-app messaging, you will be paying an extra fee based on the number of unique viewers. It is free for upto 2000 viewers. The pricing starts at $20/month for 4000 unique viewers and extends upto $580/month for 1,50,000 unique
Zendesk gives you all tools and functionalities needed to craft and deliver the best customer experience possible. It is flexible, intuitive, and easy to use as it is built with both service agents and customers in mind.
A continuous conversational flow is achieved across channels, so you can always stay connected. Also, a unified customer view will be maintained using which you can smartly personalize the experiences across the entire buying journey.
To help customers self-resolve their issues is fine, but you’ll have to constantly keep adding new articles or paragraphs to add value to the search context. This is where Zendesk enables you to use content blocks.
Using a content block, you can organize info in blocks. It can be a para, video, disclaimer sentence, or anything. You can place them in your articles across your help centers and instantly make changes. So you’ll have to build only once, and use them anywhere, which significantly saves your time.
One outstanding aspect worth sharing is that Zendesk offers 1000+ pre-built integrations to deliver next-gen customer experiences. You can blend your favorite tools without writing a single code or even use its channel framework to build your own apps for exclusive use.
In a nutshell, Zendesk seamlessly has everything on the plate to delight customers at each stage of interaction with you.
Key Features –
Pricing & Plans – Zendesk offers a 14-day free trial with access to all its features. It has 3 paid plans, which are as follows –
How you treat your customers during sales inquiries or post-purchase defines your growth path. If you provide or want to provide excellent customer care services, you need help desk software that enables you and the team to communicate and resolve their issue seamlessly.
Now, choosing the best help desk software entirely depends on business types, team size, and the budget. So, you must analyze all the above-mentioned help desk software and pick the one that matches your business needs.
Rest assured, all the software listed is the best and has something unique to offer that you can leverage for your business.
I hope this article helped you find the best help desk software for your business. If you are looking for more software recommendations to improve customer service for your business, you may want to check these articles next –
