Top 5 Enterprise Help Desk Software Options

By Tek-Tools on September 9, 2020

There are a lot of help desk software options available for businesses of every size. However, few solutions can scale to the level of an enterprise, and using software designed for smaller operations will likely slow you down.

Enterprise help desk software should help you tackle internal and external service requests. More importantly, it should work just as well for small businesses and large companies alike. This means offering support for hundreds or even thousands of agents depending on your business.

In this article, we’ll talk a bit more about why your business needs an enterprise help desk solution, then we’ll introduce you to five top options.

Why You Need an Enterprise Help Desk Solution

If you run a business involved with selling services or products, a service desk solution could be a vital tool in your workflow. In a nutshell, help desk software should enable you to do all of the following:

  • Process internal and external service requests
  • Track the progress and resolution of each individual request
  • Set up knowledge bases to speed up incident resolution
  • Manage your business’s software and hardware assets

The main difference between “regular” and enterprise help desk software is scale. Enterprise solutions should be able to grow alongside your business and provide the same level of performance, whether you manage a team of a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand support agents.

If you run a growing business but the help desk solution you opt for limits your growth, you’ll need to switch at some point. This means training your team from scratch on using a different set of tools, porting IT assets and documentation, and much more. Overall, it’s a massive expense you can avoid by choosing the right software.

Top 5 Enterprise Help Desk Software Options

Each of these five software options can adapt to both small and large companies. Given this, you should choose whichever software best suits your needs and budget. Here are the five options, in no particular order.

1. Freshservice

© 2020 Freshworks Inc. All rights reserved
© 2020 Freshworks Inc. All rights reserved

Freshservice is a cloud platform that enables you to track incidents and set up internal knowledge bases to help your agents tackle requests efficiently. The software also offers you the option of creating user self-service portals if you want to use it to attend public support requests.

With Freshservice, you can automate support workloads and access team performance analytics. The software also provides you with tools to manage both software and hardware assets, contracts, and projects.

Price: The Freshservice Forest plan starts at $99 per month per agent, and it’s the recommended tier for enterprises.

2. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud
© 2020 Salesforce.com, Inc. All rights reserved.

Salesforce is a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform offering a range of services. Here, we’ll focus on its Service Cloud suite, which encompasses the platform’s help desk tools.

Using Salesforce, you can process user requests and provide your agents with access to the knowledge they need to help your customers. Service Cloud can also suggest articles from a public user portal to your customers to help them troubleshoot issues on their own.

With Service Cloud, you can monitor agent performance using analytics. The platform also helps you keep track of and manage service and software contracts. Plus, it integrates with a wealth of other services through an API.

Price: The Salesforce Service Cloud Enterprise plan starts at $150 per user per month.

3. Zendesk Support Suite

Zendesk Support Suite
© Zendesk 2020 All rights reserved.

The Zendesk Support Suite is an excellent option if you want to provide support services through social media. Beyond this, the Support Suite also offers support for traditional channels, including email, chat, and phone.

With the Zendesk Support Suite, you can create a comprehensive knowledge base for your team to use as a reference. Each team member gets their own workspace and you can monitor performance using company-wide analytics.

Price: Zendesk Support Suite Enterprise plan starts at $149 per agent per month.

4. Zoho Desk

© 2020, Zoho Corporation Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
© 2020, Zoho Corporation Pvt. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Zoho Desk offers a help desk solution designed to scale with your business. At its core, you have support for multiple ticket processing channels, including social media, live chat, and phone.

Using Zoho Desk, you can set up a public help center for your users, and a private knowledge base to help your team. The software also enables you to use an artificial intelligence assistant to process incoming live chat support requests.

The platform lets customers rate the quality of your support and you can monitor agent performance through in-depth reports. Finally, the software also includes remote support capabilities, which enables your technicians to solve incidents by controlling devices remotely, which comes in handy for enterprises.

Price: Zoho Desk Enterprise plan starts at $35 per agent per month.

5. SolarWinds Service Desk

SolarWinds-Service-Desk
© 2020 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

SolarWinds® Service Desk is an enterprise-level support services solution. The platform enables you to manage all incoming tickets in one place. Using Service Desk, you can automate ticket assignments and manage escalation.

The platform enables you to correlate support requests with specific IT assets. It also helps you manage those assets by automatically transforming required actions into tickets for your team to take care of.

Price: SolarWinds Service Desk plans start at $355 per agent per year (roughly $30 per month).

Conclusion

Help desk software is an essential part of any modern business. With the right solution, you can both provide support for customers and manage internal service requests. As your company grows, the help desk software you use needs to scale alongside it, which is why we recommend using an enterprise-level solution.

If you’re not sure what enterprise help desk software to use, here are our top five recommendations:

  1. Freshservice: The Forest plan starts at $99 per agent per month.
  2. Salesforce Service Cloud: The Enterprise plan costs $150 per user per month.
  3. Zendesk Support Suite: The Enterprise plan starts at $149 per agent per month.
  4. Zoho Desk: The Enterprise plan costs $35 per agent per month.
  5. SolarWinds Service Desk: Plans start at $355 per agent per year (or roughly $30 per month).

*As of August 25, 2020. All prices are in USD.

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