Email ticketing systems play a critical role in streamlining requests and resolving end-user issues. Over time, these tools have evolved to support a multitude of business processes. As the IT service desk function continues to focus on end users—both customers and employees—it’s essential to implement an email ticketing system capable of enabling an exceptional end-user experience.
An exceptional email ticketing system not only acts as a platform for request and process management but helps do the following:
- Find bottlenecks in requests
- Automate various ticket management workflows, such as ticket assignment, escalation, alerting, and performance reporting
- Implement industry-recognized processes and support frameworks, such as ITIL best practices
- Identify and link related tickets for an issue
- Surface persistent problems
- Integrate with other tools used in various business processes for efficient management
This article discusses some of the leading email ticketing systems available on the market in terms of their capabilities and scope with respect to the IT service desk function.
Web Help Desk
A notable feature of SolarWinds® Web Help Desk® is it’s compatible with FIPS 140-2. It targets organizations needing to deploy their email ticketing system on-premises or wanting to deploy and self-manage in the cloud.
Accordingly, it offers the flexibility of choosing subscription-based or perpetual licensing on a per-technician basis. Its automation capabilities help create and assign tickets based on agent availability, route tickets to respective teams, auto-alert about ticket progress, and escalate tickets to supervisors and managers based on service levels and predefined criteria.
Web Help Desk helps promote end-user self-service via its knowledge base functionality, which allows organizations to maintain help articles for common, run-of-the-mill problems. It also has built-in features supporting IT asset management, change management, incident management, and purchase order management.
Additionally, Web Help Desk natively integrates with Active Directory, LDAP, and other SolarWinds products, such as SolarWinds Dameware® Remote Support for providing remote assistance to end users. It can also create tickets automatically upon receiving email alerts from third-party monitoring tools and offers native alert integration with SolarWinds monitoring tools, including Network Performance Monitor and Network Configuration Manager.
SolarWinds Service Desk
SolarWinds Service Desk is a multitenant software as a service (SaaS)-based email ticketing system. It’s also PinkVERIFY certified, which means it’s compatible with ITIL best practices.
Additionally, Service Desk supports vendor management, contract management, and purchase order management. Using its native artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, SolarWinds Service Desk automatically categorizes and groups related inbound tickets and provides relevant knowledge base resources for end users searching for a solution in the self-service portal. It also offers chat functionality to facilitate immediate assistance for end users, and its built-in workflows allow agents to help multiple end users simultaneously. Service Desk helps discover and manage IT assets and track software licenses to surface compliance gaps.
SolarWinds Service Desk integrates with other SolarWinds products—such as the Orion® Platform and Dameware Remote Everywhere—and third-party tools such as Jira, Google Analytics, and Dropbox, among many others.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is ITIL-ready and is available in on-premises and cloud editions. One of its notable features is enterprise service management, which organizations can use to deploy multiple unique ServiceDesk Plus instances to facilitate service delivery across additional business functions, such as HR and legal.
The ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus IT release management features allow you to create predefined release workflows, increasing the transparency of release cycles and reducing risk. It also provides native mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms for ticketing management on the go. Additionally, the solution allows you to define and apply business-specific rules on ticket creation and updating and notifies agents via email and SMS when a business rule is executed.
Freshservice
Freshservice is a SaaS-based email ticketing system designed to allow you to set up service delivery processes and streamline requests based on ITIL best practices. A notable feature of Freshservice is Team Huddle, which allows multiple agents to collaborate on a specific ticket using an internal chat functionality. Additionally, while replying to a ticket, an agent can directly insert a help article from the knowledge base or use a canned response.
It also provides natural language querying to sift through data, create filters, and customize visualizations. Interestingly, it provides a feature called Arcade, which allows organizations to gamify IT service desk management and encourage support agents to compete against their peers.
Jira Service Desk
Jira Service Desk, a part of Jira Service Management, is a PinkVERIFY-certified ticketing system available in cloud and self-managed variants. It extensively supports the four fundamental IT service desk processes: request management, incident management, problem management, and change management. For asset management and knowledge management, it requires integration with Insight and Confluence respectively, two different products under the Atlassian umbrella. It also requires integration with Opsgenie, another Atlassian product, for incident alert management. Additionally, you can integrate Jira Service Desk with more than 800 apps via the Atlassian Marketplace.
Conclusion
Email ticketing systems have evolved from simply enabling ticket creation and management to much more sophisticated systems playing a core part in the IT service desk function across organizations. Choosing one ticketing system over another will have ramifications, so it’s important to get a cost-effective solution capable of scaling when the business grows. In our view, SolarWinds Web Help Desk is a comprehensive solution designed to accommodate smaller teams as well as large enterprises with end users spread across the globe. You can download a 14-day free trial of Web Help Desk here. If you prefer cloud-based tools, Service Desk offers a 30-day free trial.
*As of November 16, 2020