4 Best IT Help Desk Management Software Solutions to Try Today

on December 23, 2020

Help desk management software is key to maintaining positive relationships within an organization and ensuring smooth operations and internal processes. These software tools can enable your business to automate, centralize, and improve help desk processes across the board.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through key features of some of the most powerful help desk management software applications on the market. We’ll examine the benefits they can provide to your business and how you can try them out today.

A Primer On IT Help Desk Management Software

IT help desk management software is built to help streamline your internal service and support processes, using incident management features to consolidate, manage, and prioritize tickets more efficiently. For example, the software can automatically determine whether or not an incoming ticket needs to be escalated, or suggest self-service solutions to end users using knowledge base resources, leaving the more complex questions to be handled by support staff.

Effective help desk management solutions are designed to help ensure all individuals seeking support get their queries resolved as soon as possible.

Overall, help desk management software can be an efficient and organized way to prioritize support requests and deliver rapid results through automated functionality.

4 Best IT Help Desk Management Software Solutions to Try Today

While the following solutions help address help desk management, they all serve distinct purposes. Below we’ll discuss the individual product differences that makes each tool unique.

1. Web Help Desk

WEB HELP DESK
© 2020 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

We believe Web Help Desk can provide a full-fledged, on-premises help desk solution for your team. It’s a centralized tool that includes ticket routing, IT asset tracking and association, and much more.

We found Web Help Desk can also let you automate much of your service request management chain, which can positively affect your team’s productivity.

Key Features:

  • Provides ticket automation
  • Offers a centralized knowledge base
  • Tracks and helps to manage your IT assets
  • Simplifies project and task management with relational ticketing
  • Integrates with Active Directory and LDAP
  • Enables you to measure Service Level Agreements through reporting

If your team deals in support for outsourced products and services, or maybe you have to provide hands-on support for complex solutions, we believe Web Help Desk is an ideal solution.

You can get a fully functional 14-day free trial of Web Help Desk to see if it’s right for you.

2. SolarWinds Service Desk

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

While SolarWinds Service Desk seems like a similar solution to Web Help Desk on the surface, it is a fully cloud-based, SaaS IT service management (ITSM) platform. In other words, it aims to assist you in improving your core service desk offerings, aligned with your business goals.

Key Features:

  • Offers incident management to consolidate, manage, and prioritize incoming tickets
  • Gives you standardized service request and fulfillment processes through a service catalog
  • Provides integrated IT asset management to help compile hardware, software, and more
  • Customizable service portal for users to have a single place to submit tickets and requests and access self-service knowledge base solutions
  • Built on ITIL best practices with incident, problem, change, and release management
  • Automated ticket routing, asset discovery, and cross-departmental workflows

Overall, think of Service Desk as a robust solution built to support the end user and the organization as a whole, compared to Web Help Desk, which is more dedicated to the end user.

If your team would benefit from an efficient internal system to support your employees, we recommend checking out the 30-day, no obligation free trial.

3. Freshservice

Freshservice
© 2020 Freshworks Inc. All rights reserved.

Freshservice is also classified as ITSM software and offers incident and SLA management solutions as standard. You’ll also find some of the same features found in Service Desk, such as asset management, automated processes, and more.

Key Features:

  • Offers an integrated ITSM management platform
  • Provides asset auto-discovery
  • Lets you create knowledge repositories for the end user

We believe Freshservice appears as a more modular solution than its competitors. While this could be ideal for a team that needs a one-stop solution for managing a support desk, we think the number of moving parts could be potentially overwhelming.

In any case, there is a sliding scale on price, which can offer more features based on your chosen subscription tier. Freshservice starts around $35 per agent, per month.

4. Zendesk

Zendesk
© 2020 Zendesk. All rights reserved.

We found Zendesk to be geared towards solving tickets for external customers efficiently, and as such, focuses heavily on the end user, much like Web Help Desk. There are a number of different products available under the Zendesk brand, which can help provide an omnichannel support experience to customers.

Key Features:

  • Gives your team a customizable platform to converse with customers across a number of channels
  • Lets you primarily focus on the customer service experience throughout your interactions
  • Enables the external customers to access self-service options and a knowledge base

Zendesk is designed to make collaboration a primary focus, which we believe is something all the solutions on this list achieve. For example, you can set up and maintain a knowledge base, track interactions, collaborate with other team members, and much more.

We argue Zendesk has less feature-depth than other solutions, although each tool is specific to a support team’s set of problems. It may be that you’d use Zendesk to plug gaps where there are no suitable alternatives for teams already using solutions to solve external customer problems.

You’ll also notice that while free trials are available, there are individual pricing structures for each tool in the Zendesk line. As such, we think you’ll want to carefully consider your budget when looking at this option.

How to Choose the Best Help Desk Management Solution

This article looked at some of the best IT help desk management solutions available on the market today. Here’s a quick recap of the featured tools and our thoughts on each:

  1. SolarWinds Web Help Desk – An end-user focused solution that offers efficiency and organization.
  2. SolarWinds Service Desk – Gives your team the same level of productivity your end users expect from support software
  3. Freshservice – An all-around solution that could work for teams without an existing support desk
  4. Zendesk – A modular solution, made up of a number of different individual products focused on external customer support

Resolving customer questions quickly and effectively leads to rewarding experiences and stronger brand loyalty. Using the right tools to achieve this can offer tremendous benefits to your business.

* As of December 15, 2020. Pricing in USD.

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