Today, every organization uses a wide range of applications and web-based services for their operations. For businesses, meeting their end-user expectations is becoming challenging in a highly competitive landscape.
Users need their requests to be addressed, answered, and resolved in real time. On the other hand, IT support teams are overburdened—as they have to deal with an expanding IT ecosystem, with numerous dashboards for monitoring the connectivity, productivity, and security issues. Keeping track of issues and tickets in this environment in a prioritized manner becomes difficult. Businesses often lack a definite strategy and systems for their IT service management. This is where IT help desk solutions can offer a way forward.
What Is a Help Desk Solution?
A help desk solution is designed to help businesses resolve customer queries more efficiently by automating service request practices. Having a help desk solution in place can help teams fill service gaps and improve overall service quality. The tool also assists the admins to quickly allocate IT resources and provision higher capacity for internal operations.
In this article, we’ll evaluate popular help desk tools available in the market; here’s a list of five centralized help desk solutions, with a quick comparison of their features and advantages.
Web Help Desk
SolarWinds® Web Help Desk® is a lightweight, on-premises, FIPS-140-2-compatible ticketing and asset management solution. Web Help Desk offers several unique features to reduce manual efforts, improve help desk productivity, and business service quality. The tool can automate service request management tasks to ensure the right team receives client tickets. Besides ticket automation, it also has a centralized knowledge base, IT asset inventory, PO management capabilities, AD and LDAP integrations, and more. Web Help Desk consists of a well-designed dashboard with built-in reports. Teams can set alerts based on the priority of the tickets or approaching client deadlines. The desk is end-user-friendly and allows them to track the ticket lifespan throughout the process. To understand the features and functionalities, try its free and fully functional 14-day trial.
Service Desk
While many small and medium-sized businesses prefer SolarWinds Web Help Desk, organizations can also explore SolarWinds Service Desk, which is available as a SaaS offering. In addition to most Web Help Desk features, Service Desk also offers vendor and contract management, release management, and smart suggestions based on machine learning. It’s also ITIL PinkVERIFY Certified. The Service Desk provides an advanced and automated ticketing system to speed up the identification, logging, and diagnosis of issues. Like SolarWinds Web Help Desk, the service desk enables organizations to create a knowledge database to effectively answer customer queries. Some of the key features include automated routing, approval notifications, ticket escalations, and quick status updates. The solution works well for small, medium, large, and complex IT infrastructures due to its ability to adapt to changing needs. To find out how it works, try its fully functional 30 days free trial version.
Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk solution for businesses of all types and sizes. It makes the management of customer tickets easier and effortless. It helps teams collect customer interaction data from various media such as chats, calls, emails, and social media, centralizing the data in one place. The key features include a customer support portal, live chat, Artificial Intelligence for customer service teams, reports, and dashboards to monitor the team’s performance. The tool allows the automation of various tasks such as setting reminders, ticket assignment, service escalations, and time-based actions. Besides automated ticketing management, the tool also offers features such as customizable and scheduled reporting, graphical dashboards to understand and allocate customer queries, and happiness ratings to analyze customer satisfaction scores. Try its 15-day free trial or demo version to better understand how the tool operates.
Jira Service Desk
Jira Service Desk is comprehensive support software by Atlassian designed to help IT teams address incidents faster, implement critical adjustments, and deliver an effortless service experience. The tool includes key features such as automated routing, incident alerts, ticket management, knowledge base management, multi-channel communication, real-time chat, a self-service portal, change management, CSAT reporting, and more. The smart search feature of the tool uses machine learning capabilities to recommend the right services and simplify the query search for both employees and customers. Although Jira offers competitive ITSM functionalities, it still requires investing in add-ons such as Confluence or Opsgenie.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a help desk and customer support platform with powerful analytics to deliver exceptional customer services. Zendesk Suite includes support, knowledgebase, talk, and chat modules that can be upgraded separately. The cloud-based tool collects customer information and places it in one dynamic interface for efficient and quick delivery of support services. The tool deploys a centralized communication console to get in touch with customers in between chats and emails. With an integrated live chat feature, teams can proactively engage customers and website visitors.
Moreover, it provides an option to set up a call center with mobile and messaging channels. This is helpful for teams requiring quick communications via automatic triggers while dealing with potential customers. The flexible plans of Zendesk make it ideal for businesses of all sizes. However, additional charges and subscriptions are required to avail the best features.
Conclusion
We’ve discussed some of the IT help desk solutions available in the market. It’s important to note here, while most of these solutions offer advanced capabilities for ticket management, organizations should choose easily implemented solutions without steep learning curves. Organizations should also consider scalable solutions to meet their future needs. It’s in this respect we find SolarWinds Help Desk, an on-premises IT ticketing support tool, and SolarWinds Service Desk, a SaaS-based ITIL-ready service management tool, offering a complete solution for organizations of all sizes and complexity. With these solutions, you can enhance the entire ticketing process by implementing Exchange, POP, and IMAP protocols, translating performance issues into help desk tickets automatically.