For the owner of any company that builds a business with a long-term perspective, the fundamental factor is not only a rapid ROI, but also the satisfaction of customers, partners and employees of the company. Improved service and support creates excellent brand value. This increases brand loyalty, customer retention, employee retention, all of which translates into increased revenues and lower operating costs. Therefore, the choice of service desk software (also known as help desk software) greatly impacts your help desk’s ability to quickly and efficiently assist your customers and internal divisions.
These service desk systems allow their users to communicate with clients easily and effortlessly in order to provide them with the assistance and service that they require over a multitude of channels. Because of their ability to consolidate support operations, your customers’ waiting times can be reduced from days to hours or even minutes.
And to help your support staff cut down on their incoming support request loads, many of these systems have the ability to create and maintain knowledge bases that your customers can browse through online portals and find answers to common questions.
Generally speaking, the particular requirements of your support operation will include a common feature set which many modern service desk software platforms offer today. Other more specific needs may be configured into many of these solutions as needed.
7 Leaders in the Service Desk Software Providers
This review presents the 7 of today’s top service desk software platforms. All of the below mentioned platforms are cloud based offerings, which reduces the operating costs of your support desk. These platforms cover the core list of features found in modern service desk software solutions, including multi-channel customer interaction logging, order history, support history, knowledge bases, pre-defined processes for various industry verticals and analytics for future QoS improvement. Read on to learn more about each of these offerings.
BPM’online: The undisputed leader on our list is the BPM’online brand. This unified cloud based platform will help medium and large businesses organize external and internal user support based on ITIL recommendations and best practices. Interactions through telephone conversations, e-mail, online chat, social networks and online forums are combined into a single interface. The platform allows the complete automation of all tasks and processes in your service and support divisions. Additionally, its powerful BPM engine allows these processes to span multiple departments and incorporate other processes from across the organization, allowing the creation of a true customer-centric environment where customer satisfaction is the organization’s number one priority.
Agiloft: The Agiloft platform is one of the most intuitive and easy to use platforms on our list. Ordinary support specialists can quickly get up to speed with its core functions and become productive in a relatively short time. The standard feature set includes predefined ITIL compliant processes, procedures, tasks and checklists. The system can quickly adapt to any style of service across small, medium and large companies. Among its most distinctive features is the automation of document workflow, which translates to the ability to quickly resolve trouble incidents with customers.
Cherwell Service Management: Cherwell Service Management software is a powerful cloud solution that is widely used by businesses to implement and automate ITSM processes. Depending on the company’s requirements, new functionality can be introduced into the solution without writing or modifying any code. The platform is simple to use and intuitive for both the IT service desk and for employees conducting business analytics. The platform can also quickly be adapted to reflect changes in the company’s operating adjustments.
Happy fox: Happy fox is a cloud-based platform for help desk operations. It is designed with flexibly in mind as it adapts to various types of business requirements and environments. Interactions with clients may be carried out and logged through multiple channels such as websites, e-mail, live chat, telephone, social networks and others. Thanks to the full automation of built-in ITSM processes and self-service tools, your technical support will focus on qualitative resolution of incidents with users and rapid processing of any tickets.
Help Scout: Help Scout for customer service is a strong contender on our list, particularly popular with small and medium size businesses. It offers flexible pricing plans and options and boasts a wide range of integration capabilities with various apps and business solutions. Among its various features are a robust process automation capability, shared team inboxes, email integration, a document based knowledge base and various reporting options.
Live Agent: The Live Agent brand offers a complete set of tools for live communication with the client. Customer service is realized via the Internet through private messages in an online chat window. The solution can be fully integrated with social media channels. A transparent reporting system in real time presents a clear snapshot of all operations. This platform is ideal for companies whose customers need realtime responses to problems and inquiries, without waiting for responses to email based or form based tickets. All customer interactions are logged and can be filed in other integrated systems.
Track-It!: Track-It! from BMC software is an end-to-end service desk management solution, complete with asset management, change management, knowledge management and license management. It is not the easiest platform to use but it is certainly one of the most comprehensive platforms available on the market today. It supports the most up-to-date ITIL methods and offers smart solutions for non-standard tasks. In addition to these features, Track-It also provides a wide assortment of optional add-ons to expand functionality.
