In today’s economic climate, both small and large businesses are struggling to stay afloat. 

Large businesses have the resources to sustain themselves somehow. But, when it comes to small-sized companies, the road to survival looks rough, with challenges like changing customer behavior and increasing customer concerns over service or product quality. While it might seem just a handful of customer concerns, it is just the tip of the iceberg!

When you are a small, growing company, even one disappointed customer can be a disaster.

Looking for an affordable, efficient, and reliable way to deliver incredible customer experiences irrespective of the current market challenges?

A smart and intuitive help desk tool can help. It streamlines your customer support function, empowers your support team, and enables you to provide enriching experiences to your customers. 

This blog explains why a help desk tool is indispensable for your small business and provides a list of the best help desk software, along with their features and pricing. Take your pick and start delivering 5-star customer support experiences. 

Why Should Small Businesses Invest in Help Desk Software?

Being a small business, you cannot let a single customer request slip through the cracks, as every customer matters.

That’s where help desk software comes in. 

It is a powerful customer support tool that brings all customer requests on a single platform, where your agents can track, manage, and resolve them. 

It offers a converging point for all incoming customer concerns, helping you provide a speedy resolution to your customers. With a help desk tool, you can rest assured that none of your customer requests would go unnoticed and unaddressed. No more stress and ticket pile-ups!

Further, you can prioritize, track, and manage support tickets and gain actionable insights into customer data – all of this without burning your pockets, which is certainly a constraint for small business owners.

Here are some major benefits of using help desk software for your small or medium-sized business:

• Faster ticket resolution 
• Personalized customer support experiences 
• Increased agent productivity 
• Streamlined customer support process 
• Happier customers and improved bottom line

Let’s look at the top 10 help desk software for your small business.  

10 Leading Help Desk Software for Excellent Customer Support Experiences

1. ProProfs Help Desk

Being a small business, your aim is to provide the best customer support even with limited resources. ProProfs Help Desk offers the best solution. 

No matter how small or large your team is, this simple cloud-based tool streamlines your customer support process, making your agents more productive and customers happier than ever. 

ProProfs Help Desk offers a shared platform for all your customer communication so that no customer issue falls through the cracks. It comes with a simple Gmail-like interface, making it easy for agents to prioritize, manage, and resolve customer issues from a single dashboard. 

Besides, you also get smart reports that give you insights into how well your agents are performing and how satisfied your customers are with the support experience. It is unarguably the best help desk ticketing system for your small business. 

Key Features:

• Shared inbox
• Advanced ticket assignment
• Labels and internal notes
• Insightful built-in reports
• Canned responses and automatic notifications
• Ticket prioritization
• Parent-child ticketing
• Integration with ProProfs Knowledge Base and Live Chat

Pricing: Paid plans start from $10/user/month. 

2. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is another feature-rich helpdesk system that offers a powerful customer support solution. It unifies customer communication across email, chat, phone, and social media to help you cater to your customers effortlessly. 

The tool allows you to streamline workflows, engage with customers across all channels, and provide quick and quality responses to all customer issues. 

Regardless of your company’s size and team strength, you can use this software to deliver a top-notch support experience without going through the hassles of legacy software. 

Key Features:

• Team inbox
• SLA management
• Canned responses
• Shared ownership
• Scenario automation
• Parent-child ticketing

Pricing: Paid plans start from $13.50/agent/month. 

3. Zoho Desk

Equipped with multi-channel capabilities and context-aware working, Zoho Desk is one of the best helpdesk ticketing systems in the market. 

Its self-service capabilities and a powerful AI-backed assistant helps you offer 24×7 exceptional support experiences. Even without a large global team, you can ace customer support by leveraging this tool’s vast potential.

It automates common, repetitive actions and helps you seamlessly manage cross-functional processes. Your agents can use Zoho Desk to stay more productive, reach quick resolutions, and offer consistent and quality support to your customers.

Key Features:

• Omnichannel capabilities 
• Auto tag tickets
• Sentiment analysis
• Ticket assignment and notification
• Workflows
• Custom functions
• Powerful integrations

Pricing: Paid plans start from $9.73/agent/month. 

4. Zendesk

One of the leading software for customer support, Zendesk, is simple to set up and use and can be easily scaled to your needs. 

What sets this help desk apart from others is that it focuses on customer conversations. It puts all interactions across channels – social media, phone, chat, and email, at one single place, where you can focus just on the conversation and not on the channel. 

Zendesk provides instant access to customer profile history and a unified workspace where agents can collaborate, communicate, and manage customer issues.

Key Features:

• Automated workflows
• Multi-channel support
• SLA views
• Customer context
• Contextual workspace
• Personal views and macros

Pricing: Paid plans start from $5/agent/month. 

5. Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk offers three customer service tools – help desk software, service desk, and satellite help desk tool.

Its help desk software gathers customer requests from various channels such as contact forms, phones, chat, emails, Facebook, and Twitter, empowering you to cater to customer requests coming from multiple directions. 

This multi-channel ticket management software facilitates centralized access to all the customer interactions, helping your agents deliver timely and accurate responses to all customer issues. Vision Helpdesk allows your support agents to receive, process, and address customer concerns in an organized and efficient manner. This makes it one of the most powerful and best help desk ticketing systems for SMBs. 

Key Features:

• Advanced search
• Custom filters
• Flags, labels, and tags
• Workflows
• Notifications and macros
• Time tracking
• Agent collision detection

Pricing: Paid plans start from $12/agent/month. 

6. HappyFox

If you are looking for an all-in-one ticketing tool, HappyFox fits the bill. 

HappyFox reduces chaos and infuses clarity in your customer support process. It brings all customer issues generated via email, phone, or chat on one single platform, where your agents can manage and resolve them. 

 It is not just your customer support that the tool takes care of. This help desk software is suitable for all your needs – customer support, IT operations, HR and marketing, and all other teams. Another key highlight of HappyFox is its integration with popular tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Wrike, Jira, and many others. 

Key Features:

• Multi-channel ticketing 
• Ticket management
• Canned actions 
• Ticket tags and attachment
• Remote access
• Call center management
• SLA and IT asset management

Pricing: Pricing is available on request.

7. Hesk Help Desk

Hesk is a free help desk software for small businesses that offers excellent customer support features, especially relevant for those in the IT field.

It offers incident management as well as self-service solutions for smart customer support. Your support agents can use it to offer better customer service by prioritizing, organizing, and filtering tickets. Hesk comes with many distinct ticket functions such as tracking time spent on resolving a ticket, status modification, attaching files, and notes, etc. You can run Hesk on the cloud as well as on-premise. 

Key Features:

• Ticket Management, status modification, and monitoring time spent on solving one ticket.
• Customer interaction tracking 
• Self-service portal and real-time chat for swift support.
• Canned responses
• Ticket templates 
• Custom status and custom data fields

Pricing: Basic functionalities are free, and advanced functionality prices are available on request.

8. Intercom

Intercom is a unique ticketing tool that offers proactive conversational support to your customers. 

This is one of the best help desk software for small business owners that wish to build positive and delightful customer journeys via conversation-based, personalized experiences. The software leverages the power of AI and personalized messaging to cater to customers and provide them stellar support experience.  

Its resolutions bot and customs bot help you attend to customer issues, prioritize issues, and connect customers with the right agents for quick support.  

Key Features:

• Business messenger
• Automated answers
• Customizable bots
• Help center articles
• Powerful inbox
• Third-party integrations

Pricing: Paid plans start from $39/month. 

9. Jira Service Desk

Source

Jira is a market-leading IT service management (ITSM) software that facilitates rapid collaboration across development and operations teams, empowering them to deliver fast and seamless customer experiences. 

Jira can be customized to meet the unique needs of your business. The best part is it empowers higher management to set up a scalable service desk for their respective departments. 

This enterprise-grade solution can offer a better user experience, thanks to its integrations with tools like Slack, Trello, Google Sheets, and many others.  

Key Features:

• Change management to empower your IT operations team with contextual information and help them make better decisions 
• Asset management to facilitate efficient inventory management, track ownership lifecycles, and costs etc.
• Knowledge management to foster team collaboration
• Problem management for quick root cause analysis and workaround recording
• Request management and incident management for better collaboration and speedy issue resolution. 

Pricing: Paid plans start from $20/agent/month.

10. HelpDesk

HelpDesk is an online ticketing system that simplifies teamwork and allows your support staff to manage customer communication in one app. It comes with a shared inbox and automatically converts your emails into support tickets. 

Using this tool, your agents can collaborate while resolving critical customer issues. You can even automate repetitive tasks and invest your time and effort towards matters of more concern. 

This ticketing tool comes with excellent analytics that helps you measure your support staff’s performance and customer satisfaction and make data-driven decisions. It allows you to customize your dashboard for better workflow management. You can also integrate it with LiveChat software to offer quick real-time support to your customers. 

Key Features:

• Smart ticketing
• Custom ticket list creation 
• Automated routing
• Interaction tracking
• Custom tags 
• Ticket management
• Workflow configuration
• Reports and analytics 

Pricing: Paid plans start from $4 per month per agent. 

Best Help Desk Software: Choose the Best Software For Your Company

Every small business operates with the intention to grow and compete with big corporate giants. A help desk software can prove to be your partner in crime that helps you scale your customer service operations as and when required.

There is no better day or time to invest in an efficient, smart, and intuitive help desk software for your small business. Having a robust and feature-rich help desk at your disposal can work wonders for your customers and help you create excellent customer journeys. 

So, choose your help desk wisely and power-up your customer support.