January 15th, 2020 | Updated on May 20th, 2024
Are customer emails and support tickets drowning your customer service department?
Are you not able to manage your customer needs satisfactorily?
Are you thinking of taking steps to improve customer satisfaction while minimizing your support expenses?
If you have answered yes to all of the above, then you certainly need something to sort this out for you.
Regardless of the size of your business, you must have realized by now that in order to build a trustworthy relationship with your clients, you must solve their complaints and respond to their queries promptly and reliably.
Therefore, customer support has become one of the crucial parts of all businesses.
While you can try and deal with customer queries with a manual system, but it is not going to last for long.
What you really need is a helpdesk system for your business. You can start by integrating free helpdesk software with your business website.
Obviously, you’ve researched, but you still have questions.
The first of which is, “How do I know which helpdesk software to choose for my business?”
Benefits Of Help Desk Software
Help desk software offers several key benefits for businesses, such as:
- Efficient Ticket Management: Simplifies the creation and handling of support tickets, ensuring timely and organized responses to customer inquiries.
- Improved Communication: Centralizes support interactions, leading to quicker resolutions and higher customer satisfaction.
- Increased Productivity: Automates routine tasks, allowing support staff to focus on more complex issues.
- Better Tracking and Reporting: Provides insights into response times and ticket volumes, helping identify areas for improvement.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Facilitates teamwork and knowledge-sharing among support staff, leading to faster issue resolution.
- Improved Customer Experience: Streamlines support processes, resulting in quicker resolutions and stronger customer relationships.
Help Desk Software Vs Service Desks
Help desk software is a tool for managing customer inquiries and support tickets, tracking issues, assigning tasks, and ensuring timely responses. Features often include ticket management, knowledge bases, and reporting. It’s used by businesses of all sizes to streamline support and boost customer satisfaction.
While often confused, help desks and service desks have different roles. Help desks focus on resolving technical issues (incident management), while service desks handle a wider range of IT tasks, including service and information requests. Service desks are more customer-focused, aiming for high-quality, efficient service.
Choosing The Best Help Desk Software
When selecting help desk software for your business, consider the following key factors:
Essential Features:
- Ticket Management: Track and handle customer inquiries in one system to ensure prompt responses.
- Multichannel Support: Respond to customers via email, phone, social media, and chat.
- Knowledge Base: Provide a centralized resource for self-service and quick agent access to solutions.
- SLA Management: Set and track service level agreements to meet performance targets.
- Automation: Automate tasks like ticket assignment to improve efficiency.
- Reporting and Analytics: Generate reports and analyze metrics to optimize processes.
Other Considerations:
- Integrations: Connect with other tools like CRM software and chatbots for a seamless experience.
- Customization: Adapt the software to fit your specific business needs, such as branding and workflows.
Top 10 Free Help Desk Software List
Free help desk ticket systems are the platforms that act as the initial point of contact between businesses and customers. Remember that they are looking for answers and are turning to the help desk channel to get them.
So, here are your top choices:
1. ProProfs Help Desk
The need of the hour is to equip your agents with powerful free helpdesk ticketing software with the objective of providing a delightful customer experience. The ProProfs Help Desk system is a cloud-based, feature-rich tool that contributes significantly towards realizing your business goals.
Features:
- The shared inbox feature facilitates collaborative teamwork
- Ticket prioritization helps to improve performance
- Canned responses and rule-based automated messages
Benefits:
- Customer-facing inboxes can be managed conveniently so that you never miss a customer request
- You can track issues and route tickets to the appropriate department
- With the self-help center, you can reduce support tickets by 80%
Pricing:
You can try any of the plans for free for 15 days. Start-ups can start with the ‘Forever Free’ plan free of cost. Paid plans start from $ 39 per month.
2. Zoho Desk
It is the industry’s first context-aware help desk software where businesses can solely concentrate on building meaningful relationships with their customers.
Features:
- Offers a robust ticketing system with unique customization features for the agent interface
- Social support software for simple ticket aggregation
- Knowledge base and forums encourage customers for self help
Benefits:
- This customer service software for free offers a multi-channel support platform that can meet customer expectations and preferences
- Support is offered in real-time via the call center functionality
- Clients can submit support requests, ask questions, and even call for help via popular social media channels
Pricing:
You can sign up with the ‘Free Plan’ that offers a limited number of features. Paid plans start from $720 per agent, per month.
3. Zendesk
Looking to convert your customers into brand loyalists? Try the Zendesk customer support software that can do a complete makeover of your customer service into instruments for customer retention.
Features:
- Flexible ticket management with automated workflow
- Knowledge base portal and community forums included
- Over 100 out-of-the-box integrations with third-party applications
Benefits:
- Zendesk is more than a helpdesk system that verges on the border of acting as a CRM by organizing processes, workflows and tracking of customer engagement
- Has a suite of support apps to scale as your business expands
- Let’s you engage prospects through a proactive live chat with automated trigger
Pricing:
You can sign up for any of the plans on a free trial basis. Post that you have to upgrade to a premium plan that starts from as low as $ 9 per agent, per month.
4. Kayako
Offering a full suite of tools, Kayako helpdesk software is an easy system to set up and integrate with your business site. You can offer exceptional customer service in multiple languages too.
Features:
- Customizable to suit individual companies’ needs with a simple, clean interface
- All support channels in one place
- Mobile app for incoming notifications
Benefits:
- Advanced ticket workflows, rules, and automation allows you to offer effortless customer service experiences
- Enhanced customer and organization profiles for CRM connects the dots between your support channels, your customer’s information, and your team
- Scheduled reports are automatically sent to your inbox
Pricing:
You can start a free trial on any of the plans. However, paid plans can be availed at $ 15 per month on a per agent basis.
5. Freshservice
Looking to simplify your IT operations? Choose Freshservice, a cloud-based and free customer support ticket system that complies with best practices to enhance the quality of your service.
Features:
- Intelligent automation and team collaboration tools help administrators manage customer issues
- Offers gamification module called “Arcade”
- Freshservice can be integrated with third-party applications
Benefits:
- End users can raise tickets and check the status of old tickets using the self-service portal
- The service catalog facilitates new service requests by customers
- Service requests on the go with Freshservice’s mobile app
Pricing:
You can opt for the 21 days free trial with no credit card required. You can upgrade to a paid plan starting from $ 999 per month on a per-agent basis.
6. SysAid
SysAid is a feature-rich, configurable, and highly-scalable help desk solution ideally suitable for larger corporations to be used to optimize IT performance.
Features:
- Offers an ideal combination of help desk and asset management tools
- Has a robust incident and service request management module
- Effective help desk and IT service management in a single ITIL-aligned solution
Benefits:
- SysAid’s inventory management system eliminates the need for manual entry or importation
- You can automate your helpdesk, manage it remotely, control assets and analyze the performance
- The Incident Management Solution enables service desk agents to log, manage, process and report IT-related issues
Pricing:
You need to get in touch with the vendor for a customized quotation.
7. osTicket
osTicket boasts of being the world’s most popular customer service tickets software that helps you scale your customer service and make the customers really happy with the experience.
Features:
- A cloud-based solution that is compatible with any operating system
- Has an easy and convenient set up process that does not require installation
- Offers custom fields, custom queues and columns, ticket filters, help topics, agent collision avoidance
Benefits:
- You can personalize forms, fields and lists of data during ticket submission
- Triggered actions can be set up to send automated canned responses
- Use personalized auto responses to immediately engage your client
Pricing:
The Open Source plan is free for use with a limited set of features. Paid plans start as low as $ 9 per agent on a monthly subscription.
8. Hubspot’s Service Hub
If your goal is to keep your customers satisfied and engaged with your service standards, then choose the Hubspot’s Service Hub, a latest free ticketing system by HubSpot.
Features:
- Service Hub offers a view of your customers across sales, marketing and service across a unified platform
- Work through all the tickets from the ticket board with access to organized data in the service reporting dashboard
- Converts customers into active brand promoters
Benefits:
- You can now take on a systematized approach to addressing customer issues
- Engage customers in active conversations using multi-channel avenues such as chat, email, and social
- Track, order, collaborate and deliver as per customer needs and expectations using the Service Hub ticket system
Pricing:
Access the Service Hub for free to kickstart your help desk process. You can upgrade to a paid plan that starts from $ 35 per month.
9. Request Tracker
Request Tracker is your all in one free customer service help desk software that works with any modern browser, including mobile devices.
Features:
- Seamlessly integrate email inboxes to facilitate communication between internal teams and customers
- Check ticket statuses, actions, and transitions with custom workflows
- Set key values like the Due Date on each ticket with the SLA tool
Benefits:
- Receive automatic alerts based on the message or other ticket updates
- Get in-depth reports from custom dashboards with key ticket information
- Access email digests of activity by day, week, month, etc.
Pricing:
This is an open source application. You can give it a test run by experimenting on their demo site.
10. Agiloft
With an integrated suite of tools including help desk, customer service, web self-service, knowledge and contract management systems, Agiloft is simple to configure. This is a platform that allows easy customization of various aspects of the application.
Features:
- Seamlessly integrate your brand with a unique set of options for each user
- Solve customer issues in real-time with live chat service
- Personalize home pages to improve staff productivity
Benefits:
- Reduce interruptions and offer quick ticket resolution with a triage approach to assigning new service requests
- Create a new service ticket by incorporating HTML code on your company website
- Self-registration method available for new users that supports an unlimited number of user accounts
Pricing:
Get a free trial at zero cost where you can access a few features. The paid plans start from $ 45 per licence, per month.
Takeaways
But you’ve got to remember that whichever helpdesk software you end up choosing, it is not the only element that can deliver great customer service. But it is a vital component in the larger scheme of things, which is to set up customer support for your business.
With the right free customer service help desk software, you can build a team that can consistently offer quality customer service for your business.
In a time where over 40% of millennials expect businesses to respond in less than 60 minutes before moving on to another channel, tools like the helpdesk software are absolutely essential for your customer service agents to satisfy customers. The purpose, as always, is to make sure that they remain loyal to the brand in the long run.
