17 Best Help Desk Software for Small Business CX Success

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Imagine you're a small business owner working diligently on a Friday night to meet an important deadline. Then, out of the blue, you get a notification that you have a new help desk ticket. You pause your work to see the problem, and to your dismay, it's a customer having trouble with your product or service. This is different from the type of interruption you need right now. If only you could have addressed this ticket sooner instead of waiting until the customer contacted you. The right help desk software could have resolved this issue before you knew there was a problem. Help desk software is a valuable tool for small businesses. It can enhance your customer experience by allowing you to manage and resolve customer issues more efficiently, making your team and customers happier. This blog will help you find the best help desk software for small businesses like yours to improve customer experience and help you with 24/7 Customer Support.

ChatBees’ AI customer support solution can help you achieve your goals by enhancing the customer experience while improving your service efficiency.

What is Help Desk Software for Small Businesses?

Best Help Desk Software for Small Business

Help Desk Software for small businesses is a solution that acts as a centralized hub, effectively consolidating all customer inquiries into a single, trackable system. Each inquiry is transformed into a "ticket," a detailed record of the issue that facilitates efficient management and response. This empowers your support team to collaborate seamlessly, ensuring faster resolution times and a more satisfying customer experience.

In essence, help desk software streamlines customer support by:

Centralizing communication channels to reduce inbox overload

Enhancing organization for faster resolutions

Providing insights to improve support operations continuously

You are boosting team collaboration and generating valuable insights to improve your support operations continuously.

Why Use Help Desk Software? The Benefits of Help Desk Software for Small Businesses

Small business help desk software offers numerous advantages that can significantly enhance your customer support operations and overall business efficiency.

Enhanced Organization Helps Reduce Response Times

A help desk software centralizes all customer inquiries into a single, organized platform. This eliminates the chaos of scattered:

Emails

Phone calls

Social media messages

By transforming every interaction into a ticket, you gain complete visibility and control over your support workload, ensuring no request slips through the cracks. This streamlined approach promotes efficiency and reduces response times.

Improve Collaboration Across Your Team

Effective teamwork is essential for delivering exceptional customer service. Help desk software fosters collaboration by enabling multiple team members to work on a ticket. Agents can easily:

Share information

Assign tasks

Escalate issues as needed

This ensures consistent communication and a unified approach to resolving customer problems.

Automate Routine Workflows to Improve Efficiency

Help desk software empowers you to automate repetitive tasks, allowing your team to focus on more complex issues. Automated workflows can be created to:

Assign tickets

Send notifications

Resolve common problems without human intervention

This automation saves time, reduces errors, and improves overall efficiency.

Assistance in Reporting & Analytics Helps Improve Performance Over Time

Gain valuable insights into your support performance with built-in reporting and analytics features. Help desk software provides detailed data on the following:

Ticket volume

Resolution times

Customer satisfaction

Agent performance

By analyzing this information, you can identify trends, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), and make data-driven decisions to optimize your support operations.

Optimize Accessibility to Meet Customer Expectations

Modern customers expect multiple channels of support. Help desk software often integrates with various communication platforms, such as:

Live chat

Social media

This ensures you can engage with customers where they prefer, improving accessibility and satisfaction. Many help desk solutions offer self-service options like knowledge bases and FAQs, empowering customers to find answers independently and reducing support ticket volume.

AI Customer Experience

Omni Channel Customer Support

Help Desk Ticket Workflow

How to Scale Customer Support

What is a Support Ticket

What is a Help Desk

Help Desk Software Requirements

Helpdesk Best Practices

17 Best Help Desk Software for Small Business

1. ChatBees: The Smart Way to Manage Tickets

ChatBees optimizes RAG for internal operations like:

Customer support and employee support, delivering highly accurate responses

Seamless integration into workflows with low-code and no-code setup options

AI-Powered Efficiency and Accuracy

Our AI-powered support software simplifies operations and enhances response quality, tailored for efficient internal use. ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses optimal strategies to improve response quality, increasing predictability and accuracy. This enables operations teams to handle higher query volumes with ease.

Key Features

Build knowledge graphs from your tickets.

Build knowledge graphs from the popular ticket systems, such as HubSpot Tickets.

Resolve the new tickets faster with insights from the historical tickets.

Integrate your support and sales pipelines to different collections.

Train Private AI on Your Knowledge Base

Train your private AI using internal knowledge bases such as PDFs/DOCs, Web Help Center, Notion, Confluence, and Google Drive). ChatBees periodically updates your AI to keep it current.

AI Customer Support Starts Working

ChatBees takes care of the rest by automatically analyzing and researching incoming tickets, providing actionable insights directly in your Ticket system, and Copiloting the support agent to resolve the ticket quickly and efficiently. No DevOps is required to deploy and maintain the service.

Try our AI customer support software today to 10x your customer support operations. Get started for free, with no credit card required. Sign in with Google and start your journey with us today!

2. Freshdesk

Intuitive, contextual support helps agents provide consistent service at scale without delays. Freshdesk’s cloud-based help desk software is a contact center solution and ticketing system for small businesses. It has built-in telephony that supports voice conversations and omnichannel messaging.

Freshdesk provides customer health analytics and automated workflows to assist with everyday help desk tasks. The platform also works seamlessly with Freshchat, allowing agents and bots to talk to customers across channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, and SMS.

Features

Integrated ticketing

Ticket trend report

Knowledge base

Ticket dispatch

Collision detection

SLA management

Pricing

Free: $0 per month (up to 10 agents)

Growth: $18 per agent/month

Pro: $59 per agent/month

Enterprise: $95 per agent/month

Free trial: 21 days

3. Help Scout

Features

All messages and context are in one intuitive, familiar view.

Automations that reduce busy work and menial tasks.

They save replies from customer conversations so your agents can provide accurate answers faster.

Pros & Cons

Help Scout put everything in one place for small business owners. Your universal inbox, live chat, and knowledge base all come standard. In addition, Help Scout’s intuitive interface is as familiar as an email inbox. This means a shorter onboarding process for your agents and ease of use over time.

Although the basics are available for every plan, some key features require a larger investment. You’ll need to upgrade your plan for Salesforce and Hubspot integrations and for more than 25 seats, which might not give you enough room to grow without a higher price tag.

Pricing

15-day free trial available for Standard and plans

Standard: Starting at $20 per user per month

Plus: Starting at $40 per user per month

Pro: Starting at $65 per user per month

4. HelpDesk

Features

Automation is needed for various tasks, such as canned responses and workflows.

Collaboration tools like collision detection and ticket assignment to keep your team running smoothly.

24/7 chat support is available in case you or your team run into any issues or questions at any time of day.

Pros & Cons

HelpDesk is a solid choice for help desk software for small business providers or startups. Their collaboration tools are very useful for teams of all sizes, and customers love their support.

elpDesk is limited to ticket management. You’ll need separate CRM and sales and marketing solutions. If you’re on a budget, all of that tech can get pricey. In addition, they only offer one standard plan with a higher starting point than competitors.

Pricing

14-day free trial

Team: Starting at $29 per agent per month

Enterprise: Custom pricing

5. HappyFox

Features

Integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more to leverage the power of those tools with your help desk software.

Automated help desk ticket assignment allows you to designate rules and ensure that every customer issue is routed to the right agent as quickly as possible.

Knowledge-based software puts the power in your customer’s hands with intuitive self-service options.

Pros & Cons

HappyFox is a one-stop ticketing system that supports your customer service team. You’ll get live chat, a knowledge base, ticket management, automations, and integrations in a single platform.

However, the system's starting price point is higher than average, which can make it out of reach for small businesses. In addition, its email tools are not as robust as those of other systems.

Pricing

Agent-Based

Mighty: Starting at $26 per agent per month

Fantastic: Starting at $39 per agent per month

Enterprise: Starting at $52 per agent per month

Enterprise Plus: Starting at $64 per agent per month

Unlimited Agents

Starter: Starting at $1149 per month

Growth: Starting at $1599 per month

Scale: Starting at $2399 per month

Scale Plus: Starting at $3999 per month

6. Hiver

Features

It works hand-in-hand with Google Workspaces, making it an easy addition to those existing tools.

Multi-channel capabilities, including chat, email, phone, and WhatsApp messaging, provide support where your customers are.

Customizable automations help your agents focus on what’s important instead of menial tasks.

Pros & Cons

Hiver allows your team to manage multiple channels from their Gmail inbox for a reasonable entry price. It’s ideal for small businesses already using Gmail and Google Workspace. That means easy setup and onboarding for you and your team.

However, if you’re not already using Google Workspace, adopting Hiver will require significant change management, which can be disruptive. In addition, their free trial is only 7 days, shorter than most other options.

Pricing

7-day free trial

Lite: Starting at $15 per user per month

Pro: Starting at $39 per user per month

Elite: Starting at $59 per user per month

7. Hubspot

Features

A feature-rich customer relationship management system (CRM) keeps all of your customer data in one place.

Omnichannel functionality gives you the power to support your customers on various channels, including live chat, email, phone, Facebook, and more.

The customer self-service portal expands support by allowing customers to check the status of their requests and access self-service options, including your knowledge base.

Pros & Cons

Hubspot’s free version has well-rounded support capabilities, making it an excellent option for small businesses on a budget. You can get a lot of functionality without an investment. Their Service Hub connects seamlessly to their marketing and sales tools for a full view of your customers.

However, the free Service Hub option only covers two users. As an add-on, it lacks key support features such as live chat, conversation routing, and ticket management. If you need those, your price tag will increase quickly.

Pricing

Free: $0

Starter: Starting at $18 per user per month

Professional: Starting at $800 per month

8. Zendesk

If you’re looking for an intuitive, user-friendly help desk solution that works well without going over budget, Zendesk is the best all-around solution. Small business owners love how well Zendesk integrates with their favorite applications and often find additional ways to boost productivity through our extensive marketplace of pre-built applications.

Because of the Zendesk platform’s agility, fast time to value, scalability, and powerhouse partnerships, SMBs know they can rely on our help desk tools to continue providing outstanding customer service as they grow.

Rapid Deployment and Wide Adoption

Even among businesses that have never used a help desk solution, 90 percent can deploy the Zendesk support platform in eight weeks or less (with the help of Zendesk partners), and more than 88,000 SMBs currently utilize our tools.

User-Friendly Implementation and Versatile Use Cases

This is possible because the Zendesk help desk software and task automations are easy to configure, and customers always have access to self-service guides or customer service representatives to streamline implementation and integrations. Some SMBs also use the Zendesk software for internal help desks to provide technical support for employees.

Features

Reporting and analytics

Integrations

Open and flexible platform

Agent workspace

AI and automation

Messaging

Help center

Routing and intelligence

Industry leading ticketing system

Scalability

Agility and fast time to value

Partnership

Pricing

Support Team: $19 per agent/month

Support Professional: $49 per agent/month

Support Enterprise: $99 per agent/month

All plans are billed annually

9. ZohoDesk

Features

Customizable live chat gives your clients branded access to your team with just a few clicks.

Self-service options such as their knowledge base and customer forums make it easy for your customers to answer their questions independently.

Automations handle repetitive tasks, such as ticket assignments, notifications, and escalations.

Pros & Cons

The fully integrated platform allows you to provide contextual, personalized support because your agents can see your customer’s full history and proceed accordingly.

Some customers report issues with search and filtering capabilities, which impede their ability to find tickets promptly. Live chat is only available at the Enterprise level, so this key feature might be out of reach for your small business.

Pricing

15-day free trial

Standard: Starting at $14 per user per month

Professional: Starting at $23 per user per month

Enterprise: Starting at $40 per user per month

10. Kayako

Features

Their cloud-based solution includes live chat software, so you don’t have to pay extra to help customers on this fast-growing channel.

Collaboration tools and pricing models allow you to bring in other teams and subject matter experts to help out.

Single-view gives you and your team a complete view of the customer and the customer journey.

Pros & Cons

Kayako is designed especially for SMBs, focusing on businesses like yours. Its out-of-the-box functionality is highly prized for companies needing to start quickly. With the ability to add collaborators, you can enable everyone on your team to enhance customer service.

The company has recently moved to an all-inclusive pricing model with two tiers: one is cloud-based, and the other is their classic on-premises model. However, you must contact Kayako directly to get a price quote.

Pricing

14-day free trial

Kayako Cloud: Contact for pricing

Classic On-Prem: Contact for pricing

11. LiveAgent

Features

Live chat software, called “The fastest on the market,” allows quick and easy conversations between your team and customers.

Vast omnichannel capability means connecting with customers on almost any channel, including chat, email, phone, social media, and even video.

Ticketing system and universal inbox organize all queries so you can manage them effectively.

Pros & Cons

LiveAgent provides many features small businesses need, such as ticketing software, a knowledge base, and analytics, at a price they can afford. The company also gets high marks for customer service and customization.

Nevertheless, many users complain about the UX. Although a high level of customization is possible, it requires a lot of upfront work. Out-of-the-box options are limited.

Pricing

7 and 30-day free trials

Small Business: Starting at $9 per month

Medium Business: Starting at $29 per month

Large Business: Starting at $49 per month

Enterprise: Starting at $69 per month

12. Cayzu

When investigating Cayzu's product, you’ll first notice its competitive pricing. Their plans start at only $4 per agent per month! But, organizations managing support for multiple brands might want to check out the Enterprise tier.

Cayzu supports the ability to create multiple branded self-service portals. This lets you present a customized experience to your customers while allowing their requests to flow into a single shared inbox for management and resolution by your team.

Key Features

Email and social media management

Knowledge base

Self-service portal (multi-brand)

Web widget

Rule-based automation

Time tracking and asset management tools

Integrations with popular platforms

Reporting dashboards

Pricing

Free Trial: Available

Plans: Start at $4/agent per month

13. Crisp

If your small business wants to roll out live chat support, Crisp is a great option. They offer a free plan that allows up to two people to manage live chat support from a team inbox or from iOS and Android apps when you’re on the go. If you’re interested in offering additional channels, Crisp can also handle:

Messaging apps

Social media through its platform

An appealing aspect of Crisp for small businesses is its flat-rate pricing plans. Their Unlimited plan is $95 per month for a workspace with 20 agent seats, which would cost significantly more on a per-agent price model.

Key Features

Multi-channel platform (live chat, email, social media, messaging, self-service).

Team inbox with collaboration features (canned responses, private notes).

Audio & video messages

Chatbot software.

Knowledge base

Integrations with CRMs and other popular apps

Reporting dashboards

Pricing

Free trial and plan available

Paid Plans: Start at $25/workspace per month (includes four seats)

14. Tidio

Tidio is a chat-based customer service platform. Its free plan lets you chat with up to 50 unique users per month and have chatbot conversations with up to 100. If you’re a bit further along with your support efforts, Tidio’s paid tiers let you center your plan around live chat, chatbots, or features beyond support, such as email marketing tools.

Proactive Support with Live Typing

One exciting aspect of Tidio’s live chat paid plans is a focus on proactive support tools like

Live Typing is a feature that allows your team to view what a customer is typing into a chat window before they hit send. Though it might feel a little creepy from the customer side, live typing previews can save your team time, allowing them to jump-start on the customer’s request.

Key Features

Live chat and chatbot offerings

Shared inbox that allows integrations with other channels; includes collaboration features like private notes and teams.

Live monitoring features like Live Typing and the Live Visitors List

Email marketing tools

Integrations via Zapier; custom integrations are also possible

Reporting dashboards

Price

Free trial and plan available

Paid Plans: Start at $15.83/operator per month

Businesses can manage support requests and automate repetitive administrative tasks with Salesforce Service Cloud. With Salesforce, you can deliver personalized customer support and manage incoming tickets from digital channels like social media or live chat.

Empowering Self-Service with Drag-and-Drop Help Center

Salesforce Service Cloud can save small businesses time, money, and resources with a drag-and-drop help center. This tool makes it easy for customers to create knowledge base resources and direct more customers to self-service options, freeing up help desk agent lines for more complex requests.

Features

Case management

Knowledge management

Computer telephony integration (CTI)

Service contract management

Pricing

Starter: $25 per user/month

Professional: $75 per user/month

Enterprise: $150 per user/month

Unlimited: $300 per user/month

All plans are billed annually

Free trial: 14 days

15. Salesforce Service Cloud

Social media

Live chat

Empowering Self-Service with Drag-and-Drop Help Center

Features

Case management

Knowledge management

Computer telephony integration (CTI)

Service contract management

Pricing

Starter: $25 per user/month

Professional: $75 per user/month

Enterprise: $150 per user/month

Unlimited: $300 per user/month

All plans are billed annually

Free trial: 14 days

16. Front

Front allows users to manage all customer communications from email, live chat, and SMS in a collaborative hub. Support team members can use Front to manage high volumes of support requests without sacrificing personalization by accessing information from a single customer view.

Team inboxes allow for cross-functional collaboration; message templates support faster replies and ticket resolutions, and automatic load balancing also contributes to faster ticket resolutions.

Features

One-click scheduling

Omnichannel messaging

Collaborative inbox

Round-robin ticket assignment

Load balancing

Response time SLA rules

Pricing

Starter: $19 per seat/month

Growth: $59 per seat/month

Scale: $99 per seat/month

Premier: $229 per seat/month

All plans are billed annually

Free trial: 7 days

17. Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management is a help desk tool with rich ITSM functionality. Jira’s help desk software comes with the necessary features for IT and general support teams to deliver service to customers and employees.

Small businesses can utilize Jira’s knowledge base to:

Rapidly resolve incoming trouble tickets

Manage SLAs

Track action-oriented requests

Uncover customer satisfaction (CSAT) insights

Features

Global and multi-project automation

Multi-language support

SLA management

Configurable workflows

Self-service portal

Email notifications

Pricing

Free: $0 per month (up to 3 agents)

Standard: $21 per agent/month

Premium: $47 per agent/month

Enterprise: Contact sales (billed annually)

Free trial: 7 days

Help Desk Benefits

Customer Experience Automation

SaaS Help Desk

Ticket Escalation

Self Service Customer Support

Service Desk Automation Ideas

Help Desk Benefits

Common Help Desk Problems and Solutions

Generative Ai for Customer Support

Best Incident Management Software

Best Open Source Ticketing System

How to Choose the Right Help Desk Software for a Small Business

Set Realistic Expectations for Return on Investment

Small businesses should establish realistic expectations for their help desk software before researching options. These expectations should include:

Ideal ROI for the software

A budget for purchasing and maintaining it

A time frame for when they expect to see value from it

Setting these guidelines will help you avoid wasting time on solutions that won’t work for your business and increase the likelihood that your decision will pay off how you envision.

Choose Help Desk Software That’s Easy to Use

Since help desks typically handle IT issues and incident management, your business must avoid lapses in service. That’s why ease of use is essential when choosing help desk software. The solution you choose must be easy to configure and use. It also shouldn’t take long to onboard and train your team.

Pick a Scalable Help Desk Solution

Find a help desk partner that understands your business and can grow alongside you. While you may be small now, your help desk solution should accommodate increasing support requests in the coming years. Any good help desk solution can support your agents as they adapt to fluctuating ticket volumes or unique customer needs and provide customizable tools.

Assess the Total Cost of Ownership

TCO is an important factor when considering any business software because it shows the true cost of a tool and how much you’ll spend to implement and utilize it throughout its lifetime at your company. Ideally, the software you select will have a low TCO. This means your business will see cost savings on expenses attributed to:

Installation

Onboarding

Subscriptions

Maintenance

Learn About Vendor Support Options

As a small business owner, you are well aware of how critical responsive vendors are to the success of your organization. Before deciding on the best help desk software for your company, consider how much support the vendor will offer to help you get set up and how accessible they will be to correct any future issues.

Ideally, the vendor will have several support options available. Some examples of this are:

Video courses or training

24/7 chatbots

Live training and configuration support

Guides and knowledge base articles

Customer service agents across multiple channels that provide real-time customer support

Freshdesk vs Zendesk

Salesforce Alternatives

Email Ticketing System

Freshdesk Alternatives

Help Scout vs Zendesk

Tidio Alternatives

Talkdesk Competitors

Help Desk Knowledge Base Examples

Use ChatBees’ AI Customer Support Software to 10x Customer Support Operations

ChatBees optimizes RAG with our AI customer support software for internal operations like customer support, employee support, etc.. It provides the most accurate response and easily integrates into workflows in a low-code, no-code manner.

Automated Optimization for Scalable Support

ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases. This improves predictability and accuracy, enabling these operations teams to handle more queries. No DevOps is required to deploy and maintain the service.

Try our AI customer support software to 10x your customer support operations. Get started for free; no credit card is required. Sign in with Google and get started on your journey with us today!