The Ultimate Guide to Helpdesk Integrations (2024 Edition)

Maximize your helpdesk efficiency with our 2024 edition guide on integrations. Find out how to integrate your systems for superior customer service.

Aug 17, 2024

•

The Ultimate Guide to Helpdesk Integrations (2024 Edition)

Table of Contents

Do not index

Managing a help desk, especially when you have limited resources, can feel like an insurmountable task. How do you ensure customer inquiries are handled efficiently and accurately when you have many moving parts? Helpdesk integrations can help you answer this question. By connecting your help desk with other business tools, Customer Service KPIs, you can optimize customer support workflows to enhance the customer experience and lighten the load for your support team. This article will explore the significance of helpdesk integrations, how they work, and the benefits they offer.

AI customer support is a valuable tool that can help you achieve your objectives. ChatBees.ai's support automation solution can ease your team's workload, helping you handle inquiries faster, boost customer satisfaction, and improve support operations.

What Is a Helpdesk?

A helpdesk is the first point of contact for customers and employees when problems arise. Its primary purpose is to fix customer or employee issues quickly without delay. In many cases, IT support is needed to serve customers who need technical help.

Help Desks are Primarily of Two Types

Internal Help Desks

Internal Help Desks are designed to offer support services to the employees or members within an organization. These desks focus on resolving technical issues, providing IT support, and answering queries related to:

Internal tools

Software

Infrastructure

The aim is to ensure smooth operational flow and to assist employees in overcoming challenges that might hinder their productivity.

External Help Desks

External Help Desks are support centers that provide:

Assistance

Guidance

Problem-solving services

These desks typically handle inquiries, support requests, and technical issues from users who are not part of the organization running the help desk. The focus is on supporting products or services the organization offers its customers.

The Features that Make Helpdesks Work

Multi-channel Support

Today’s customers want their favorite brands to be available on multiple channels, including:

Chat

Messaging apps

Social media

Web portals

Phone

Look for help desks that support omnichannel flow and allow customers to switch seamlessly between the channels for greater convenience.

Ticket Management

Basic help desk functionality allows your agents to view all customer queries on a single interface as tickets. Key features under help desk ticketing include automated ticket routing and assigning, categorizing and prioritizing tickets, managing flexible business hours, and effective SLA management.

Automation

A significant benefit is ticket management automation and streamlined response workflows.

Examples of simple help desk automation that make a big difference for your agents include:

Ticket type filters

Canned responses

Autoresponders for out-of-office hours

Agent-assist bots

AI-powered chats

Prompt reminders

Alerts

Notifications

Customization

Help desks should be an extension of your business and feel like it. Customizing the look of your business portals helps create a frictionless customer experience. A robust help desk should also let you customize agent roles and access according to their responsibilities.

Integrations

When you’re using essential business software like:

Slack

G Suite

Shopify every day

Developing a unified solution can help improve efficiency across the board. Most help desks offer direct integrations with standard tools that help you gain even more context about your customer’s wants and needs.

Help desk analytics

Analytics give you real-time data on ticket trends, helping you visualize vital agent performance metrics like response times and First Contact Resolution (FCR) ratings on an intuitive dashboard.

You can create curated reports on your team’s performance and deliver them to your inbox. Help desk tools also have mechanisms to tap into customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction using CSAT surveys.

Self-service

A smart help desk provides solutions on demand without waiting for you to get back to

them via slower channels. Ideally, this should be available through an exhaustive knowledge base that fits your business's and your customers' needs. Your customers can access it easily as FAQs, guides, or tutorials for self-support.

Collaboration

Your customer support team will need proper internal and external communication channels. With the right collaboration capabilities, your team can set the context, offer constructive insights on tickets, and allow other stakeholders to give updates as and when they resolve issues.

Why Are Helpdesks Important?

While your support team is vital to the customer service ecosystem, they can only do so much without the right tools. Help desks solve this problem by acting as the middleman, giving your business an efficient process for supporting customers and resolving issues.

Here are some of the reasons why help desks are important

Improved customer satisfaction: A more efficient customer service system solves inquiries and issues quickly, leading to greater customer satisfaction.

Increased efficiency: A help desk boosts the efficiency of your support team and the company through greater automation, IT-powered elimination of redundancies, and optimized workload.

Enhanced brand value: As you scale up, so should the quality of your tools and services. A help desk can enhance your company’s reputation by providing tech-integrated, high-quality customer support.

Cost savings: Without a proper system to help organize them, some issues can often be left in disarray. Service desks can help you save resources and cut costs by providing self-service terminals and automated responses.

Ticket Resolution

Automated Ticketing System

Customer Service Knowledge Base

Slack for Customer Support

Ticket Triage

AI For IT Support

Ticket Handling Best Practices

Automated Email Response Customer Service

AI Ticketing System

6 Benefits of Using a Helpdesk for Customer Support

1. Unify All of Your Support Channels Into One Place

A help desk can consolidate support channels such as:

Mail

Phone

Live chat

Messaging

Social media

Customers find it frustrating to begin a conversation on one platform and then get redirected to others, having to repeat their queries. With a help desk app, you can offer a seamless omnichannel experience, preserving context when customers switch channels.

2. Provide Faster Support to Customers

Customers hate waiting—in the queue, over a phone call, or an email. Our surveys show that 80% of customers agree they want faster responses from your support team. Help desks take on simple tickets through:

Automated channels

Organizational tagging

Smarter overviews

Leaving your team with extra time to focus on more urgent and technical issues.

3. Boost Your Team’s Productivity

While a help desk provides automated responses, much more can help your support team. With the ability to create central knowledge bases, set up efficient workloads, and facilitate cross-team collaboration, your support service team is always on the same page, no matter the time or place.

4. Implement Effective Self-Service Options

While personalized service is excellent, it’s not always the answer. Statistics show that 39% of customers prefer self-service dashboards over speaking with agents and prefer resolving issues in real time by finding their answers. A feature-rich customer help desk lets you set up an accessible knowledge base to find support on demand. From FAQs, guides, tutorials, and troubleshooting, there’s no limit to what you can add.

5. Engage in Contextual Conversations With Your Customers

Help desk tools are primarily built to make support more personable. With an evolving dataset of their preferences and request history, your support team can quickly connect the dots and deliver convenient, personalized services.

6. Gain Critical Insights on Agent and Team Performance

Scalability through service desks is essential, but so is the growth of your service team. With detailed analytical tools, help desks allow you to track factors such as:

Volume

Ticket type

Resolution speed

for each agent. This will help you develop and create robust service management reports that can be utilized to upskill the team and set higher benchmarks.

What Is Helpdesk Integration?

Help desk integration connects the APIs of two or more help desk software to extract, transit, and share information in any desired direction. This process usually involves writing webhooks to interact with the API and track payloads back and forth.

You need to understand how every system's API works to write the appropriate script for it. Since building an IT help desk integration requires painstaking coding and coffee-induced debugging, companies are now looking for third-party integration solutions to connect help desk systems seamlessly.

Help Desk Integration Example

Help desk integrations enable you to streamline operations, enhance functionality, and improve team productivity if you integrate your help desk with a project management tool like Asana or Trello, your support team can create, manage, and track the progress of tasks related to customer issues within the help desk.

This way, you won’t have to waste time switching between different platforms, which can lead to disorganization and errors. Instead, you can resolve customer issues faster and ensure everyone is on the same page.

How Does a Service Desk Differ From a Help Desk?

Help desks and service desks are similar because they help service teams. When you drill down to their core functionality, service desks differ from help desks. In the traditional sense, help desks focus on consumer concerns. They are the first point of contact for end users seeking assistance with a product or service.

Help desks offer:

Lower-level support

Self-service options

Direct communication channels.

Conversely, service desks encompass everything help desks offer while extending to the organization’s IT service management (ITSM) fabric. The difference is subtle since most help desk platforms also provide service management.

6 Reasons You Need To Integrate Help Desks

1. Why Help Desk Integration is Critical for Team Collaboration

Help desk integrations improve collaboration between teams and departments using different help desk software. When these teams integrate their help desks, they can access all customer information and reports from one location instead of manually transferring data between systems. This reduces the chances of errors and improves productivity by enhancing visibility and eliminating information silos.

Help desk integrations eliminate information silos by providing teams with a unified view of all data regarding customer complaints and incidents. This helps dismantle barriers between teams working on the same issue so they can collaborate more effectively. This ability to share information seamlessly will lead to transparency and trust for cross-company collaborations.

3. How Help Desk Integrations Improve Customer Satisfaction

When your help desk agents can see all the data regarding customer concerns, they’ll better understand how to fix them. This will lead to faster resolution times and accurate provisioning, which improves customer satisfaction.

4. How Help Desk Integrations Can Reduce Costs

Integrating help desk solutions bidirectionally allows your organization to enjoy the benefits of

both platforms. You can collaborate with another MSP that uses ServiceNow without paying. With their permission, you can extract data from the field you want.

5. How Help Desk Integrations Improve Security

Help desk integration solutions come with security tools that protect data in transit. Some of these safety measures include:

Personal access tokens

Role-based access

User permissions

Multi-factor authentication

As opposed to the exposure risk associated with manually transferring data, your admins can share sensitive business information with MSPs and other teams without worrying about information security.

6. How Help Desk Integrations Help Predict Problems

Integration solutions for help desks usually include analytical tools for measuring customer service efforts' performance. With access to data from multiple sources, aided by AI's power, your organization can predict user concerns based on trends and historical data.

AI Customer Service Software

Ticketing System Workflow

Help Desk Process

Hubspot Ticketing System

AI Customer Service Agent

Real-Time Agent Assistance

Ticket Management System

Digital Customer Service Tools

Slack Ticketing System

Service Desk Automation

Customer Service Automation Software

Help Desk Analysis

Automated Customer Support

Help Desk Automation

6 Helpdesk Integrations to Boost Your Customer Support Efforts

1. Analyzing Customer Support Performance with Helpdesk Integrations

Measuring your customer support team's performance is one of the best ways to improve it. Using Zendesk as a data source, Databox as a data visualization platform, and Make as the glue between the two solutions, you can create dashboards that automatically track and display your customer support team's performance. From ticket volumes to resolution times, here are three scenarios you can build to get a clear insight into how well your team services your customers.

Tracking Zendesk Ticket Volume in Databox for Resource Planning

Add a ticket metric in Databox with the total number of Zendesk tickets created Ticket volume is a fundamental metric to track in customer support. It helps determine how many hands you need on deck to provide excellent service.

In the scenario below, you will count all the tickets created in your Zendesk account. It will add a metric in Databox that displays that count. Update the ticket metric in Databox with the number of tickets created in Zendesk on the previous day. We recommend keeping this scenario active and running daily because it lets you keep a pulse on your team and product.

Monitoring Ticket Metrics to Diagnose Team Overload and Product Issues

Has your ticket volume been high the past couple of days? If so, then your team might be overwhelmed. Just as alarming, your product could also have a significant bug that needs serious fixing.

Track the metrics number of closed tickets and resolution time for the dimensions type of ticket and ticket priority in Databox Naturally, you may want to customize the metrics in this dashboard to gain an even more textured understanding of your team’s performance. But for beginner users or users unfamiliar with JSON structures, doing this can be challenging, hence the data request below.

2. Backing Up Customer Support Calls for Better Performance

Similar to recording and backing up your sales calls, doing the same with your customer service calls allows you to analyze what your team members did well, what they could work on, and how they can level up their customer service skills for their next call. It also gives you the peace of mind of never losing a call recording in case you need to access one for an unforeseen reason.

In the scenario below, Make will upload your RingCentral call recordings to the cloud storage platform Dropbox. It will create a subfolder for each of your customers and add their call recordings to them with their date and time stamp. This organizes all your customer support calls neat, allowing your team to easily find exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Collecting Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is the breakfast of champions. Without it, you wouldn’t know the first thing about your customers' feelings and thoughts toward your product. Since they’re the ones who keep your lights on, why not take their advice when building and iterating your product?

To help you automate customer feedback collection, we’ve built a scenario with the customer feedback management tool Canny and the customer support software Help Scout. In this scenario, Make will automatically create a support conversation or a ticket in Help Scout anytime someone writes a post about a specific topic on your Canny profile. Or you can have Make automatically create a support conversation anytime someone writes a post about anything.

Another scenario we’ve built to automate customer feedback collection taps into how much people love to vent about brands on social media. In the scenario below, Make automatically scans any tweets that mention your brand, sends them to the AI-powered sentiment analysis tool MonkeyLearn, and creates a ticket in Zoho Desk for every tweet that MonkeyLearn deems as unfavorable.

This scenario is as helpful or even more useful than the scenario with Canny and Help Scout because Twitter will have more reviews about your brand. They’ll also be way more unfettered so you never have to ask them how they feel.

4. Flagging Undelivered Customer Support Emails

As a customer support rep, you know that time is always of the essence. Customers expect quick responses and service from you, prompting you to hustle all day to meet their demands. That’s why there’s nothing worse than promptly sending an email to a customer only to get a message from them a day later about how I haven’t even responded to them.

What gives? You can see the email in the folder you sent. When you connect your Gmail or Microsoft 365 Email inbox to Zendesk, you won’t get notified if one of my emails doesn’t deliver to a ticket requester. This can happen when a customer submits a ticket but makes a typo in their email address.

Automating Undelivered Email Alerts and Notifications in Zendesk

Make can automatically check for these undelivered emails by scanning your inbox for automated replies from mailer-daemon or for undelivered notifications. Make will immediately notify the relevant support agents by tagging and/or commenting on the requester's most recent Zendesk ticket and providing the email address they were trying to reach.

Armed with these scenarios, your team doesn’t have to constantly switch between Zendesk and their mailbox to see if their emails are being sent.

5. Creating Recurring Tickets

You likely need to create recurring tickets for maintenance, checkups, follow-ups, and customer-specific tasks. But, manually creating these recurring tickets is extremely time-consuming. It’s also possible to completely forget about creating or creating them after they’re due.

So why not rid yourselves of these burdens and automate the task? Using the scenario below, you must input a few data points into the following Airtable base to automatically create tickets in the Zoho Desk that recur every day, week, or month.

6. Adding Deadlines to Microsoft 365 Calendar

Deadlines are reminders to get your work done and one of the best motivators around. That’s why we’ve built an integration that links Freshdesk to Microsoft 365 Calendar.

In the scenario below, Make will automatically create an event in an individual support agent’s calendar when a due date is added to one of their Freshdesk tickets. Make will also update the event in Microsoft 365 Calendar when the due date changes in Freshdesk.

Build, Buy, or Outsource Helpdesk Integrations?

Companies often find themselves at a crossroads when building or buying integrations. Going with the build option requires having a team of developers on hand to develop everything from scratch. You’d also have to pay for:

Licensing

Maintenance

Updates

Security

You also need to provide internal support when the product malfunctions. You could buy and outsource everything to a dedicated and trustworthy integration service provider. This will cost you less and reduce stress on your development team. Evaluate your business requirements and capabilities to see if your resources can shoulder the stress of building a product in-house. The choice is ultimately yours.

Why Outsource Integration Services?

As mentioned earlier, companies outsource integration services for different reasons. Some do so to share data, and others to keep all systems running like Swiss watches. Other reasons to outsource integration services include:

Handing It over to The Experts

Integration outsourcing provides an excellent opportunity for companies to delegate their integration concerns to dedicated experts. This might involve giving up partial control by allowing the company to build the solution while your devs maintain it.

You could outsource the entire integration solution lifecycle to the provider. They can cater to your needs with unlimited access to the latest technologies. You also retain access and permissions to the turnkey solution they provide.

Speaking From Experience

Most companies start their integration journey in-house. The devs build APIs for connecting systems and data sharing. This might work in big companies with massive R&D departments dedicated to building out-of-the-box solutions.

Finding experts to build cross-compatible, multi-system integration tools might be a long way for small businesses and startups.

Focus on Core Business

When you delegate integration to experts, you free up bandwidth and resources to channel into core business processes. For example, say a third-party service is handling data integration across all your teams.

Instead of hiring and managing developers to work on APIs, you can now focus your team on gathering, analyzing, and interpreting the data. This will increase productivity and overall performance.

Guarantee Stability and Service Availability

As part of focusing on core business functions, there won’t be any need to worry about the integration tool breaking down because you are paying experts to keep it running. Integration service providers stake their brand reputation and ultimate survival on ensuring maximum uptime for all their customers.

They’ll go the extra nautical mile to guarantee service stability and availability. This also extends to security. Reputable integration outsourcing companies use:

Multi-layered security measures

Firewalls

Access controls

Encryption

Authentication protocols

Save Money

Exploring integration outsourcing reduces the company’s overall expenditure. Think about it; you no longer need to hire developers to build and maintain the integration platform. Other costs you can save by outsourcing include the following: Licensing fees. Training. Office space and equipment.

Technology stack

These extra expenses could go even higher as your business scales up. And if your in-house devs lack the experience to discern the tools they need, you might splurge on things you don’t need.

Optimizing Internal Operations with ChatBees’ AI Customer Support Software

ChatBees optimizes RAG for internal operations like customer support, employee support, etc., with the most accurate response and easily integrates into their workflows in a low-code, no-code manner. ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases. This improves predictability/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 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!

20 Helpdesk Integration Solutions for Smarter Workflows

1. ChatBees: Automating Internal Operations for Predictable Outcomes

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. FreshWorks Freshdesk: A Streamlined Approach to Customer Support

Freshworks is a global software company that offers solutions to enhance customer (CX, CRM) and employee (ITSM, HRSM) experiences. Currently utilized by over 50,000 businesses worldwide, Freshworks operates out of 13 global locations to meet the needs of its customer base.

Freshdesk is FreshWorks customer service software that facilitates seamless customer support experiences. It provides many tools for efficient ticket management, enabling teams to prioritize, categorize, and track customer service tickets effectively. The software also offers AI-powered automation and collaborative tools to streamline operations, enhancing agent productivity. Freshdesk provides analytics to monitor and optimize support operations, identifying potential issues and delivering AI-driven insights to improve service delivery.

3. HappyFox Help Desk: Simplifying Tickets for Faster Resolutions

HappyFox offers a straightforward and efficient help desk and ticket management solution. Designed to centralize and simplify omnichannel requests, it facilitates a single platform to:

Convert emails

Phone calls

Chats

Social media interactions

Web requests into actionable tickets

This tool seamlessly integrates with HappyFox Chat and other live chat widgets, recording all customer conversations as tickets in the help desk system. It also manages knowledge base articles and FAQs in multiple languages, encouraging self-service among end-users and allowing you to reduce ticket volume.

4. Hiver: A Collaborative Approach to Customer Service

Hiver is a customer service platform that integrates with Google Workspace, allowing teams to manage customer service tasks directly within the familiar Gmail interface. Hiver facilitates the swift and efficient resolution of customer issues by turning emails into actionable tasks, assigning designated owners, and categorizing them for quick access. With this setup, teams can collaborate seamlessly on internal and external queries within the Gmail environment.

5. Jira Service Management: Streamlining IT Operations

Jira Service Management facilitates seamless communication and operations between IT, business teams, and development units. The tool offers a comprehensive suite of IT service management features, allowing teams to adapt to changes rapidly and providing top-notch IT service and support. This solution is a strong choice for enterprises seeking a responsive ITSM solution.

Jira offers several management features to streamline various IT processes. With Request Management, teams can centralize work requests and ensure timely assistance to employees and customers. Incident Management aims to foster quick responses and resolutions to incidents by bridging the gap between development and IT operations teams.

6. LiveAgent: A Comprehensive Customer Service Solution

LiveAgent is a customer service platform with over 175 features to assist in the help desk and live chat functionalities. It streamlines customer communications by consolidating messages from various channels into a single, organized inbox. This facilitates improved customer relationships by enabling faster ticket resolution times and fostering meaningful conversations without imposing a heavy financial burden.

LiveAgent’s core service is its ticketing system, which converts customer messages into help desk tickets and provides a structured view of all customer queries. The software also features a fast and user-friendly live chat widget supported by functionalities such as pre-written responses and a real-time typing view, allowing quicker and more efficient customer service. Businesses can establish a call center to manage both inbound and outbound calls, offering a personal touch in customer interactions and addressing tickets effectively.

7. SolarWinds Service Desk: AI-Powered Incident Management

SolarWinds Service Desk is a cloud-based, AI-powered IT service management (ITSM) platform designed to enhance productivity and speed up problem resolution. This platform includes modules for incident, problem, release, and change management and a streamlined Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to cater to your specific service needs. SolarWinds facilitates the automation of numerous help desk processes, including:

Ticket classification

Routing

Correlation

This automation is further complemented by self-service capabilities, enhanced by a comprehensive knowledge base to bolster efficiency. In addition, the service desk offers IT asset management (ITAM) functionalities, ensuring full lifecycle management and maintaining an audit trail of your hardware, software, licenses, and contracts, facilitating a seamless workflow and operational transparency.

8. Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk: A Free and User-Friendly IT Help Desk

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is a free and user-friendly IT help desk solution utilized by over 280,000 organizations globally. It is a comprehensive tool designed to help manage, prioritize, and streamline daily support tasks and user requests without needing a substantial budget or support department.

This solution allows for the easy tracking and prioritization of user requests, reducing time spent on support tasks. The platform includes customizable web portals for user-submitted tickets, automatic ticket assignment, routing based on categories and priorities, and customizable ticket views and rules. The software offers Android and iOS apps that bring network inventory and monitoring capabilities to your fingertips. This is easy to deploy across all platforms.

9. SysAid Help Desk Software: Automating IT Support Operations

SysAid Help Desk Software is a reliable tool that can streamline the IT support processes within your organization. Instead of navigating the tedious setup and maintenance of IT help desks, SysAid offers an automated solution that allows your team to focus on other tasks. The software is designed to automate various help desk functions, including:

Ticket handling

Asset management

Issue resolution

Aiming to optimize your team’s time and efforts

One of SysAid's main features is its ability to quickly resolve issues, facilitated by the cross-referencing of tickets, users, and assets within the system. The ticket automation feature automatically sorts, routes, and assigns tickets to the appropriate desk. This means ticket resolution can be as efficient as possible; all necessary data and records are readily available within each ticket.

10. Zendesk: A Scalable Customer Service Solution

Established in 2007, Zendesk is a well-recognized customer service solution that enables businesses to personalize customer interactions across various telephony, chat, email, and social media channels. Zendesk serves over 100,000 brands and connects them to hundreds of millions of customers globally. At the core of Zendesk’s offerings is its ability to scale according to business needs.

The service accommodates new teams and divisions effortlessly while maintaining stringent security measures. It allows the swift implementation of new features and solutions, helping businesses adapt without a cost surge. The platform’s key features include messaging, AI and automation, a help center, and a wide range of integrations.

11. Zoho Desk: AI-Driven Customer Service Software

Zoho Desk is a comprehensive customer service solution that facilitates the efficient management of customer interactions across various channels, including:

Telephony

Live chat

Social media

The platform offers multi-brand and multi-department structures to better organize your help desk according to your company’s configuration. It also streamlines ticket management, allowing you to track customer requests, no matter the product, brand, or department concerned.

Enhancing Customer Service Efficiency with Zoho Desk’s AI Integration

A standout feature of Zoho Desk is its integration with ZIA, an artificial intelligence engine that automates repetitive tasks and offers contextual insights to aid customer service agents in their responses.

ZIA can analyze conversation sentiment, auto-tag tickets based on their key elements, and alert the team about unusual activity in the ticket stream. It further enhances agent productivity by showcasing relevant solutions from your knowledge base for ticket responses.

12. Help Scout: A Customer-Centric Help Desk

Help Scout offers a customer help desk that enables support teams to manage customer conversations collaboratively. The tool consolidates requests from email, live chat, self-service portals, and other channels into a shared inbox. All requests filter into this centralized location, where they can be tagged, updated, and assigned to agents or teams. Other features of Help Scout’s help desk include:

Help Center

Live chat

Messaging software

Automation

Custom workflows

Prebuilt reporting dashboards

Collaboration tools

Help Scout also offers over 100 integrations in their app marketplace.

13. Salesforce Service Cloud: A 360-Degree View of Customer Service

Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service platform that provides a single view of customer information and history. It features:

Automated workflows

AI-powered productivity tools

Single ticketing system

For issue resolution. Self-service options allow customers to manage tickets without additional help and find articles in the help center.

Remember that Salesforce can be intricate, requiring a longer learning curve for first-time users. Salesforce isn’t solely dedicated to customer experience (CX); it provides a comprehensive suite for sales and marketing. That means businesses seeking to enhance their customer service may find it easier to achieve their goals by opting for software specifically designed for CX.

14. SysAid: IT Help Desk Software with Automation Capabilities

SysAid’s help desk software offers a suite of ITSM capabilities. The platform provides ticketing functionality, allowing users to log, prioritize, and track support requests. SysAid can help teams with asset management, enabling businesses to manage and monitor their IT assets throughout their life cycle.

The software includes a knowledge base with automation features to handle repetitive tasks. Its reporting and analytics tools provide metrics for help desk performance and customer support trends. SysAid is also customizable and offers integrations with third-party tools and applications.

15. Vivantio: Help Desk Software for Service Management

Vivantio’s help desk software can help businesses with service management. Teams can integrate Vivantio with a support mailbox to automatically tag and categorize incoming emails. It also offers email templates for automated responses, ensuring customers receive acknowledgment.

Vivantio’s portal widget builder features customized themes and designs, and the software’s searchable online knowledge base comes with customized forms and fields. Its help desk also features prebuilt and customizable reporting and analytics dashboards and a report builder that allows teams to create customized charts to display data and metrics visually.

16. HubSpot Service Hub: A Centralized Dashboard for Customer Support

HubSpot Service Hub provides a single dashboard that lets your support team log, organize, and track all customer issues in one place. Agents can view:

Customer data

Ticket status

Queue location

How long it took

To resolve an issue. Reporting and analytics help you monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like ticket volume and first contact resolution time. HubSpot Service Hub offers ticket routing and automation features that allow your team to automate tasks. The platform also automatically creates tickets when a customer submits a form, email or

chat.

17. Intercom: A Conversational Approach to Customer Support

Intercom’s help desk offers synchronous, chat-based support. It prioritizes a conversational approach to customer communication, allowing businesses to engage with customers in real-time. Intercom is heavily investing in its AI offering, Fin. Fin can summarize conversations, personalize replies, and autofill ticket information.

18. Kustomer: AI-Driven Customer Service Operations

Kustomer is a customer service platform that provides businesses with tools to manage and optimize customer interactions across various channels. It offers omnichannel support, conversation tracking, automation, and analytics.

It also offers self-service and instant resolution with AI-powered bots that integrate with CRM data. Compared to other solutions, Kustomer has less robust native reporting and analytics features and fewer customization options.

19. Front: A Collaborative Approach to Customer Support

Front sets itself apart as a comprehensive customer service solution by going beyond the limitations of traditional help desk tools. Front has a:

Modern

Fast

Clean

Intuitive interface

It offers collaborative support for many teams compared to tools that specialize as support-only help desks.

Through robust tagging and routing capabilities, Front empowers organizations to efficiently manage and prioritize customer communications while fostering collaboration across departments. This creates better and faster workflows, making exceptional customer service at scale achievable for businesses of all sizes and industries.

20. Knowmax: A Knowledge Management System for Help Desks

Knowmax is an AI-powered knowledge management system developed by CX experts specifically designed to be integrated with and enhance your existing help desk. With its:

Interactive decision trees

Visual how-to guides

Articles

Knowmax ensures that knowledge is easily accessible and actionable for your help desk staff from day one. Knowmax serves as a single source of truth that helps create, curate, and organize all organizational knowledge efficiently in one place. It seamlessly integrates with your existing CX tools and channels, such as CRM, chat, telephone, etc., which empowers support representatives to access guided and contextually relevant knowledge within their workflows

7 Best Practices For Successful Helpdesk Integrations

1. Identify Your Helpdesk Integration Needs

Before integrating your helpdesk software with third-party apps, you must identify your team's unique integration needs. Assess your current workflows, identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies, and consider which third-party apps could help address these issues. Common integrations include:

CRM systems

Project management platforms

Communication tools

Knowledge management software

2. Track Key Metrics

With a better view of data coming in from all the help desks, you can use analytical tools to monitor performance metrics such as:

API limits

Uptime

Downtime

Ticket volume

Resolution speed

Response time

Open/Closed tickets

First contact resolution

Backlogs and predicted backlogs

Customer satisfaction score

Agent performance

Transfer rate

You should also use more native analytical tools to gather insights to improve the resolution speed and overall customer experience.

3. Choose Compatible Third-Party Apps

Select third-party apps that are compatible with your helpdesk software and can be easily integrated. Many helpdesk platforms offer native integrations with popular third-party tools, making the process straightforward. You can use middleware solutions or APIs to connect your helpdesk software with third-party apps that do not have native integrations.

4. Plan Your Integration Strategy

Develop a detailed integration plan outlining the steps to connect your helpdesk software with the chosen third-party apps. This plan should include:

Defining integration goals and objectives

Identifying the data and processes that need to be integrated

Determining any necessary customizations or configurations

Developing a timeline for implementation

5. Test and Refine Your Integrations

Before rolling out your integrations to the entire team, test them thoroughly to ensure that they function as expected and do not cause any disruptions to your helpdesk operations. Identify any issues or areas for improvement and refine your integrations accordingly.

6. Train Your Team on Integrated Workflows

Once your integrations are in place, train your team on using the connected tools and workflows effectively. Encourage your team to incorporate the integrated apps into their daily routines and leverage them to improve efficiency, collaboration, and customer support.

7. Monitor and Optimize Your Integrated Helpdesk

Continuously monitor the performance of your integrated helpdesk software to ensure that it delivers the desired results. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:

Response time

Resolution time

Customer satisfaction

Use this data to identify areas for improvement and optimize your integrated workflows.

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.

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.