What Is a Help Desk & 17 Key Features for Better Service Delivery

What is a help desk? Uncover 17 essential features that drive better service delivery and improve customer support operations.

Oct 27, 2024

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What Is a Help Desk & 17 Key Features for Better Service Delivery

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Picture this: you’re a 24/7 Customer Support rep who just received an email from a frustrated client. The message is long and details several issues with your product. As you read, you realize that this isn’t just a simple troubleshooting issue—solving this problem will require assistance from several departments within your organization, and the client is going to want updates as you work to find a resolution. That’s a lot of pressure! Now, imagine how much easier this scenario would be if you had a help desk to organize the incoming request, track the progress of the resolution, and keep the customer informed throughout the process. That's what a help desk does. This blog will answer the question, "What is a help desk?" and explore its functions and benefits, so you can better understand how they can enhance your customer service operations.

To level up your help desk operations and enhance customer satisfaction, consider adopting AI customer support from ChatBee. This solution can help you achieve your goals by automating repetitive tasks and organizing help desk tickets to streamline your operations.

What is a Help Desk & Its Importance

A help desk 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’s needed for IT support, to serve customers needing technical help.

Businesses don’t sail on smooth seas. Customers encounter product bugs, employees experience malfunctioning equipment, and organizations occasionally deal with advanced outages that send teams into turmoil. Luckily, help desks can steer the ship back to calmer waters.

What Does A Help Desk Do?

A help desk provides support for:

Customers

Employees

Both by addressing general inquiries

IT issues

Related concerns

Help desk departments typically specialize in incident management—or diagnosing and fixing immediate problems. Common tasks include:

Helping users with connectivity problems and getting them back online

Addressing product glitches

Investigating slow-running software

Processing password resets and assisting users who are locked out of their account

Resolving issues related to computer hardware like malfunctioning keyboards, monitors, or printers

Help desks typically ensure that customers and employees can use technology seamlessly.

Types of Help Desks

1. Web-Based Help Desk

Cloud-based help desk software is built on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Users access the help desk software using a recurring fee-based system. These services only require an internet connection, and the service provider takes care of the rest of the software management.

They also offer great accessibility through channels such as:

The service provider's website

Mobile apps

Desktop client

Web-based help desks are a suitable option for small —to medium-sized businesses that want a ready-to-use solution with minimal set-up.

2. Enterprise Help Desk

An enterprise help desk solution is software that provides comprehensive support and customer service capabilities to large organizations. It is designed to handle the needs of big companies and has a wide range of features that cater to both internal and external customers.

Features of the enterprise help desk include:

IT collaboration

Unified asset and account management

Central knowledge base

Customizable internal service systems

Scalable ticketing software

These tools boost efficiency on a larger scale, making collaboration and communication among widely spread support teams easy while maintaining high customer satisfaction.

3. Internal Help Desk

Internal help desk software streamlines employee service support and offers employees a centralized platform for service resolution. This separates it from traditional customer-facing help desks and makes it a great tool for reducing internal inefficiencies and smoothing out hidden problems.

Features include:

Ticket management

Knowledge base

Asset management

Collaboration tools

It uses monitoring, tracking, and analytics to identify trends and enhance employee service. Businesses of all sizes use it to increase productivity and reduce downtime.

4. On-Premise Help Desk

On-premise help desk software operates from the customer's server infrastructure, granting them full control over their data and IT environment. This level of control is particularly valuable for businesses with stringent security or privacy requirements as you maintain complete control over data.

While they can take time to set up, on-premise help desk solutions can be customized and tailored to your preferred customer experience style. On-premise help desk software requires a significant upfront investment in hardware and IT resources. They also require a dedicated IT team to manage the infrastructure and keep the software running smoothly.

5. Open-Source Help Desk

Perhaps you don’t have the budget to sustain robust help desk software and are just starting with a business facing customer service challenges. Open-source solutions shine in these situations by providing community-developed software that anyone can use. These are mostly free and can be customized by coding them to suit your business if you can do so.

They can be limiting as they are not developed by professionals, making security one of their main drawbacks. If you wish to use an open-source help desk long-term, you’ll need a team of IT professionals to build one around your business needs.

What is the Difference Between a Help Desk And a Service Desk?

A bulleted list shows the differences between help desks vs. service desks. Many businesses use the terms interchangeably, but help desks focus on putting out fires, while service desks specialize in broader IT service management activities.

A help desk is where customers and employees go for IT outages or end-user issues.

A service desk can address:

Issues

Manage service requests

Ensure IT services support the organization’s strategic goals.

While there are differences between help desks and service desks, they can boost efficiency, provide positive experiences, and save users time.

Why is a Help Desk Important?

A help desk can benefit companies of all sizes and types—from multinational enterprises to small consumer-facing businesses. While help desks have many benefits, here are three of the most important.

Drives Customer Satisfaction

A help desk can drive customer satisfaction by providing effective support. When users encounter issues, they want answers fast—and help desks ensure they receive the answers and guidance they need, reducing frustration and improving the customer experience. Doing so can also help build long-term customer relationships and foster customer loyalty.

Boosts Employee Service

Employees rely on technology to do their jobs, whether internal company software or hardware like business-issued laptops. A help desk can step in when these systems fail, helping teams get back to work. Help desks can also assist employees with HR-related questions.

A key pillar of employee service is making it easy for employees to get the help they need quickly, so maintaining a practical help desk can show employees you appreciate them. Not only that, it can also boost the employee experience (EX).

Enables A Business To Grow And Scale Better

Growing businesses gain new customers and hire more employees. A practical help desk supports this expansion by acting as an unflappable source of support even while the organization evolves.

Help desks don’t compromise on quality—whether servicing 10 support requests or 100. This helps businesses grow confidently, knowing their customer service, HR, and IT needs are well-managed.

AI Customer Experience

Omni Channel Customer Support

Help Desk Ticket Workflow

How to Scale Customer Support

What is a Support Ticket

Help Desk Software Requirements

Helpdesk Best Practices

17 Must-Have Help Desk Software Features

1. Ticket Management Features

Ticket mismanagement is the most common problem for businesses. Especially if you’re still hung up on conventional manual processes. This makes ticketing features the most important ticketing system requirement. You may lose multiple queries, maintain a streamlined workflow, and even miss/forget to update your customers about their ticket resolution journey. Robust help desk software features can solve this problem indefinitely. With a shared team inbox, process customer requests, manage tickets, streamline your workflow and notify your customers alongside.

Some must-have ticketing features are mentioned below. Help desk software features that you need for ticketing:

Email to ticket conversion

Automatic ticket assignment

Shared inbox with shared access

Chat and comment within the tickets

Ticket notifications

Auto-responders or notifications

Service level agreements management

Collision detection

Unified interface for a single query

Robust data management to save customer history

2. AI and Automation

Integrating AI and automation into a help desk can significantly enhance team efficiency. Teams can use workflow automation to streamline repetitive tasks. For example, this can include onboarding automation for new hires or using omnichannel routing to automatically direct customer or employee requests to the right support agent. Organizations can also use AI agents to supercharge their productivity.

These advanced chatbots can connect to backend systems to provide 24/7 customer support and handle issues as effectively as human agents. They can understand and fully resolve even:

The most sophisticated customer issues in seconds

Give users personalized service

Provide teams with automation suggestions based on past conversation data

More to improve help desk performance.

In fact, according to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, 70 percent of CX leaders believe that AI agents are becoming skilled architects of highly personalized customer journeys. This shows just how important this technology is and will be for the future of help desks and customer support.

3. An Intuitive User Interface

When you deploy help desk software, you expect it to make the life of your customer service department a little easy. That is why ensure you know everything about the help desk software before selecting one.

Here are a few things you must consider before making a decision:

Whether it matches your business’s requirements or not?

Whether your customer service department can use the software properly or not?

How many features does it have, and are they helpful or not?

Is the help desk software easy to set up and use?

Always select a help desk software that has a flawless user interface. Because even after offering numerous features, it is of no help when the user interface is hard to understand. An intuitive and easy-to-use interface will help you save:

Time

Work more efficiently

Improve the customer experience

4. Multi-Language Support

One of the most crucial ticketing system requirements in the multi-lingual world includes supporting multiple languages. Developing customer support that only supports a single language hardly makes sense. A great way of improving CX is by speaking their language. Brands must strive to make communication smooth.

Businesses should ensure that their ticketing systems are compatible with various languages. Even if you do not require multi-lingual support, including it in your futuristic plan will help.

5. Collaboration Features

The foundation of ideal ticketing system requirements lies in your end goals. It depends on the efficient management of its customer service and how collaborative the processes are. Team collaboration is a must in building a customer-intimate culture. Collaborative help desk software features are critical to your help desk software. A collaborative interface will empower your overall support.

Make sure you have these collaborative features as a part of your ticketing system requirements:

Shared Inbox

Each of your support reps would have access to a shared inbox. This way, they would know all the incoming queries and could collaboratively work on them. Your agents can also comment/chat within the tickets through a shared inbox.

Collision Detection

Let your agents view potential ticket collisions. Ideal ticketing software would sort this out. It would save unnecessary communication between agents and promise a standardized customer experience.

Merge Similar Tickets

Combine similar tickets and send their progress in one go. This would save hours of answering repetitive queries.

6. Escalation Management

Service level agreements define the level of service you expect from a vendor, laying out the metrics by which your services are measured. They also include the remedies and penalties that would be charged when the service levels are not achieved. Service level agreements are a critical component of any business trying to improve and provide better customer support.

Simplified SLA Target Creation

You can create targets for the entire workflow, like:

Time taken for the first response

Time taken for ticket assignment

Response time

Ticket closing time

Lifecycle Tracking

Keep tracking the lifecycle of your tickets. Keep track of the deadlines based on:

Elapsed time

Request categories

Minimum response time

First-time response

Prevent Potential Breaches

The primary reason why service level agreements are the most useful help desk software feature is that they allow you to predict potential breaches and prevent them. You can define automated escalation actions for each commitment. You can also notify the right team member to resolve the tickets in time.

Custom Alerts and Notifications

Set visual alerts and notifications to ensure those problematic tickets get more attention as the SLA breach time approaches.

Measure SLA Performance

Monitor the SLA performances and set more vital targets to deliver a refined and thorough customer service experience.

7. Customization Options

Interact with your customers at a personal level by customizing your ticketing system according to your requirements. Customize every little thing, from adding your logo to the domain to creating custom ticket fields. To make the process easier, you can use a user-friendly logo maker tool to design a unique and professional logo. You can also create and customize profiles for support executives according to their level of access.

With the help of customization, you can create contact forms with customized fields that only ask for specific customer information. Doing so can make your contact form less complicated and easy for the customers to understand. Thus, keep your brand identity intact with the help of customization, as the more the helpdesk is customized, the more it resembles your brand.

8. Self-Service Features

It becomes challenging when you need support employees working round the clock. For example, at the time of a sale or during the holiday/festival season, an ecommerce business is likely to receive several repetitive queries. I am sure you do not want your support representatives to be overburdened during work hours. This makes self-service a crucial addition to your ticketing system requirements. Self-service allows your customers to gain autonomy and solve their queries themselves. Self-service is among the most popular help desk software features adopted widely across industries, countries, and business units.

A survey states that by 2023, around 85% of customer service interactions will be through self-service.

There are multiple benefits of having self-service features:

Boosts social engagement

Support cost reduction

Builds a social presence

Increases customer satisfaction & success

Provide detailed troubleshooting steps for customers' common roadblocks and share them with every user.

You can add content in the format your customer wants. It can be:

Knowledge base

Video tutorials

FAQs

Personalized recommendations

Building a self-service strategy also includes making your website navigation-friendly. You can use advanced search algorithms to ensure customers find what they want. You can also have advanced categorization and sub-categorization features. Adopt a self-service tool for your organization. We have the perfect solution that caters to all your needs in a personalized manner.

9. Canned Responses

Tools like canned responses, snippets, email templates, etc., can save you a lot of time. They allow you to pre-create and compose messages for generalized responses.

Snippets

You can trigger snippets by entering a code. They are used explicitly in writing an introduction and concluding messages. But by using snippets, you can help your support agents during live chats and save them from repeatedly writing the same thing.

Email Templates

Email templates are pre-written messages. The customer support agents work on way too many common issues every day. Templates will help my agents save time as they won’t have to rewrite all the details of an email.

10. Customer Satisfaction Survey

Customers can make or break a brand, so knowing their perspective toward your service is very important. This is where the customer satisfaction survey, a built-in help desk software feature, plays a crucial role. It enables you to create and send surveys without any hassle to help you gather customer feedback. With the help of this feedback, you can effectively track the performance of your customer service agent/department.

You can also better understand how satisfied your customers are with your service. By gaining insights into all these factors, you can take corrective action without any further delay and ensure that you offer your customers the best service possible.

11. Omnichannel Access

Customers hate to wait on calls, be dodged, and contact brands repeatedly to resolve the simplest queries. Businesses with only a single communication channel usually face this problem. Features of a good ticketing system Omnichannel: An Important Help Desk Software Feature Brands try to do everything they can to make themselves widely available to customers.

But, many still struggle to implement a service strategy that truly meets customers to their specific terms. 73% of customers say that when the brand values their time, that is a good customer experience. An omnichannel helpdesk system strategy requirements brings you closer to your customers and helps you get a deeper context of their problems. An omnichannel response is a helpdesk software feature that has become the new benchmark for serving exceptional experiences.

90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as essential. This statistic has made it crystal-clear that responding immediately to customer queries is very important and can enhance customers’ experience. Help widget and live chat are two ticketing system features that allow you to offer quick solutions to your customers.

By integrating your knowledge base and FAQs, I can let my customers discover the answers by browsing the help widget. I can also attach the contact form with the widget so that my customers can reach out to me without any hassle by just filling it out. The help widget feature can make it easy for my customers to find solutions. The cherry on top is that customers can also start a chat from the help widget in case of any urgent query.

13. Workflow Automation

Automation is another helpdesk software feature. It will depend on the communication channel used by the customer. If you integrate automation in your helpdesk, you can ensure an immediate response. If you use automated chatbots, they will respond to customers even when your team is not online. For example, your helpdesk can send a personalized response to customers whenever they register their queries by automating your incoming ticket process.

They’ll hold off on customer queries until your agents take over. Since we’re talking about automation, did you know DeskXpand now has automated ticketing features? No? Check us out!

14. Analytics and Reporting Features

Setting individual and team goals based on data will help you improve accountability. Set up a dashboard to track the team’s performance and daily goals. Agents will know how quickly they must answer. Serve a responsive CX and monitor agent performance customer service managers can leverage analytics to boost employee morale and motivate them to reach expected numbers. They can track their team’s performance and help them if stuck somewhere. This way, managers can help boost agent morale and motivate them to reach expected targets.

Here are the three key metrics that you must measure:

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The customer lifetime value is a measure of your company's profits from a given customer. It can be calculated by adding up the total revenue earned from a customer and subtracting the initial cost from that total amount.

Churn Rate

Customer churn rate helps you identify why customers are leaving. The churn rate simply states the number of customers that stop doing business with a company. This metric is calculated as a percentage of customers your company has lost over time. If the number is higher, you must determine the reasons and change your strategies to reduce it.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The net promoter score measures customers’ willingness to recommend your company’s products and services to others. NPS helps you understand whether your customers are satisfied with your products. It is a good indicator of how loyal your customer base is. The NPS is a 10-point scale calculated based on the response to the question: “how likely are you to recommend < brand name > to my friends or family?” or even a set of questions. The former question is largely popular.

15. Third-party Integrations

When choosing a help desk software, it becomes crucial to see whether it integrates with other third-party tools. Let us see an example of why you should select a help desk software that integrates with other third-party tools. Assume you have selected helpdesk software that best suits your business requirements and is affordable.

But it just lacks one feature that could help you the most. In such scenarios, integrating the help desk software with other third-party tools becomes important, as your desire for that one feature gets solved quickly. So, always remember to select a help desk that integrates with other tools effectively.

Social Media presence is an obvious way to improve your customer experience. Earlier in this article, we noticed that Jet Blue Airways could track Mr. Brown’s tweet almost instantly. This helped them provide what they say, exceptional customer service to Mr. Brown. Social media channels are a breeding ground for customer service wins and fails. Many companies successfully communicate with their audiences and capitalize on Facebook, Yelp, etc.

According to a study by Conversocial, only 3% of tweets looking for help tagged the company. That means an incredible 97% of Twitter users could be tweeting good or bad things about your brand without you even knowing it! Yikes. You can find mentions of your brands even if you’re not tagged. You can look up your company name in the Twitter search box. Customers of the digital era will likely discuss their needs on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You can monitor your industry's direct and indirect brand mentions and buzzwords.

17. Security and Compliance Feature

According to a report, security breaches have risen by 11% since 2018. Your help desk software can be a treasure for hackers as it contains all the sensitive information of customers and members who access it. Hence, it is very important to ensure that all the information is safe and sound; this is where security comes in.

For starters, to enhance security, help desk software can let you offer role-based permission to limit access. In addition to creating strong passwords, help desk software also offers two-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access. So, now you know how important help desk software is; it safeguards all sensitive information and prevents it from breaching by offering quality security.

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

Best Help Desk Software for Small Business

Generative Ai for Customer Support

Best Incident Management Software

Best Open Source Ticketing System

How to Determine Your Help Desk Needs?

Assessing Your Current Situation: Where Do You Stand?

Before investing in a help desk solution, examine your current operations. The goal is to determine how well your existing system performs and identify any gaps a new help desk could fill. Start by tracking metrics like the volume of requests your team receives during a defined period and the average response and resolution times.

Categorize the requests to reveal any underlying issues. For example, suppose you discover your team is receiving many queries about a specific product or feature. In that case, it may indicate a lack of documentation or knowledge base articles that could be improved to help customers solve their problems independently.

Identify Pain Points: What’s Slowing You Down?

Establishing a baseline for your current help desk operations can reveal where there’s room for improvement. Next, gather feedback from your team about what’s slowing them down. You can do this through:

Surveys

Interviews

Informal discussions

Ask questions such as:

What aspects of the help desk software or procedures are slowing them down?

Are there any repetitive tasks that could be automated?

Review the technology and tools currently in use. Are they fully suitable for the tasks your team needs to perform? Consider whether the help desk software integrates well with other tools used by your company.

Evaluate Your Team’s Capabilities: Are They Ready?

Even if there’s a strong case for investing in a help desk solution, evaluating your team’s capabilities is important before deciding. Start by assessing whether your team has the necessary customer service skills and knowledge to handle the types of issues being reported. Determine if you have enough staff to manage the volume of requests without burnout. Identify any gaps in training that, if addressed, could improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Consider Technology Solutions: What Can Help Desk Tools Do?

As you begin to explore help desk options, knowing what these tools can do is helpful. For example, a robust ticketing system can help organize, prioritize, and track the status of support requests. Automation tools that automate repetitive tasks can free up your team’s time to focus on more complex issues. Self-service options can provide customers with links to your knowledge base articles to help them find answers to common questions without contacting support.

Budget Considerations: What Will It Cost?

Before you invest in a help desk solution, it’s crucial to understand the costs involved. Start by quantifying all expenses associated with implementing a new help desk solution. This includes:

Software and hardware costs

Training expenses

Any ongoing maintenance or subscription fees.

Calculate the expected return on investment by comparing the costs of the help desk solution over a set period (e.g., 1-3 years) against the financial benefits derived from its implementation.

Solicit Feedback: What Do Your Stakeholders Think?

Before deciding on a help desk solution, it’s wise to gather feedback from key stakeholders. Ask customers for input on their support experience and what improvements they would like to see. Your support team can provide valuable insights into what tools, resources, or changes would help them perform their jobs better.

Email Ticketing System

Help Scout vs Zendesk

Freshdesk Alternatives

Tidio Alternatives

Salesforce Alternatives

Freshdesk vs Zendesk

Talkdesk Competitors

Help Desk Knowledge Base Examples

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

Help desk software is a tool that helps businesses manage customer support requests. When a customer has an issue, they can reach out to the company via:

Chat

Phone

Social media.

Help desk software collects and organizes this information to streamline issue resolution. Instead of having customers reach out to individual agents who may be unavailable to help, help desk software creates a centralized system that promotes collaboration and improves the customer experience.

When a customer submits a support ticket, the software automatically assigns it to the right agent so they can resolve the issue quickly. If the agent isn’t sure how to help, they can look up information in the software’s knowledge base, a repository of articles that can help both customers and support teams. Help desk software also allows for communication between customers and agents as they work to resolve the issue. This keeps customers informed and enhances the overall support experience.