Editor’s note: Veranika overviews the key features of help desk software for small businesses and presents a list of the top 3 small business help desk software. If you are planning to establish a help desk in your company, feel free to consider ScienceSoft’s help desk outsourcing services.
By automating ticket creation and resolution workflows and consolidating relevant customer/employee data and ticket-related information in one place, help desk software can increase your agents’ productivity and, consequently, improve customer/employee satisfaction and retention rates. 92% of help desk software users claim that help desk software contributed to increased employee and customer satisfaction.
Small business help desk software: the essence and main features
Employees and customers expect to receive a high level of support from a company regardless of its size. However, small businesses have budget and workforce limitations. Help desk software is a cost-effective solution assisting your agents with accepting, monitoring, and resolving incoming tickets and providing self-service capabilities for your customers or employees.
It may be time-consuming to find fitting help desk software for a small business, as there are many solutions on the market, and new offers appear every day.
To optimize your search, I suggest focusing on the following features that help desk software for small businesses should include:
- 360-degree employee/customer view.
- Ticket management.
- Self-service options for employees and customers.
- Knowledge base for help desk agents.
- Omni-channel support.
- Dashboards and reports measuring help desk KPIs (Resolution Rate, CSAT, etc.), etc.
The best help desk software for small businesses
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a variety of features to streamlining the employee and customer support processes for small businesses. It includes AI-powered Virtual Agent – a chatbot with natural language processing capabilities that can help resolve standard employee and customer issues (password resets, etc.) Dynamics 365 Customer Service can serve as a ticketing system, automatically converting requests into tickets, assigning tickets to suitable agents, and guiding the entire ticket resolution workflow. Self-service portals with an integrated knowledge base allow your employees and customers to find solutions to their problems (troubleshooting error messages, data access, etc.) without agents’ help.
Limitations: Limited number of integrations with third-party services.
Pricing:
Professional Edition – $50/user/month.
Enterprise Edition – $95/user/month.
Virtual Agent – $1,100/tenant/month.
More about Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud automates small businesses’ employee and customer support processes and allows agents to connect with employees or customers across various communication channels (email, phone, etc.). In Salesforce Service Cloud, you can create and manage a knowledge base for your agents, employees, and customers. The knowledge base can be integrated into a self-service portal for customers/employees and an AI-based Einstein bot can be used on the portal to resolve the most common questions without a human agent’s help. Another distinctive feature of Salesforce Service Cloud is telephony integration that enables your agents to see customers’ or employees’ profiles before picking up, automatically log calls, and more.
Limitations:
- No possibility of on-premises implementation.
- Limited customization capabilities.
Pricing:
Essentials Edition – $25/user/month (billed annually).
Professional Edition – $75/user/month (billed annually).
Enterprise Edition – $150/user/month (billed annually).
Unlimited Edition – $300/user/month (billed annually).
More about Salesforce Service Cloud
SharePoint is a cost-effective platform that offers extensive customization capabilities to build a ticketing system for a small business. It can automatically convert your employees’ and customers’ requests into tickets and route them to the appropriate agents according to the established criteria (their competencies, experience, availability, etc.). The system automatically sends notifications to your agents about assigning new tickets, upcoming or expired due dates, etc. SharePoint enables the no-code creation of self-service portals that can include a knowledge base and FAQs where employees and customers can search for answers to their problems (hardware problems, remote access problems, etc.).
Limitations: Limited number of integrations with third-party services.
Pricing:
SharePoint Online:
Plan 1 - $5/user/month.
Plan 2 - $10/user/month.
Resolve more issues faster with small business help desk software
Small businesses worldwide use help desk software and have already reaped its benefits, including improved productivity of help desk agents and increased employee/customer satisfaction and retention rates. If you are interested in implementing help desk software tailored to the needs of your small business, feel free to reach out to ScienceSoft's team.
With 16 years in application support, we offer multi-tiered IT support for your enterprise applications or your software products and their users with minimum involvement from your side.
