Help Desk

A help desk centralizes a company’s customer support; allowing them to offer better customer service.

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At it’s most essential, a help desk gives customers a place to address their questions, problems, issues with a company’s product or service. Without a help desk, companies lose a valuable opportunity to absorb a customer’s negative experiences and turn them around. While usually there when something goes wrong, help desks are essential to overall positive customer experiences and client services.

How Can Help Desk Software Be Used?

The tools a company chooses to address its customer support are important. While the essential ideas of a help desk can be quite simple — address customer needs — the ways in which you run your help desk can make or break it. Many companies nowadays use specialized help desk software to track and address their incoming customer issues. This is called trouble ticket software.

Additionally, many companies leverage online help desk software to provide some self-serve customer support: knowledge-bases, FAQs, and customer support search tools that allow customers to search for answers themselves.

Help Desk Software for Better Customer Service

Good help desk software can ensure a company will offer, if not perfect customer service, at least better customer support service. Help Desk Software provides a framework for capturing customer questions, problems, and issues; and tracks those issues until they are marked solved. Capturing is important because you need a way for your customer's issues to get to you. But capturing is not enough — think of a suggestion box that no one ever actually opens. You also need tracking, the ability for an issue to alert the customer support agents and ensure that it gets answered in a timely fashion. Help desk software can do this.

Help Desk Software for Happier Customers

Customers need a place to get in touch with you; whether that’s a phone call, an email, or a physical location, the easier it is to contact you when they have an issue, the less aggravated they will be with that issue. Additionally, the faster your company responds with applicable customer support solutions, the more loyal they will be. Often, a company who can effectively handle a customer support issue will actually receive more praise than if the customer had never had the issue at all.

Help desk software gives your customers an online service desk to visit when they have an issue; as well as makes answering their issues much easier and faster for your company.

Help Desk Software for Happier Customer Support Agents

When your company uses help desk software to handle its customer service, it reduces the strain of organization put on customer support agents. Rather than trying to keep support issues straight using an email inbox or another homegrown customer support solution, help desk software is built around the workflow of the customer support staff. This means your company’s support agents can focus on client services and not on managing the incoming mail.

Help Desk Software for Trouble Ticket Tracking

Good help desk software will include trouble ticket tracking built to fit within a support ticket system. The goal of help desk software is to bring a customer’s issue to solved as quickly and effectively as possible. When a customer submits an issue to your help desk, your company should have a help desk ticket system in place that keeps track of these in the form of tickets.

The support ticket system will keep track of which customer issues are new, which are pending more information from the customer, and which are solved. Notifications and alerts are tied into this support ticket tracking, so that as a ticket moves from new to solved, the support agents are reminded about outstanding issues that still need resolution. Additionally, your company should be able to create customized ticket routing to fit your particular customer support workflow.

Help Desk Software for Self-Service Customer Support

While some customer support issues are best handled through a support ticket system, some issues can be more easily and quickly addressed through the use of self-service customer support tools like knowledge-bases, community forums, and FAQs. Good help desk software will come with the tools to both create and manage these kinds of customer service tools.

Self-service customer support options such as these give your customers the ability to get answers to their questions without relying on a response from a customer support agent. While this will not work for every customer service issue, it can address many of the most common customer concerns; and can relieve your help desk agents’ support ticket workload.

The Benefits of Web-Based Help Desk Software

While physical or phone-based help desks are still valuable to some businesses, it is becoming more and more important for companies to offer online customer service. Just as consumers turn to the web for information about a product or service, they also look there when they have a question or issue with that product.

In addition to offering an online help desk, many companies are looking to run their help desk software straight from the web. Hosted help desk software is a help desk that is completely Web-based, freeing users from the burdens and constraints of running their own customer support software. It is built and managed via the Web from end-to-end, making it not only more readily accessible, but also more interactive, more dynamic, and more compelling. From ticket tracking through community support, online help desk software allows users to perform all tasks across the customer support lifecycle quickly, easily, and conveniently, from any Internet-enabled PC or handheld device.

Hosted Help Desk 2.0 vs. Running Your Own Help Desk Server

Traditionally, Help Desk Software was installed and run on a company’s web server. This meant that the software had to be installed and configured before it could be used; and that it required maintenance throughout it’s life. Similarly, the company had to pay for the server upkeep and the bandwidth to run it.

A hosted help desk solution removes the hassle and risk of maintaining your own server and software. Instead, hosted customer support software is delivered via the SaaS (Software as a Service) model. SaaS eliminates the need to install software on desktops, so customer support agents can begin handling customer issues within a couple minutes. All features and functions are accessible via the Web, so any user, anywhere around the globe, can handle customer support issues at any time.  And, because ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and enhancements are handled by the service provider, and because SaaS solutions can be instantly scaled to support new users whenever needed, burden on IT staff is dramatically reduced.

Zendesk: Help Desk 2.0

Zendesk help desk software provides professional-grade customer support service that is simple to implement, affordable, and highly customizable.

Perfect for SMBs or enterprise scale companies, our help desk software is a scalable solution that easily adapts to fit new or evolving work flows and processes with no downloading, installation or managing. As a SaaS program, Zendesk help desk software is more responsive and customizable. Companies can quickly scale to answer customer support requests, and the ecosystem of SaaS integrations enables the smooth flow of customer data and services

Leveraging the benefits of web-based communications, social media, and SaaS, our hosted customer support software has helped companies of all sizes move their help desk and customer support operations to the Web. Companies such as Twitter, MSNBC, IDEO, and Books-a-Million can attest to the fact that Zendesk’s help desk software is all about simplification.

Zendesk offers:

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Zendesk is a professional-grade customer support help desk system with a full-featured back end for your customer reps and support agents.

 

  • Overview

    Zendesk extends good help desk karma to any company looking to offer professional-grade support service with very little effort. Perfect for companies of all sizes, we grow with your organization, easily adapting to fit new or evolving work flows and processes with no downloading, installation or managing. Get rid of the traditional IT headaches that are associated with security.

     

    Trust us, setup is easy

    Simple configuration means that advanced features such as SLAs, custom workflows and business rule creation can be customized quickly and require no ongoing management. You can easily share the wealth of information you possess by publishing your knowledge base, forums, FAQs and other content on the portal and tie them directly into your ticket processing.

    You don't have to give up
    your designer coffee

    With Zendesk, extending good help desk karma doesn’t mean having to give up your favorite caffeinated beverages or taking a hit on your bottom line. With plans starting at just $9 a month, companies of all sizes can benefit from our scalable, professional grade support service.

    Plays well with others

    You can use your own email or you can use one of the email addresses we provide. Don’t worry about compatibility because there’s an extensive set of APIs and painless integration to services such as the 37signals products, Salesforce.com, Twitter, Freshbooks and Yammer. Keep with your beloved application data by just pulling it into your help desk with our widgets.

    Make us as good
    looking as you are

    Zendesk offers easy customization to match a company’s look and feel. We can brand your online support panel to tie into your online presence. Add us to your domain with your own email address and SSO/authentication in any language you want - even one we don’t know.

     
     

  • Collect

    Zendesk is your help desk back-end and hub for collecting customer conversations. We provide you with a state-of-the-art professional-grade help desk system for your support agents. Customize. Coordinate. Extend your good help desk karma.

    Any way you like it

    Is your inbox feeling a little out of it? Manage your emails by either forwarding them to Zendesk or use the email addresses we provide. In fact, set up as many addresses as you want and give each its own set of rules to allow your customers to check up on their request history and access a full communication trail.

    Like a well-oiled machine

    Each piece of your help desk puzzle should work together flawlessly. Zendesk fully integrates with CRM tools such as Salesforce.com, Highrise, and Get Satisfaction. Additionally, our comprehensive list of APIs make it easy to build and configure integrations that collect user information and feedback from any system you require.

    Don’t drop the ball

    Extending good help desk karma means being available for your customers. Implement a drop box where they are always just one-click away from asking a question. You can even go a step further and add the dropbox to your iPhone and Android app.

     

  • Organize

    Zendesk offers an intuitive interface for implementing your own workflow and business rules in all corners of the system, and comes pre-populated with business rules for most standard support operations.

    Take our word for it, it's customizable

    Your help desk can be open or closed, for everybody or for a select group of customers, for your internal staff only, for only those you allow, for those from certain domains, from those who ask nicely and any other combination you can imagine. Pre-populating your help desk is another option since we offer SSO and integrate with your current authentication system and with OpenID. The sky’s the limit.

    Zendesk does the heavy lifting

    Timely responses definitely extend good help desk karma. Zendesk is suitable for escalations and other time-driven actions so you get the message quickly and to the solution even quicker. Canned replies or quick cases are ticket templates that can be applied to all updated tickets.

    You can also set up triggers to send notifications and perform actions on the request of a ticket update.

    Because everyone views life in different ways

    Sometimes you just need a different way of looking at things. With Zendesk you can customize how you view your tickets. From sorting by priority to choosing a list view over a table, with just a few clicks of the mouse you can give your ticket display a complete makeover. We make it easy for you with our pre-defined views that are based on best-practices, but feel free to take the law into your own hands.

     
     

  • Self-Serve

    Zendesk comes with a customizable self-service portal that allows your customers to interact with each other through the online forums, building an online support community that will ultimately bring down your ticket volume. And who doesn't want that?

    Information at your fingertips

    Set up the forums in any way you want and use them to store your articles, solutions and knowledge base information. You can also publish ticket content directly to your knowledge base forums from your help desk making the resolution production process painless.

     
     

  • Branding

    Zendesk is for you, so we want to be sure the help desk looks and feels exactly the way you want it to. Feel free to change the colors, logos, favicon and whatever else you want to in order to make it match your brand. Don't worry, we won't be offended.

    Go ahead, make it all yours

    We want your help desk to be YOUR help desk. Use your own email address, domain and even your own SSL certificate. Customize the email HTML templates to your look and standards and make it so any message and notification is worded exactly the way you want it to be. Make the customer portal available in any language and implement your own CSS style sheets and custom javascript. Have fun with it. And love your help desk.

     
     

  • Integration

    Zendesk is like the guy that everyone gets along with. You can set up Zendesk to use your current authentication and SSO system almost as easily as customizing the look and feel. Quickly integrate it into your legacy applications or other cloud services and benefit from built-in integrations systems like Atlassian JIRA and Salesforce.com.

    There's the standard...

    There are the widgets you can embed directly in the help desk and targets that allow you to push data and notifications out to and via channels like Yammer, Clickatell SMS, and Twitter. Basically the ones you’d expect from a professional-grade customer support help desk system like Zendesk.

    And then the not-so-standard

    And then there are all the integrations you can embed in our systems and clients like our drop box for websites or mobile applications, our iPhone app and our Salesforce.com app on the AppExchange. Don’t see an API that you want? Go ahead and create it using our Custom widget option.

    Read more about these in our Extras section.

    You'll have fun with these

    To extend the functionality of your help desk application, Zendesk integrates with an extensive list of APIs. In addition to our REST, Widget, Target, and Remote Authentication APIs, we also have a mail API that allows you to do basic ticket processing using email only. Anyway you use them, the possibilities are endless.

    Read more about these in our API section.

     
     

  • Security

    Don't worry, we've got you covered. We take all possible steps in making sure your Zendesk data and all communication with your help desk is secure and that your billing data stays safe-and-sound through our PCI/DSS certified payment gateway and credit card processor. Go ahead, breathe a sigh-of-relief.

    Mother Nature won't bother us

    Zendesk's servers are in a data center in seismic-neutral Sacramento, California, with totally diverse routed networking, redundant environmental conditioning, physical and electronic security systems and a 99.999% facility and 99.95% network up-time guarantee. Impressive, huh?

    We've got your back

    Dedicated remote backup is available for Plus+ customers. We work with Engine Yard as a Managed Service Provider and they perform daily S3 destined backups of all Zendesk data. Engine Yard complies with the EU Safe Harbor Principles published by the U.S. Department of Commerce. So rest assured that what you put in there will stay in there.

    Your secrets are
    safe with us

    Zendesk applies a secure hash to all passwords before storing them which means that user passwords are never logged or written to the database in a human readable format. Additionally, our SSO is based on a "shared secret" between your local authenticating system and Zendesk and all communication is encrypted. And if that’s not enough, we offer SSL for all plans and SSL certificate hosting for Plus+ customers.

    Heard enough?

    Maybe its time for you to sign up for your free trial (no credit card required):

     

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