Best IT Helpdesk Software - Freshservice

What is an IT Helpdesk?

A helpdesk in the context of IT is a function responsible for answering the technical questions of users (typically employees, contractors, and suppliers). Companies in the business of selling IT products and services to customers often have externally facing IT helpdesks as well as to respond to customer queries. The questions and their answers are usually transferred via e-mail, telephone, website, or online chat. For those companies that subscribe to ITIL definitions, the IT helpdesk/service desk is an integral component of service management, concerned with addressing customer/employee queries, fulfilling service requests, and deliver busines value.

What does an IT Helpdesk do?

Act as a single point of contact (SPOC) for IT Support
Assisting in the procurement, setup, and configuration of IT devices and software
Providing information and technical instructions to users
Tracking and routing incidents using helpdesk software
Performing basic incident and problem management.
Resolving access and permission issues
Facilitating the diagnosis and repair of failed devices
Managing a knowledge base of known issues and frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Providing self-service options for end-users

IT helpdesks may be structured as centralized or distributed operational functions provided either by company staff or by an outsourced provider. Many larger companies leverage multiple help desks along with a network of suppliers and subject matter experts for escalation support.

Helpdesk vs. Service Desk

Some people will say that a help desk provides help, whereas a service desk provides service. (It isn’t quite that simple) A help desk is typically focused on issues that arise from existing services, whereas a service desks assist with not only issues but also with service requests (new services) and requests for information.

IT Service Desk

The ITIL definition of the Service Desk (Service Operation) is the Single Point of Contact between the Service Provider and the Users. A typical service desk manages Incidents and service requests and handles communication with users. It is concerned with both resolving the immediate issue and improving the quality & performance of services offered to ensure they are fully meeting the user’s needs by considering a broad business context. The service desk is a key component of managing the service management process from a big picture perspective.

IT Help Desk

The IT Help Desk can be separate or part of a larger Service Desk operation to improve the overall organization’s Customer Services The primary goal of the help desk is “first call resolution” The help desk feeds into the service desk with a tactical, day-to-day role in responding to end-user needs. The concept of an IT help desk was born in the late 1980s as an IT support capability to fix IT issues. It was initially focused on the IT rather than end user, usually with no targets for fixes, and immediate fixes were infrequent. With the proliferation of IT Help desk best practices have taken on characteristics like service desks (though in a more limited capacity)

IT Helpdesk Software - Features and Benefits

Help desks manage requests by using some sort of help desk software, or issue tracking system, enabling them to keep track of user requests, find answers to common questions and prioritize the requests being worked on. User contact is usually with internal employees and includes a combination of emails, contact numbers, and instant messages to provide support.

Benefits of IT Help Desk Software

Using a software platform to support your IT help desk operation can bring many benefits, including:

Enabling agents to scale to meet the volume of tickets/service requests
Setting expectations with requestors (end-users) on the timing and type of response they will receive
Reduce the frequency of being shuffled through different agents
Avoiding wasted time and user frustration

IT Help Desk Features

IT help desk software helps streamline incident management and other important support processes. With the ability to resolve issues more quickly, your helpdesk staff can assist more users. Some of the key features of a modern IT help desk software that help enable productivity include:

An efficient ticketing system for managing user issues
Multiple modes of user contact (email, phone, chat, web, etc.)
Built-in knowledge base for known issues and frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Workflow Automation to prioritize inquiries and route requests to the appropriate support resources
Contract/SLA management for managing help-desk performance and 3rd party relationships
Alerts and Escalations to help ensure timely resolution of issues
Agent dashboard that provides all the information they need in one place
Flexible Analytics and Reporting capabilities

How does an IT Helpdesk Software help?

While it is possible to operate a help desk without the aid of a software solution, doing so is likely to cause some issues that a software solution can help address. Right from switching through multiple email inboxes to get a complete context on the issue at hand to improving agent productivity and service desk efficiency, there is a multitude of issues that an IT helpdesk software help businesses with.

Ownership of an incident from start to finish

Tracking incidents as they move through different support teams is difficult and can lead to frustrating experiences for end users. Help desk software provides a single place for managing the incident from the time it reported until the issue is resolved.

Modern user interactions with support staff

Help desk software can provide more self-service and user enabled capabilities along with the ability to access support resources from wherever the user happens to be through mobile tools and web-based interfaces. It puts more tools in user’s hands and reduces the resource burden on help desk staff.

Process automation

leads to greater responsiveness, efficiency, and consistency in your help desk operations allowing your helpdesk to support a larger and more diverse business/IT ecosystem.

Data to support analytics and decision making

with actionable intelligence to help your IT Service Management organization manage the evolving challenges of delivering effective service in increasingly complex environments. Provide your teams with a detailed view of your infrastructure and its dependencies with diagnostic data, performance information, and actionable knowledge.

Top 5 IT Helpdesk Software in 2023

If you want to get started with an IT Helpdesk software for your business, you need to look for ticketing capabilities that streamline and uncomplicate your service management. Your IT helpdesk software should ultimately transform “cost-center IT” into a business enabler. We've put together a list of the top 5 IT helpdesk software in the market, along with their key features, to help you compare IT helpdesk software and select the best one for your business.

#1 Freshservice

Freshservice is Freshworks’ intelligent, right-sized, cloud-native IT Helpdesk software solution. It builds modern employee experiences through intelligent ticketing capabilities and delivers a unified service management experience. This empowers your IT helpdesk team to achieve efficiency, faster time-to-value, and report improved productivity and increased employee satisfaction scores.

Freshservice also provides an out-of-the-box, end-to-end consumer-grade experience that empowers employees to work from anywhere, anytime. It provides efficiency and agility through AI (Artificial Intelligence) to create contextual and intelligent ticketing experiences. With powerful integrations and workflows, you can build upon an open platform to bring all your discovery and monitoring tools under one roof. Enterprises using Freshservice will realize higher ROI, efficiency, and effectiveness.

With Freshservice, you get

ITIL-Aligned Processes: Freshservice helps organizations adopt ITIL best practices to achieve their business outcomes. Freshservice is also PinkVERIFY™ certified for 6 ITIL processes.

Advanced CSAT: With the built-in CSAT functionality, it gets easier to measure CSAT, set up reports, and configure workflows to improve service desk efficiency based on feedback.

Service Catalog: Streamline the request management process with an intuitive shopping cart from a catalog. Manage approvals, and notify users of status updates for a particular service item.

Effective Monitoring and Alerting: Consolidate and intelligently group alerts from multiple industry-standard monitoring tools onto a single pane to oversee the health of your business services in real-time.

Extensible Platform: With the Orchestration platform, take the no-code approach to integrate with external business apps to achieve greater operational efficiency with end-to-end automation.

Out-of-box Analytics: Drag and drop widgets to turn data into insights with customizable reports. The ML-powered “Ask Freddy” feature gets quick service desk metrics with a simple question.

Self-Service Portal: Users can easily raise a ticket from the portal or chat with the bot to have their issues resolved without filling out long forms or going through FAQs to eliminate redundant tickets.

Mobile App: Speed up approval processes, and manage incidents and change requests on the go. The native barcode scanner helps track assets and maintain an asset database.

Smart Automation: Optimize and increase agent productivity by creating no-code/low-code workflows. Orchestrate these workflows using third-party applications for repetitive and complex tasks.

#2 ServiceNow

ServiceNow's cloud‑based platform and solutions digitize and unify organizations so that they can find smarter, faster, better ways to work.

Modernize operations to optimize productivity, cost, and resilience with a single platform for IT.
Easy-to-use ticketing system with SLA management that tracks the deadlines for your IT team.
Embeds intelligence into every interaction to deliver experiences that break down silos and unlock productivity.

#3 Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management, the next generation of Jira Service Desk, is Atlassian's IT helpdesk software built for high-velocity development and operations teams.

Categorize service requests, incidents, problems, and changes by organizing and prioritizing these requests in one place to stay on track.
Improves visibility with an open, collaborative platform with tight integrations to other Atlassian products and 900+ apps to create context-aware, well-informed decisions.
Jira Service Management is effective across the entire IT service lifecycle from planning to deploying.

#4 ManageEngine

An ITIL-aligned helpdesk software, ManageEngine brings integrated asset and project management capabilities to help support teams deliver world-class service with reduced costs and complexity.

Integrated IT environment with ITSM, patch management, alert monitoring, and endpoint management in one platform.
Codeless and extensive out-of-the-box customizations for a personalized support experience.
Intelligent automation eliminates manual processes for quicker ticket resolution and higher end-user satisfaction.

#5 HaloITSM

Halo Service Solution offers feature-rich and cost-effective IT helpdesk software while maintaining a simple-to-use interface for great customer service.

Helps to take control of your configuration and reduce the total cost of ownership
Easy to configure, all-inclusive ITSM solution with no tiered plans or locked-away features
Brings an extensive marketplace that offers seamless third-party integrations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is helpdesk software?

Helpdesk software is a software application that helps you keep track of end user requests and issues coming to the helpdesk. Modern IT Helpdesk Software lets you track, solve and automate problems coming to your helpdesk through individual entities called tickets. Helpdesk software create an online interface that collects, stores, and tracks these tickets, and ultimately helps you solve employee/customer problems in a streamlined manner. Essentially, the helpdesk is the first point of contact for customers and employees to get answers or solutions to their issues. Troubleshooting your workplace printer, helping employees solve a small bug in tools are examples of such issues.

What is IT ticketing system software?

An IT ticketing software, also known as an IT ticketing system, is a software program that enables organizations to resolve their internal IT support queries by managing and streamlining the process of issue resolution. They handle individual elements called tickets that provide a context of what issue the requester is facing, along with other data like category, priority, etc. Tickets act as a documentation of a particular problem, its current status, and other associated information. Raised by the end-users of an organization whenever they encounter an event that interrupts their workflow, these tickets are routed to the IT ticketing software where they are categorized, prioritized, and assigned to different agents. The agents then analyze these tickets and suggest appropriate fixes or workarounds and resolve the issue. As a central repository of all these tickets, an IT Ticketing Software helps in providing the context of the issue history and its resolution.

What is ITIL help desk?

An ITIL helpdesk is a software application that is responsible for answering the technical questions of users (typically employees, contractors, and suppliers). For those companies that subscribe to ITIL definitions. the help desk is a component of the service desk, concerned with end-user functionality and providing incident management to ensure customers’ issues are resolved quickly. Enterprises and IT organizations often have externally facing IT helpdesks to respond to customer queries. The questions and their answers are usually transferred using e-mail, telephone, website, or online chat.

The following are common functions of an IT helpdesk:

Act as a single point of contact (SPOC) for IT Support
Assisting in the procurement, setup, and configuration of IT devices and software
Providing information and technical instructions to users
Tracking and routing incidents using helpdesk software
Performing basic incident and problem management.
Resolving access and permission issues
Facilitating the diagnosis and repair of failed devices
Managing a knowledge base of known issues and frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Providing self-service options for end-users

IT help desks may be structured as centralized or distributed operational functions provided either by company staff or by an outsourced provider. Many larger companies leverage multiple help desks along with a network of suppliers and subject matter experts for escalation support.

What tools are used by IT support?

Typically, IT support teams use a wide range of tools and applications like IT helpdesks, monitoring tools, operations and patch management tools, diagnostics and discovery tools etc. These tools are critical to their everyday operations, and play a significant role in the smooth functioning of any business, especially companies that are IT heavy. These tools help with IT support, assisting in procurement, set and configuration of IT devices and software, providing information and technical instructions to users, tracking and routing incidents, access controls, and providing self-service.