Top 10 Service Desk Software for Support Teams in 2024
Table of contents
What’s the maximum amount of time you’re willing to wait to get your queries resolved?
Our research shows that about 52% of customers expect their issues to be resolved within a day. Anything beyond that is an indicator of poor customer service.
Customer support is a time-sensitive function. And, if you’re someone who manages a support team, you might be aware of the importance of adding the right tools to help your agents work faster and more efficiently .
In this blog, we’ve covered one such critical tool in detail — a service desk software solution.
Service desk solutions are primarily meant for IT support teams to track issues, resolve IT-related queries, and automate workflows. They are extremely versatile and provide a structured support and issue management solution that can help you tackle different types of requests and tickets efficiently.
Read on to learn more about the top service desk software available in the market, their unique features, and pricing. You can use these insights to make an informed decision while choosing a service desk solution for your business.
Table of Contents
- What is A Service Desk Software?
- Top 10 Service Desk Software in 2024
- Choosing A Service Desk Solution for Your Business
What is A Service Desk Software?
A service desk software solution is a helpdesk designed to track, manage, and resolve service requests efficiently. It offers several features that can help employees address any issues they might encounter while using workplace tools and technology.
By swiftly responding to employee queries, IT support teams can ensure that employees are maximizing the technological resources available in the organization. This improves employee productivity and helps overall operational efficiency.
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Top 10 Service Desk Software in 2024
After extensive research, we’ve compiled a detailed list of some of the best service desk software available in the market. Here’s a walkthrough of their best features and pricing to help you make an informed decision when choosing a service desk for your business.
1. Hiver
Hiver is a powerful service helpdesk that allows you to manage IT service request from the comfort of your inbox.
his platform offers world-class tech support to your employees across channels such as email, chat, knowledge base, and phone.
Hiver allows you to streamline your IT support process, allowing you to handle service requests faster and improve employee efficiency.
Along with this, Hiver is super easy to use and highly intuitive, making it a user favorite.
Here are some of Hiver’s best features:
- Efficient ticket management: Turn incoming service requests into actionable tasks and assign them to the appropriate agents. View the progress of each ticket by tracking whether its status is marked as Open, Closed, or Pending. This way, you know which tickets are pending and who is working on them.
- Automation: Let Hiver’s automation take care of routine tasks such as ticket assignment and inbox organization. For instance, use conditional assignments to route queries to team members with specific skill sets or according to team workload. Or use tags to automatically categorize incoming queries based on priority, importance, and query type.
- Robust analytics:Get insights into your IT support team’s performance with custom reports. Track key metrics such as first response time, average resolution rate, and ticket volume togauge the quality of support and make improvements wherever necessary.
- Collaboration: Use Notes and @mentions to invite team members to collaborate on IT service requests. Move away from endless email threads, CCs, and forwards and opt for faster internal collaboration with Hiver.
- Self-service: Create a detailed knowledge base of important help articles, tutorials, and how-to guides that can be easily accessed by your employees. Empower them to resolve queries on their own so they don’t have to rely on your IT support team every time.
- AI capabilities:Enable agents to offer faster support by condensing long email threads into easy-to-read summaries with AI. Keep your inbox clutter-free by automatically closing unimportant emails such as auto-responders. This way your IT support team can work faster and deliver swift resolutions for service requests.
Pricing
Hiver has a four -tiered pricing plan that starts at $19 per staff per month.
2. ServiceNow
ServiceNow is one of the leading providers of IT service desk solutions. The platform offers a single hub from which you can improve your employees’ IT experience and increase their productivity.
ServiceNow is used by many businesses to streamline their digital transformation process by establishing seamless workflows for incident and change management.
The only problem with ServiceNow is that the sheer number of features and complicated UI can be overwhelming for new users. It can take users some time to get acclimatized to the platform.
Here are some of the best features of Service Now:
- Intelligent chatbot: Use ServiceNow’s AI-powered virtual assistant to send automated responses to employee queries. The chatbot uses generative AI to add suggested topics in response to an employee query. This way employee queries are addressed faster, improving your employees’ time to value with any workplace technology
- Performance analytics: Get insights into your service requests, prioritize critical tickets, and focus your resources on complex issues. With time charts, forecasts, breakdowns, and dashboards you can keep up with the trends in how agents handle service requests while identifying areas for improvement.
- Incident management: Leverage automated workflows to track, monitor, and resolve high-impact incidents in your IT operations. Some examples of such incidents include network outage, payment processing failure, and data breaches.
ServiceNow pricing
Custom pricing that varies with the size and needs of your business.
3. Vision Helpdesk
Vision Helpdesk offers a wide range of products designed to improve the productivity and efficiency of your support teams.
Its service desk software can be used by IT teams to proactively manage incidents and plan, structure, and deliver effective IT services.
Here are some of Vision Helpdesk’s best features:
- IT asset management: Track and manage all of your IT assets in a single dashboard. Manage new asset requests, approval, procurement, and distribution of laptops, servers, software applications, and networking equipment with ease.
- Incident management: Register all IT incidents and categorize them by type and priority in Vision Helpdesk’s incident case management system. Loop in stakeholders any time an incident needs to be escalated to other departments or functions.
- Knowledge base management: Focus your IT team’s effort on resolving important queries and issues at hand. Create multi-level, categorized staff knowledge bases for routine queries that employees can tackle on their own.
- Task management: Create and assign tasks related to troubleshooting, system maintenance, or incident management to the appropriate members of your team. Add context to tasks by leaving comments, embedding links, and uploading relevant attachments. Use due dates and reminders to stay on track with the progress of tasks.
Vision Helpdesk pricing
Vision Helpdesk offers five different pricing options that start at $12 per agent per month and goe up to $48 per agent per month.
4. Freshservice
Freshservice by Freshworks is a cloud-based ITSM system that offers multiple features for automating workflows, managing IT assets, and enabling self-service.
The platform’s no-code ability means that IT teams can deploy it quickly without extensive coding.
A major drawback with Freshservice is that its asset management features can be quite difficult to use. Managing change requests forms can also get a bit tricky since the process involves multiple, complicated steps.
Here are some of Freshservice’s best features:
- Ticket management: Triage incoming tickets using automated workflows to categorize and prioritize queries. Use automated machine learning powered responses for routine queries that do not require an agent to be involved.
- Service catalog: Enable employees to choose from different service categories such as hardware provisioning, application access, data service, and software installation. Customize categories as you need so employees can find help for different kinds of IT service requests.
- Multichannel support: Enable employees to raise IT service requests from their preferred channel. For instance, employees can raise tickets from Slack, MS Teams, or the Freshservice chatbot.
- Freshservice chatbot: Automate repetitive tasks such as ticket creation, classification, and tracking with the Freshservice chatbot. Enable agents to perform quick actions on tickets with ease.
Freshservice pricing
Freshservice offers four types of pricing that starts at $19 per agent per month.
5. SysAid
SysAid’s service desk uses generative AI to manage every aspect of your IT support process. From AI-powered conversational chatbots to automated ticket routing to personal writing assistants, SysAid offers everything your support team needs to respond faster to employee queries.
The platform is designed for mid-size teams and large businesses to help IT admins resolve technical issues quickly and efficiently.
While SysAid functions smoothly in most aspects of IT support, certain issues that require developer expertise can get considerably delayed. It can be on backlog for a long time until a developer becomes available and picks up the issue.
Here are some of SysAid’s best features:
- SysAid Copilot: Integrate SysAid’s AI-powered chatbot into your organization’s knowledge base to assist employees with IT queries. The chatbot sorts through internal data as well as external sources to surface the most relevant insights. Loop in live agents with just a single click.
- Asset management: Maintain a detailed record of all your IT assets using an efficient inventory management system.
- CMDB: Track and monitor the different components of your IT infrastructure by automatically important your data into a Configuration Management Database or CMDB. Visualize how different assets are interconnected and identify any bottlenecks for smooth running.
- AI chatbot within MS Teams: Enable users to raise tickets for IT related queries directly from MS Teams
SysAid pricing
Custom pricing based on your business needs, team size, and preferences.
6. Spiceworks
Spicework’s cloud-based service desk can be used by small businesses, mid-sized teams, and enterprises to manage their daily projects and user requests.
The best part about the platform is that it has a forever free plan, making it an affordable option if you are just setting up your IT support team.
Spiceworks is a popular helpdesk option for many users especially because the platform is free. However, the platform does run ads on its user interface which can be intrusive.
Here are some of Spiceworks’ best features:
- Customizable web portal: Deploy a web portal on your website to make it easier for users to submit tickets and interact with your support team.
- Dashboards: Stay on top of user tickets with Spicework’s dashboards. Track the progress of each user inquiry and identify any roadblocks or challenges in your IT support.
- Network inventory and monitoring: Catalog all IT assets connected to your organization’s network in a single, accessible location.
- Customized knowledge base: Empower employees to self-serve by creating relevant help articles and tutorials in a customizable knowledge base.
- Custom ticket views: Filter incoming tickets by priority, user type, urgency, or any other way by categorizing them the way you want.
Spiceworks pricing
Forever free plan that can be used by businesses of any size.
7. Happyfox
Happyfox is an advanced helpdesk management software that can be configured to deliver seamless IT support to users.
It allows support agents to engage with users across channels such as website, phone, chat, and web. Happyfox also offers several customizable workflows that can be adapted to improve the efficiency of support processes such as ticket management, escalations, and incident management.
Happyfox has a clean and simple interface and is relatively simple to use. However, its pricing model is expensive and larger teams may end up paying higher costs even for features that they do not fully utilize.
Here are some of Happyfox’s best features:
- Ticketing system: Create, assign, and track all incoming user requests with ease. Use custom ticket queues, categories, and ticket status to categorize incoming queries and respond according to their priority and urgency.
- Automation: Use Happyfox’s smart automations to take care of tasks. Create smart rules by defining conditions under which certain actions should be automatically triggered.
- Help Desk Reports: Pull up detailed reports into team performance, ticket resolution rates, and other key metrics.
- Task management: Break down complex tickets into smaller, manageable tasks and assign them to support team members along with due dates. View which agent is working on what and see the status of pending tasks to estimate how much time it will take for a query to get resolved.
Happyfox pricing
Happyfox has a four tier pricing that starts at $9 per agent per month with custom pricing for enterprise customers.
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8. Zendesk
Zendesk’s AI-powered service desk offers several advanced capabilities that are tailored to large businesses and enterprises.
The platform allows your support teams to tackle user requests across multiple channels – email, chat, phone, or apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Zendesk also offers personalization features that allow IT support agents to respond contextually to every ticket.
Although Zendesk comes with comprehensive features, there are many drawbacks to using the platform. For one thing the interface is super complicated and clunky. The other problem is that reporting features are quite complicated and often lack depth and flexibility in pulling up insights.
Here are some of Zendesk’s best features:
- Generative AI: Give agents insights into important information such as similar tickets, suggested responses, and ticket summaries. This gives them proper context into resolving IT service requests and helps with quicker resolution of queries.
- AI chatbots: Zendesk’s answer bots can analyze the intent behind a user query and offer suggestions for routine queries. For complex cases, the bot immediately loops in a live agent for further troubleshooting and resolution.
- Zendesk agent workspace: View user requests, ticket submissions, and other important information from a single dashboard dedicated to agents. Customize the workspace according to your agent’s workflows enable them to work the way they want.
- Live chat: Deliver personalized support experiences through Zendesk’s live chat feature. Interact with users in real-time, provide immediate assistance, and improve customer satisfaction.
Zendesk pricing
Zendesk has a four tier pricing plan that starts at $55 per agent per month.
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9. GoToResolve
GoToResolve is a unified IT management service desk designed for SMBs to manage their technical support.
Features like automated workflows and task management enable teams to offer remote support and stay on track with everything related to user devices such as deploying updates, troubleshooting, and managing system installations.
GoToResolve is a comprehensive remote management and monitoring solution. However, it does require extensive system resources to function properly and can often lead to your desktop or laptop crashing because of the high demand on CPU and memory.
Here are some of GoToResolve’s best features:
- Conversational ticketing: Plug in GoToResolve’s user portal to the messaging apps your teams are already using. This way employees can raise service requests without switching between multiple apps or tabs.
- Background access: Enable your IT support teams to access an employee’s desktop screen remotely. This way they can manage any technical issues and pull system diagnostics without interrupting the end user.
- Camera share: Provide interactive video support to users so that they don’t have to struggle with managing IT requests. Agents can easily access issues from their mobile device and diagnose problems in no time.
- Agent collaboration: Multiple agents can view and control the user’s screen simultaneously. They can chat with each other and work collaboratively to find resolutions faster.
GoToResolve pricing
GoToResolve offers four different pricing plans that start at $23 per agent per month. Its premium pricing can be customized for your business.
10. HaloITSM
HaloITSM is an all-inclusive ITSM solution that offers features like incident management, knowledge bases, and SLA management.
The platform can help you plan, track, and manage technical changes across your organization without any hassle.
However, the drawback with HaloITSM is that its extensive feature sets can be quite hard to configure. Simple things like changing a setting can get confusing and add to your cognitive load.
Here are some of HaloITSM’s best features:
- AI-powered incident management: Use automation to group related tickets together to resolve similar incidents faster and improve service delivery efficiency. Leverage AI triage to study user tickets and determine how to prioritize service requests accurately.
- Self-service portal: Add HaloITSM’s white label portal to your website or mobile app. Enable users to raise tickets, interact with support agents, and find information from your knowledge base.
- SLA management: Respond to user inquiries within specific timeframes by configuring proper SLAs for every query. Set escalation rules to trigger the right workflows any time an SLA has been violated.
- Service catalogue: Maintain a comprehensive list of all the activities done on a user’s system. Provide detailed reports on service requests and keep users informed of the progress at every step.
HaloITSM pricing
Custom pricing that caters to the diverse needs of your business.
Choosing A Service Desk Solution for Your Business
An efficient IT support team is one of the most important drivers of operational efficiency for any business.
They are responsible for maintaining the smooth flow of all your IT assets and ensuring that they operate securely and effectively.
Equipping your IT teams with the right service desk can go a long way in supporting critical IT functions and enabling seamless service delivery. If you’re considering purchasing a service desk for your business, we’d recommend you to keep the following in mind:
- Seamless ticket management functionalities
- Smart automation to take care of repetitive tasks
- User-friendly and intuitive user interface
- Self-service and knowledge base features
- Scalability
- Comprehensive reporting and analytics
from this, remember to look for a service desk solution that aligns with your business needs, user requirements, customizability, and budget.
In fact, you can start by testing out Hiver for free and see how it fares in elevating your IT service process.
