Amidst the global pandemic, government regulations and work-from-home policies have forced businesses to increase their digital investments. They’re delivering products and services with a higher degree of automation and have to support a large distributed, remote workforce. As a result, businesses need a higher degree of integration across customer-facing and internal websites, portals, field service apps, and more. At the same time, they need to resolve various technical issues, customer complaints, and service requests with higher agility. Their web help desks need to scale up and meet the increased workloads while ensuring a superior experience for all stakeholders. This article discusses how businesses can choose a help desk solution and lists five free help desk software to ensure seamless management of tickets with faster, effective issue resolution.
Selecting a Web Help Desk Solution
Before you select a help desk software, you need to assess your business requirements. While some organizations need an end-to-end ITSM solution, others want a simpler tool for managing their customer tickets. In this respect, you should evaluate if you need omnichannel support to cover all customer touchpoints or a solution to convert email requests to tickets. Automation and integration requirements, ease of implementation and usage, self-service and knowledge base capabilities, and reporting features are other major criteria for evaluation. Last but not least, your budget will help you shortlist the most appropriate solutions for your organization. The free web help desk solutions mentioned in this article are ideal for small teams. However, many of these free solutions also offer paid plans to help you scale up in the future.
SolarWinds® Web Help Desk® Free Edition
SolarWinds offers a comprehensive web help desk solution for businesses to streamline the management of service requests. Its Web Help Desk (WHD) Free Edition offers useful integrations to help you meet your service levels. It helps you monitor and ensure better adherence to service-level agreements (SLAs) with renewal deadline alerts. The free help desk software also offers Active Directory integration, LDAP authentication, ticket routing and assignment, and a self-service portal for end users. The solution is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac systems. If you’re looking for more features, you can also consider SolarWinds Web Help Desk Full Edition, which offers a 14-day free trial.
Zoho Free Help Desk
Zoho Free Help Desk is a powerful cloud-based ticketing solution for up to three free users. It’s useful for smaller organizations or startups who need to unify ticketing across different forms, self-service portals, email, and more. With this free help desk solution, your team can resolve customer issues fast with a contextual view of the tickets with complete history and timelines. Further, you can set up SLA alerts, automate ticket escalation, and create macros to perform predefined actions or routines, generate teams’ performance reports, and more. The solution also offers easy integration with popular tools to enhance collaboration and productivity. Zoho offers mobile apps for teams to view and respond to critical tickets any time, without being glued to their desktops.
Help Desk Software HESK
HESK is a simple and lightweight free help desk software ideal for customer support teams. It comes with an integrated knowledge base to help your support teams resolve service requests efficiently. You can monitor and modify the status of tickets, attach notes, and assign tickets to other team members with a unified interface. The solution also facilitates account management to help you assign roles and access rights to different team members, monitor their activity and time spent on ticket resolution, and more. HESK is available both as a download and a cloud service. HESK has partnered with HESK SysAid Technologies, which also offers an advanced help desk and ITSM solution for enterprises.
SysAid Free Help Desk Software
SysAid offers a popular free help desk solution. It offers a high degree of automation to help IT teams achieve higher productivity, faster service request resolutions, and improved compliance. With its unified interface, you can easily track all incidents and requests seamlessly. The tickets are automatically routed and escalated to the appropriate team members. In addition to IT teams, other teams in your organization can implement this solution for managing their work. For instance, HR teams can use SysAid for case management and handling employee requests and complaints. Similarly, finance teams can use it for managing payroll requests, contract renewals, financial audit reporting, and more.
Mojo Helpdesk
Moho Helpdesk is another capable solution for managing customer and employee requests, maintenance tickets, IT incidents, and more. It offers a centralized portal to monitor tickets, which are routed via round-robin or load-balanced algorithms. The solution integrates with email and offers workflow automation with its triggers. You can also implement its star rating system to gather customer feedback and service delivery experience. The help desk solution also offers a REST API to help you integrate it with your existing applications. The solution is HIPAA compliant, supports two-factor authentication, and offers advanced SSL encryption features for protecting customers’ data.
Conclusion
A web help desk software is critical for organizations to deliver a consistent experience with faster response to service requests while meeting their SLAs. While the software mentioned in this article are suitable for smaller teams, they offer a good starting point to integrate help desk functions and automate routines. Solutions like SolarWinds Web Help Desk are highly scalable and easily integrable and can help you meet your help desk requirements.