The Best Help Desk Tools and Technology for Enterprise IT Teams

A help desk team is a critical part of your business to ensure operations continue to run smoothly. Individuals working in these demanding roles are typically under pressure and might find themselves not having enough hours in the day. You figure they must collect customer support requests, document issues, track and manage tickets and create resolutions – all of which are time-consuming.

Leveraging help desk tools and technologies can go a long way towards alleviating the daily strains your IT staff faces. These days, effective help desk software is critical to being able to efficiently manage support tickets, along with the capacity to boost efficiency and productivity.

Many companies seemingly agree that automating help desk tasks is a good investment. According to statistics, the help desk software market is anticipated to more than double in 10 years to $26.8 billion by the end of 2032. As a comparison point, the market was valued at 10.9 billion in 2022 and 9.9 billion in 2021. It is clear that the global market for help desk solutions is becoming more in demand.

Is your team overwhelmed by the number of tickets they receive on a daily basis? Red River has the knowledge, skills and tools to help lighten your help desk team’s load and empower them to provide optimal customer service to both your internal and external users.

How Can Help Desk Tools Aid in Delivering Better Customer Service?

Help desk software is a set of tools designed to manage and organize support requests through automation and streamlining. The best tools centralize communication, automate tasks and offer self-serve options. Modern software tools can enable help desk teams to:

• Generate tickets
• Track tickets
• Prioritize ticket requests
• Timely resolve customer issues

Software can be a significant time-saver because IT personnel can leverage technology and have access to a knowledge base to help them resolve issues rapidly.

Benefits of Leveraging Enterprise-Grade Tools

The automation your enterprise-level company can receive with modern help desk tools can yield many benefits. To start, it solves pain points your business may suffer from, such as high ticket volume, slow response times and siloed communication, greatly increasing efficiency.

Other tangible advantages come as well, including but not limited to:

• Ease of use for your help desk teams
• Gain access to enterprise-grade tools with robust features, integrations and scalability.
• Ability to automate routine tasks
• Access to deeper analytics to help you detect problematic areas or trends
• Ability to make data-driven decisions to allocate resources or make changes
• Enjoy higher levels of customer satisfaction

By leveraging enterprise-grade level tools, your business can also gain a competitive advantage. The automated and analytical tools you get access to assist in staying on top of industry trends, while maintaining a higher level of service. Ultimately, it’ll instill best practices to help you stay ahead of the curve in a competitive market.

Key Features and Core Capabilities to Look for

Help desk software does not come as a one-size-fits-all solution. Your company will want to seek out key features and core capabilities to ensure your investment performs at the level you require. The following are key features and core capabilities to look for in technology solutions.

Ticket management

Ticket management is a primary component of help desk processes and should contain excellent organizational features. Since your ticketing management system collects all the essential details from user requests and then routes them to your IT team, it needs to be efficient.

A good management system can help assemble and preserve all ticket-related communications in one place. Look to ensure the ticket management component features visible notifications (e.g., for escalations) and an easy way for your team to search and filter through tickets (e.g., by customer, team member, etc.).

Service Level Agreement (SLA) tracking

SLA management is an essential feature to look for when exploring solutions. Aside from automated tracking of SLAs, it ensures your team is able to deliver high-quality service. You can customize the system to your company’s needs and be able to track response times, resolution deadlines and other performance metrics.

Automation

Automation takes over simplistic or mundane chores that are time-consuming for your IT team. Chatbots to answer questions, routing users to FAQs and knowledge bases, automated ticket generation and other key tasks can be easily automated. The technology does the heavy lifting, freeing up time for your staff to focus on other issues needing a more personal touch.

Self-service portals

Self-service options are one of the more attractive aspects of any software use. A good self-service portal should feature:

• A user-friendly, intuitive interface
• Good search FAQ capabilities (and other resources, such as tutorials or help articles)
• Automated chatbot to assist with common issues

A well-structured self-service portal empowers users to handle basic issues or seek answers for themselves, removing these types of burdens from your IT staff.

Reporting

Ideally, the help desk technology you select should have the capacity to automatically track a variety of metrics, so you can obtain a complete picture of your help desk support’s performance and efficiency. Examples of important analytics should include ticket volume, response times, resolution times, common issues, agent productivity, busiest hours, customer satisfaction levels and other important analytics.

Omnichannel support

Accessibility is an important component to seek when exploring help desk tools. Omnichannel support allows IT members to offer support through email, chat, voice, social media, SMS and self-service. This way, your internal or external users needing support can reach out via a variety of methods. Or you can focus on the support channels that are most efficient for your staff to use.

Knowledge base capabilities

Integrating a knowledge base is an excellent way to distribute self-help information and overall reduce the amount of time your agents spend on help desk tickets. Additionally, it can provide both external and internal users with support-related information. Features can include standard operating procedures, internal processes, best practices, templates and other help desk topics.

Keep in mind, when selecting the help desk technology features you need, you’ll have to carefully identify your goals and needs, along with whether you’re aiming to support external customers, internal users or both.

Top Platforms to Consider

As the help desk technology market continues to expand rapidly, enterprises have numerous choices. This section will outline some of the best products on the market for your company to consider.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a powerful and cloud-based IT service management platform that comes with deep automation and integration capabilities. Overall, ServiceNow’s software solutions go beyond Help Desk services, because it offers an array of other IT operational functions as well.

Designed for enterprises, ServiceNow’s help desk system is robust and scalable. Highlights include:

• Organization and prioritizing of service tickets
• Comprehensive self-service portal
• ITSM collaboration and documentation
• SLA management
• Powerful analytical capabilities
• Scalable (pricing depends on # of users)
• User-friendly dashboard and navigation
• Includes AI-powered features
• Easily integrates with other tools

ServiceNow has a centralized dashboard for tracking, adding to its convenience. Some users may find this system complex and requiring a learning curve. (Red River can assist with this!)

Zendesk

Zendesk is a popular solution among businesses. It’s known for its intuitive interface, strong multichannel support and deep analytical capabilities. Top highlights include:

• User-friendly interface
• Self-service portal
• Ticketing system with the ability to support email, voice, chat and SMS
• Highly customizable
• Comprehensive advanced analytics
• Omnichannel capable across many communication options
• Real-time chat
• AI-powered features
• Easily integrates with third-party apps

Zendesk is pricier than some other options, but for the enterprise-level company, it is a good potential solution to increase efficiency with help desk processes.

Freshservice

Freshservice is another commonly sought-out help desk solution by enterprises. Appealing factors this solution is known for include its modern interface, automated capabilities and asset management abilities. Top features you can expect:

• Highly customizable workflow support capabilities
• Gamification features
• Easily integrated with other apps
• ITIL support for change management
• SLA compliance abilities
• High number of features
• Great for handling large, complex projects

Important to know, Freshservice is mainly geared towards serving internal customers. It also isn’t a suitable choice for smaller businesses.

Jira Service Management

Initially a straightforward help desk offering, Jira has evolved into a versatile platform with help desk capabilities integrated within. Featured highlights include:

• Easily integrates with other Atlassian tools
• AI-powered problem resolutions
• Designed for technical teams
• One-stop “shopping” for everything related to ticket management
• Capabilities to build self-service portals
• Collaboration features
• Manage email and live chat requests
• Knowledge base builder
• Automated capabilities

Jira Service Management is best for teams already using Atlassian tools because they can build upon what’s already in place. It might be more difficult to assimilate with other platforms and apps.

BMC Helix / Remedyforce

BMC Helix Remedyforce is an IT service management solution built on Sallesforce’s platform. As an AI-powered service management for large enterprises, larger companies like its compatibility with Salesforce and the array of services it offers. Highlights include:

• Smart automation, limiting agent intervention
• Omnichannel support
• Collaborative workflow automation
• BMC HelixGPT Employee Navigator
• Templates workflow configuration
• Prebuilt solutions and automation
• Knowledge base builder
• Transparent and scalable analytics
• Robust ticket management system

This product is also known for its ability to simplify lengthy hold times (“voice trees”) with its AI-driven components.

Enterprises Have Many Choices

The features noted in the above products are highlights, not outlining every feature each one offers. Talking to an expert in technology solutions to help you evaluate the best solutions for your enterprise is your best bet.

Additionally, this technological space is seeing many advancements. Emerging technologies, such as AI chatbots, predictive analytics and workflow automation are features to keep on your radar. As tools advance, enterprises might find these solutions to be cost-effective and boost efficiency/productivity.

Summary

Strengthening your enterprise’s help desk capabilities is an important factor in ensuring smooth operations and quick resolutions to problems. Technology can play a significant role in helping your organization achieve these goals while reducing strains on your help desk agents.

There are numerous technology solutions on the market, which are expected to continue to expand over the next decade. The right help desk tool depends on your environment, goals and scale — but an experienced IT partner can help evaluate options, customize workflows and drive adoption. Red River has the extensive experience that enterprise-sized organizations need to help them identify the best solution.

Not Sure Which Solution Is Best for Your Enterprise? Red River Can Help!

Choosing the right help desk tools and technologies for your enterprise can be an overwhelming decision. With the numerous tools on the market housing thousands of features, you want to be careful with what you ultimately select. Shiny features may not make for a cost-effective and efficient solution.

Red River can evaluate your current solutions and help you identify the right tools to fill in the gaps to boost efficiency, stay within your budget and deliver optimal customer service. Not only will we help you pinpoint the right software for help desk functions, we will ensure it has the security, compliance and scalability features you need.

Read to get the conversation started? Contact Red River today. We’re happy to discuss your needs and answer any questions you have about existing and potential technology solutions.