Help desk ticketing system

What is a ticketing system?

A ticketing system is a software program that a customer support team uses to create, manage, and maintain a list (or lists) of customer problems.

Of course, many ticketing systems also provide other functions including, but not limited to:

• Omnichannel support
• Ticket routing, categorization, and tagging
• Tracking and measurement
• Integrations
• Knowledge base management
• Automation
• Live chat

You might also hear ticketing systems referred to as ticketing software, ticketing support, or a helpdesk ticketing system.

Why does your business need a helpdesk ticketing system?

Your business needs helpdesk ticketing to help organize, prioritize, and consolidate support requests. Ticketing systems enable organizations to quickly assign inquiries to the most relevant agent, provide context to customer interactions, and track inquiries from customers. The system also provides a shared inbox which helps support staff coordinate their efforts.

How does an IT ticketing system work?

An IT help desk ticketing system translates all end user issues from disparate sources into tickets. The system tracks the status of each ticket as support staff members work on solving the issue. A ticket records all interactions with a user as well as internal conversations between staff members on the issue.

With Zendesk’s IT ticketing platform, a ticket can be recorded as a question, problem, incident, or task. A single problem can be an underlying cause of many incidents. For example, if the company’s email server is down, multiple incidents can be linked to that problem. When you mark the main problem as solved, each user’s incident ticket is updated with the new status.

When customer support agents close tickets, they don’t just disappear. Tickets contain valuable data that can give you insight into your customers and company. IT ticketing programs can slice data in a variety of ways to reveal performance metrics and generate reports.

What are the features of an online ticketing system?

The best IT ticketing systems offer a combination of features that are simple to set up and use. Just remember: the sophistication of these features can vary widely.

To help you prepare to compare different online ticketing systems, here are six common features to look for and evaluate.

1. Omnichannel Support
   Customers contact your organization from many channels—email, social media, live chat, and phone—sometimes simultaneously. In many companies, insights gained during these interactions are scattered between tools and teams. This forces the customer to repeat themselves every time they reach out. But by consolidating customer profiles and conversations into a shared inbox, omnichannel support enables agents to serve customers in their preferred channels.
2. Ticket Routing, Categorization and Tagging

   In a larger enterprise, just centralizing customer support communications isn’t enough. To provide the best service, agents need to know—at a glance—a ticket’s status and what steps they must take, whether that’s routing the ticket to a different agent or handling it themselves.

   That’s why help desk ticketing systems also enable users to categorize and tag tickets as they come in. These categories and tags provide large, siloed teams with the ability to quickly route support tickets to the agents that have the skills and knowledge to handle them.

3. Tracking and Measurement

   Good customer service departments resolve issues quickly and minimize back-and-forth. But that doesn’t happen without analytics. With helpdesk ticketing system analytics, you can generate reports based on what you’re trying to understand. For example, you can quantify the amount of time your team spends on certain issues to help inform decisions about where to invest additional resources.

4. Integrations

   Just as customers like to use a variety of channels, businesses tend to use different databases and tools to use and manage important customer data. This creates data silos. Through a broad range of integrations, ticketing systems (like Zendesk’s) help break down these silos.

   As a result, it becomes far easier to create a unified, streamlined customer experience. And it prevents the disjointed, often frustrating experience agents have when they’re forced to try and make sense of multiple sources of different versions of information while dealing with an impatient customer.

5. Knowledge Base Management

   While live chats and phone conversations have their place, given the right information, many customers are fully capable of—and oftentimes prefer—serving themselves. Knowledge base systems help customers do this by summarizing and storing large amounts of information in searchable, linked databases.

   These systems enhance your ticket support system by simultaneously improving self-service for your customers and reducing ticket volume for your agents. Not only that, knowledge bases provide support agents with a searchable database where they can easily find resources for customers.

6. Automation

   What makes customer service “go” is getting the right information to the right person at the right time. And even in a relatively small company, the logistics of routing information from different systems to the people gets complicated quickly. That’s why it can be very powerful to automate tasks like assigning tickets, sending preset responses, escalating issues, pulling in relevant customer data, and more.

   By eliminating or reducing the time agents must spend on menial, repetitive tasks, automation helps make agents happier, more engaged, and more productive. Not to mention automating these tasks reduces the chance of human error.

What are the benefits of a help desk ticketing system?

IT ticketing software receives, logs, and sorts incoming tickets to streamline problem resolution. A simple ticketing software is the price of entry for any professional customer service team, even if it’s a team of one. But don’t take our word for it, check out these five powerful benefits:

1. Greater agent productivity

   Great customer service is invaluable. Yet there are quite a few low-value, time-consuming tasks involved in providing great customer service—searching for information, routing calls, categorizing tickets, and more.

   By automating all or a portion of these tasks, ticketing systems provide more time for agents to spend on high-value tasks like training and serving customers. This improved productivity also means that your organization can more easily provide great service with fewer agents, greatly reducing costs without necessarily impacting service quality.

2. Enhance the quality of customer interactions

   With full audit trails of every conversation, even if it spanned multiple channels, agents are empowered to have more productive, informed conversations with customers.

   Customers tend to be less frustrated because they don’t have to repeat themselves. And agents can take things a step further by providing personalization. For example, with accessible data on past purchases, a retail support agent could see a customer’s sizing information and help them identify the right fit for a pair of jeans.

3. Transparent customer service performance

   Without a ticket support system in place, there’s no single source of data you can use to evaluate customer service performance. Sure, you could use customer retention data if you have it, but that can be influenced by other factors. And while actively surveying customers might provide clues, you often need more granular, quantitative data to monitor and evaluate service performance.

4. Learn and grow over time

   By centralizing customer issues and your support agents’ responses to those issues, ticketing systems double as a learning tool. Managers can use it to discover what common issues might be better addressed with new knowledge base articles. Or they can identify certain situations which agents are struggling to handle, which might indicate where additional training is needed. The opportunities to learn and grow over time are endless and good helpdesk ticketing software makes them possible.

5. Better internal team collaboration

   Few customer service experiences are worse than the all-to-common hot potato call. This happens when a customer calls in and gets passed from agent to agent, with each one struggling to find a solution. The root cause of this is often poor internal communication, which a ticketing system helps reduce or eliminate.

Best practices for helpdesk ticketing software

Ticketing software has exciting capabilities, but even the best ones don’t run without the right processes built around them. Here are four best practices that’ll have your team maximizing your software investment:

Train agents on the new system

When businesses buy software, they often only use a fraction of its capabilities. Ticketing systems are no exception. To avoid this pitfall, start a training program to get your people up to speed on the system. Depending on what ticketing software you use, the vendor may offer their own training, which is a great way to get your people trained without the administrative burden. Plus later on down the road, your agents can use what they learned to train new hires.

Build out a self-service knowledge base

The idea of building out a knowledge base for your customer can seem intimidating at first. But start small, and focus on providing resources that help solve the simplest, most common issues. Even a simple knowledge base can make your agents more effective and your customers happier. Plus, with a knowledge base in place, you can provide automated answers to common customer questions.

Create (and use) a clear, well-structured tagging system

Without tags, you lose out on what makes the best ticketing systems most valuable. But it’s not enough to create some tags and call it a day. You have to be thoughtful about what tags will properly contextualize the problem so your agents can properly prioritize and route each ticket.

Not only that, but customer support agents also need to be active in tagging tickets as they learn new information while helping the customers. Tagging in this way ensures tickets show up in relevant reports as they develop and are easily searchable.

Automate with predefined ticket actions

Consider this: 51 percent of consumers who prefer the phone as their primary support channel expect a response in less than five minutes. 28 percent expect the same on live chat. In the age of ever-increasing customer expectations, automation is an agent’s best friend.

The kinds of automation you should set up will depend on your service channels, the types of inquiries, and many other factors. But a basic example to set up is an auto-response that triggers a predefined message to acknowledge receipt when a customer submits a ticket via chat or text.

An overview of the 15 best ticketing systems

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. Beyond improved customer satisfaction, Zendesk’s ticketing software is also a dream for chatbots as well as chat agents, who get a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey, so they can stop searching for information and start serving customers.

Plus, the centralized hub makes it easy for managers and admins to track their team’s performance metrics, KPIs, and SLAs across the customer experience.

Never lose a request with Zendesk’s ticketing system

Context is king for Zendesk’s ticket system

No one wants to feel like they’re talking to a robot. Zendesk ticketing software sets your team up with everything they need to provide customers with truly personalized service. With an omnichannel ticket support system, your agents have full details about every customer they interact with through an organized workflow. Equipped with context about every customer, customer support agents can quickly resolve individual support requests and provide quality customer experience across the board.

Problem-solve at lightning speed

Beyond having a centralized hub for a seamless workflow, Zendesk software makes it easy for your team to identify issues as soon as they arise.

Tickets are assigned unique reference numbers and statuses to help teams manage and prioritize their workflow. To stay on track, teams can also set up alerts in Zendesk for tickets that agents haven’t responded to in a timely manner.

With Zendesk’s built-in issue tracking system, the support team can easily identify issues the moment they’re raised by customers. Agents can use the information gained from Zendesk’s issue tracker to notify the software development team of bugs or create new self-help resources for customers.

By identifying problems early, your team can take action swiftly to ensure customer satisfaction isn’t interrupted.

Zendesk offers a simple IT ticketing solution

Zendesk’s IT ticketing solution contains a variety of features that make solving IT issues a breeze. Here are just a few examples.

• Integrations: You already have your favorite apps for a variety of tasks. Zendesk comes with pre-built integrations for over 1,000 apps, including IT asset management services, so you can keep your ideal workflows going.
• ITicket collaboration: Sometimes, support tickets require a team effort. Zendesk makes it easy for teams to collaborate on tickets publicly or privately without confusing customers.
• Satisfaction Prediction Score: With enough data, our help desk ticketing system can predict customer satisfaction within each ticket. This gives agents a better understanding of what works. It can also help you save at-risk tickets before it’s too late.
• Knowledge base: A self-service portal helps end users help themselves. By leveraging IT support staff knowledge, you can reduce incoming service tickets and better manage support requests.
• Macros: Macros let you fill in predetermined responses to common requests and problems. For example, your IT help desk can create a preset response for password related problems.
• Security and compliance: Zendesk offers multiple user authentication options including business and social single sign-ons. Redaction capabilities make it easy to keep passwords and sensitive information confidential. Zendesk Enterprise Support also offers optional HIPAA compliance.

Mobile ticketing system

Great customer support should be tied to the customer. Not the computer, fancy headset, or even a particular day or problem. Zendesk’s mobile ticketing system has native mobile apps that are built for team leaders, agents, IT, or anyone who doesn’t want to take the “help desk” literally. Agents can catch up with tickets, clean up their queue, and free up their workflow (and mind).

Zendesk offers support from your iPhone and Android:

• Notifications alert agents to updates on their assigned tickets
• Create new tickets on the fly and make quick updates with macros
• Get to the right ticket immediately using search and deep-linking from email
• Filter through the queue with Views and swipe to easily move to the next ticket

2. Zoho Desk

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Zoho Desk is a good choice for smaller, customer-facing support teams that need a platform they can grow with. Also, since Zoho Desk integrates easily with other Zoho products, if you’re already using Zoho products, implementing and using Zoho Desk will feel familiar.

Plus if you’re using Zoho CRM, you can easily sync your database with Zoho Desk. And keep in mind: Zoho consistently adds new features, such as social media integration and data analysis, so you should keep an eye on how this product evolves.

Features

• Workflow automation
• Self-service knowledge base
• Contextual AI, APIs, & SDKs
• CRM integration
• Canned responses
• Real-time chat
• Reporting
• Ticket management
• Conversations inbox
• Branding customization
• Multichannel support
• Security

Learn more about Zendesk app for Zoho

3. Freshdesk

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Freshdesk is another option aimed at smaller businesses that has an affordable price and intuitive interface. Freshdesk comes in five editions; one free plan called Sprout and four paid editions called Blossom, Garden, Estate, and Forest. If you pay for the most expensive plan, you can access key features such as team dashboards, social signals, and chatbots.

Freshdesk also provides Freshworks Academy, which you can use to offload some of the administrative burden of training your agents on your new system. However if you opt for one of the lower-priced plans, you may find features offered a bit lacking.

Features

• Automations
• Extensions, SDKs, APIs
• Shared canned responses
• Real-time chat
• Analytics
• Email ticket routing
• Multiple shared inboxes
• Customization
• Public and private knowledge base
• Omnichannel support

4. HappyFox

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HappyFox is a cloud-based CRM that provides ticketing solutions for many different industries. Their ticketing software provides a host of easy-to-use, powerful capabilities. But where it excels in features, it lags in price and integrations. Unlike options like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Zoho Desk, HappyFox doesn’t integrate with as many other tools and systems.

There’s also no free option for you to get a feel for the software. Their price tiers range from $39 to $99 per user per month, so you will have to pay to try it. Still, if your priority is best-in-class ticket management capabilities, HappyFox is worth consideration.

Features

• Smart rule automation
• Integrations and API
• Canned actions
• Live chat
• Reporting and analytics
• Ticket routing, categorization, and tagging
• Unlimited shared inboxes
• Ticket and branding customization
• Knowledge base management
• Omnichannel support

Learn more about Zendesk app for HappyFox

5. WordPress Advanced Ticket System

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If your organization uses WordPress and you have a simple customer service operation with no more than two channels, the WordPress Advanced Ticket System plugin is worth consideration. Since this open-source helpdesk ticketing software is built directly on WordPress it’s very easy to integrate. Plus, because the system uses your site’s default single post template to display tickets, it won’t slow your site down.

Of course, supreme simplicity comes with its drawbacks. The system doesn’t support direct ticketing from social media, live chat, or blog comments.

Features

• Ticket tracking and reporting
• Email ticket routing
• Custom ticket fields
• Branding customization

Learn more about Zendesk app for WordPress

6. Help Scout

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Help Scout’s helpdesk ticketing system is similarly full-featured like HappyFox. And also like HappyFox, Help Scout can support large teams with more than 500 users. That said, even small teams who need powerful, flexible ticket management tools may find Help Scout to be a great fit.

In addition to its ticketing system, Help Scout provides robust reporting and built-in knowledge bases. Plus, its robust API and a broad selection of integrations mean you should have no problem getting the system to work with your existing customer channels and databases.

Features

• Rule-based automation
• Extensions and integrations
• Templated responses
• Website live chat
• Analytics
• Ticket routing and prioritization
• Collaboration tools
• Customizable branding
• Knowledge base content management
• Multi-channel communication

7. LiveAgent

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LiveAgent emphasizes its live chat service with features like real-time typing view, website monitoring for chat engagement, and proactive chat invitations based on the active agent availability. The software also provides a universal inbox that collects and consolidates tickets from a variety of channels.

LiveAgent is particularly well-suited for small support teams that use WordPress. Plus it has native integrations for many of the most popular apps that support teams use. The various plans from LiveAgent include a free version and paid versions that range in price from $15 per agent per month to $39 per agent per month.

Features

• Smart automation
• Mobile SDK and API
• Canned answers
• Real-time chat
• Advanced reporting
• Email ticket management
• Shared inbox
• Ticket and branding customization
• Knowledge content management
• Omnichannel communication

8. KB Support

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Another lightweight, WordPress-friendly helpdesk ticketing system is the KB Support plugin. The plugin includes support for ticketing from web forms and email, agent permissions, custom ticket statuses, preset replies, and WooCommerce integration. Also, you can integrate KB Support with other apps fairly easily through Zapier.

In addition to using its ticketing features, KB Support also has a built-in knowledge base you can use to provide self-service options for your users. You can even restrict certain articles to be available for logged-in users only.

Features

• Native automations
• Tracking and measurement
• Ticket routing
• Brand customization
• Knowledge base management

9. Vision Helpdesk

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Vision Helpdesk is a cloud-based helpdesk ticketing system that’s designed for all team sizes and industries. Teams can automate their ticket management with rule-based criteria and record conversations across social media, emails, live chats, web portals, and calls.

To support agent productivity, Vision Helpdesk also offers gamification features that businesses can use to set up agent achievements with rewards. A mobile app is available for Android, iOS, and Windows phones but many users report that the mobile app needs some work.

Features

• Workflows
• API
• Live website chat
• Reporting and analytics
• Ticketing
• Shared inbox
• Branding and ticketing customization
• Optimized knowledge base content
• Multi-channel support

10. HubSpot

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HubSpot provides a fairly robust ticketing system through its Service Hub product. In addition to providing broad helpdesk functionality, Service Hub helps support agents prioritize tickets, automate workflows, and provide personalized experiences across many service channels.

If you’re already using HubSpot’s other products like the HubSpot CRM, integration with those tools is very simple. And even if you’re not a HubSpot user, their broad range of integrations makes implementing this ticketing system into your workflow fairly straightforward.

Features

• Rules-based automation
• APIs, SDKs, and native integrations
• Shared canned responses
• Real-time website chat
• Advanced reporting
• Ticket routing, categorization, and tagging
• Conversations inbox
• Brand customizations
• Knowledge base management
• Omnichannel support

Learn more about Zendesk app for HubSpot

11. Front

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Through its shared email inbox, Front connects your entire customer service team. But beyond that basic functionality, Front is truly geared towards fostering a culture of teamwork on your service team.

For example, after an agent selects a case, other agents can still monitor that ticket’s progress which helps improve transparency and collaboration. Similarly, through its shared draft tool, Front lets agents work on tickets together before responding to customers. Plus, Front supports ticketing for emails and messages from every channel including email, chat, social media, and SMS.

Features

• Workflow rules
• Shared drafts
• Integrations directory
• API access and custom plugins
• Canned responses
• Live chat
• Ticket analytics
• Ticket routing, categorization, and tagging
• Universal inbox
• Custom branding
• Knowledge content management
• Omnichannel communication

12. AzureDesk

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AzureDesk’s core features include reporting, ticket management, knowledge base management, and email-to-ticket conversion. In short, it’s a light system with enough capabilities to support larger customer service departments. Uniquely, AzureDesk’s ticketing system allows you to use an unlimited number of email addresses which makes it easy to convert emails to any address into a support ticket.

AzureDesk is also very flexible software with an API that can support many customer service integrations and pre-built integrations with other popular support apps, such as Slack.

Features

• Smart automation
• APIs and app integrations
• Live chat widget
• Agent signatures
• Advanced reporting
• Ticket management
• Shared email inbox
• Brand customizations
• Knowledge content management
• Omnichannel support

13. SupportBee

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Designed as a simple, intuitive ticketing system, SupportBee is designed for small teams that need to get up and running fast. SupportBee offers a solid set of basic features including a centralized inbox and customer ratings. Plus, their plans include unlimited tickets and inboxes which makes it easier to scale up if needed.

However, for what you gain in SupportBee’s simplicity, you lose in your ability to customize. So if you’re looking for a solution that provides tailored service and extensible tools, you may want to skip SupportBee.

Features

• Ticket workflows
• Customer portal
• Snippets, filters, and integrations
• Team messaging tools
• Tracking and measurement
• Ticket assignments, categorization, and tagging
• Private and shared inboxes
• Multiple brand support

14. Awesome Support

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Awesome Support is one of the most popular customer support ticketing system options for WordPress. The free version allows unlimited tickets, agents, users, products, and departments. It’s a good base for simple customer support, but you can also upgrade for more advanced features. The highest plan supports service level agreements (SLAs), deeper reporting, and automation.

While Awesome Support is super easy to set up, it’s not powerful enough for the needs of most support teams. So unless you’re a support team of one with your website as your only channel, Awesome Support may come up a bit short.

Features

• Workflows
• AI search and automated chatbots
• API and Zapier integrations
• Analytics
• Ticket handling
• Shared inbox
• Custom branding and localization
• Knowledge base and documentation management
• Unlimited support channels

15. TeamSupport

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TeamSupport is a customer support ticketing software solution designed to meet the needs of companies serving B2B technology customers. In addition to functioning as ticketing management software, TeamSupport’s reporting features focus on helping with root cause analysis to help minimize ticket volume. TeamSupport also offers external and internal knowledge base functionality and a customer forum.

The tool is fairly customizable. For example, you can make your own basic ticket management page with fields of your choosing. And it’s focused on improving your agent’s service delivery through features like suggested solutions which automatically surfaces articles relevant to a customer’s issue.

Features

• Ticket automation and workflows
• 3rd party integrations and API
• Real-time chat
• Reporting
• Customizable ticket management
• Custom branding
• Shared inbox
• Customer database
• Knowledge base management
• Omnichannel service

Summary chart of the best ticket support systems

Here’s how our top 15 picks for online ticketing system stack up against one another at a glance:

How to choose the best ticketing software for your business

If your IT professionals spend all their time sorting through emails or figuring out who responded to what ticket, it’s time for a change. As far as software goes, your ticketing software will be among your customer support team’s most heavily used tools. So choosing among the many options available is high stakes.

To help guide your decision-making, here are six questions you’ll want to ask yourself and your team, and the kinds of answers you should be looking for.