8 Best Help Desk Software for Small Business 2023 (Compared)

Are you looking for the best help desk software for your business?

Using help desk software can help you improve your customer support workflow, better manage requests, and improve your customer relationships.

In this article, we’ve hand-picked some of the best help desk software you can use along with your WordPress site. We’re using these tools across our various businesses to help deliver an excellent customer experience.

Why Use Help Desk Software?

Help desk software makes it easy to manage customer support requests to serve your customers better.

This leads to happier customers and improved customer retention, which means more money for your business over the long term.

When you’re just getting started online, it can be easy to manage all of your customer support requests yourself through your business email address.

But as your WordPress website continues to grow, it can be challenging to keep up the same quality of customer support.

Using help desk software in your business can elevate the quality of your customer interactions and give you a competitive advantage in your space.

The best help desk software:

• Helps you scale your customer support as your business grows
• Makes it easy to keep track of support requests across multiple channels
• Lets you create detailed customer profiles and better understand your users
• Improves support response time and customer relationships easily

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best help desk software you can use to help your small business website grow.

1. Help Scout

Help Scout is one of the best all-in-one help desk software in the market. It has nearly every feature you need to streamline your help desk and customer support process.

We use Help Scout here at WPBeginner and our other businesses for all of our email support needs.

It can help you manage all of your chat and email support requests from one place. That way, your customers can reach out using the method they prefer, and your support team can manage requests from a single queue.

You can speed up support requests by creating saved replies, so your team can respond to common questions instantly.

There’s a built-in knowledge base feature, so you can build your own help center. This reduces the total number of support requests since your users can find solutions to their problems.

It also integrates with full featured knowledge base plugins like Heroic KB. This adds an additional panel to the Help Scout interface that searches your knowledge base using the current conversation tags.

You’ll also find in-depth reporting data, so you can see where your team is doing great and what needs to be improved.

The time tracking report lets you see where your support team is spending the most time, so you can improve your product workflows.

A live chat feature, also known as Beacon, is available if you want to add an additional support channel.

It recommends articles to help solve your users solve problems. If they can’t find a solution, then they can chat with your team.

Pricing: The Basic plan starts at $20 per user per month and includes 3 mailboxes, live chat, and more. The Plus plan starts at $40 per user per month if you have a bigger team.

2. HelpDesk.com

HelpDesk is a very easy to use help desk tool and ticketing software. It’s a very intuitive and a simple way to keep all your messages in one place.

Any requests from contact forms, incoming emails, live chat, and more will come to a single dashboard, and a ticket will be created.

There are advanced ticketing, sorting, and tagging features, so you can prioritize the most important messages.

Plus, there are useful team collaboration tools like multiple mailboxes, agent groups, and private notes for support tickets to help your entire support team become more effective.

You can use the automation features like automated task assignments, canned responses, and custom automated workflows to optimize your response time.

Those running IT help desks can use the specialized IT service teams features to create groups of support agents responsible for certain areas like subscriptions, signs up process, end-users, and more.

You can even create an IT support help desk for internal teams to help employees get up to speed on your software and processes.

There’s also an integration with LiveChat, so you can manage help desk tickets and solve customer issues in live chat all in one place.

You’ll find additional integrations like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Slack, and more that you can use to improve your support workflow.

Pricing: For teams, pricing starts at $29 per agent per month and includes a ticketing system, 60-day chat history, and more.

3. Heroic Inbox

Heroic Inbox is the best help desk and customer support plugin for WordPress. It lets you manage all your emails and support tickets right from your WordPress dashboard.

You can add unlimited inboxes in one central place, such as sales, customer service, support, partnerships, and so on. Plus, you can have unlimited conversations in each inbox, which reduces costs when compared to other solutions.

Heroic Inbox makes it easy for your team members to work together. For example, you can assign inbox access and specific messages to the appropriate individuals.

You can also add notes to conversations that are only visible to your team, which is perfect for sharing information and coordinating responses.

In addition, the plugin pulls all of your customer data, including previous conversations, into the sidebar so that you have all the key information you need while providing support.

Heroic Inbox is simple to set up. All you have to do is install the plugin, link any Gmail or G Suite email account in a few clicks, and you’re ready to go.

Other important features include auto responders, read receipts, ticket history, saved replies to standardize responses and save time on repetitive tasks, and more.

Pricing: Heroic Inbox costs $199 per year to use on 1 website. So, unlike many other help desk solutions on this list, there are no per-user limits or pricing.

Or, you can get the Heroic Bundle for $299.50 per year. It also includes Heroic KB, which lets you create a knowledge base to reduce the number of support tickets you receive.

4. HubSpot

HubSpot offers business owners a wide range of customer management tools to help improve customer satisfaction and relationships.

It includes easy to use help desk software and a ticketing system to keep track of long term customer service requests.

They offer one of the best CRMs for small businesses that easily integrates with the customer service management software.

The service desk software and ticketing system organizes all of your support requests into a single dashboard that your entire team can access.

You can keep track of important support metrics like ticket volume, agent response time, and more. This helps you see if you’re hitting your goals and meeting your customer service level agreements (SLAs).

You’ll find additional features like knowledge base software to help your customers resolve their own issues and routing and automation to help save you time.

Plus, there’s bundled live chat and chatbot functionality, so you can communicate in real time with your customers.

Pricing: There’s a free plan for all users. Paid plans start at $45 per month and give you access to additional automation tools and support for more team members.

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is another popular, cloud-based help desk provider for businesses. It’s very user friendly, while still offering plenty of advanced features.

The help desk system has a shared inbox for easy and fast team collaboration, escalation, and issue management. You can even route tasks based on team member availability.

Beyond help desk features, you’ll find chatbots, live chat, modern messaging, automation features, omnichannel support, and more.

There’s built in reporting and data, so you can refine your support processes over multiple communication channels. You can even use the social media integration to convert messages and brand mentions into tickets and respond.

It also includes various tools to help create your own self service portal like forum support, FAQ creation, a help widget, and more.

Pricing: The basic version of the software starts at $15 per month. While full omnichannel support plans start at $79 per month when billed per year.

There is a free version of the support software that supports up to 10 agents. But, it only includes ticketing and knowledge base features.

6. Nextiva

Nextiva is the best business phone service for small businesses. Beyond phone support, they offer a complete multichannel support solution.

The integrated help desk solution lets you communicate across many different channels from a single app including, phone, email, and team messaging.

No matter where your customers reach you from, you can respond from one place.

The ticket management system is straightforward to use, and you can set priorities, send reminders, message your team, and more.

If you’re using other Nextiva services like Nextiva business VoIP or the sales CRM, then these will instantly integrate.

You’ll find other useful features like call routing, canned responses, a mobile app, and a self-service knowledge base.

We use Nextiva at WPBeginner for all of our phone support needs. It’s the best option available if you need to offer phone support.

There are all kinds of powerful features to help your phone support team including, call forwarding, custom greetings, virtual business phone number, analytics, and more.

Nextiva works great for small business owners as well as large call centers who want to automate sales and customer support.

Pricing: Nextiva starts at $14.95 per month per user. If you want support for SMS and more integrations, then the Professional plan starts at $20.95 per month.

7. LiveChat

LiveChat is the best live chat software in the market. It lets you quickly add live chat support to your website, so you can instantly respond to customer’s requests.

The LiveChat apps are easy to use and work on mobile, desktop, and tablet devices across Android and iOS. So, your support team can answer requests without logging into the WordPress dashboard.

Plus, there’s a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to integrate with your website.

You can set up LiveChat to work during your non-work hours, so all live chat requests will go directly to your help desk management system.

We use LiveChat across all of our eCommerce businesses to support our pre-sales staff.

The chat window is very easy to customize to match your website’s branding.

One really great feature of this tool is the speed. The chat window loads faster than other providers and works across every device.

It integrates easily with other customer support and marketing tools you’re already using, like HelpDesk, HubSpot, and Google Analytics.

You’ll also find additional support tools to help improve the quality of your support, like visitor tracking, a smart API that integrates with your knowledge base, and more.

Pricing: There are plans for businesses of all sizes. The starter plan begins at $20 per agent per month when paid yearly. Plus, there’s a 14-day free trial to test out the service.

8. Chatbot.com

Chatbot.com is the best AI chatbot software in the market today. This tool makes it easy for small businesses and startups to create their own AI chatbot and improve customer service.

You can use the drag and drop builder to create a customer support chatbot quickly.

There’s also a library of industry specific templates you can use. These will help you develop your unique chatbot based on user questions and scenarios.

It integrates easily with both WordPress and WooCommerce. Plus, your live chat and customer service software of choice.

We use ChatBot.com in several of our SaaS businesses to handle pre-sales questions and forward users to our live support team if necessary.

This process can make your customer service workflow more effective, and free up time for your support staff.

Pricing: It starts at $52 per month billed annually for up to 1,000 monthly chats, and goes up from there.

There’s a 14-day free trial included in every plan, so you can see if chatbots work for your business.

Bonus: WPForms

WPForms is the best contact form plugin for WordPress used by over 6 million websites. It’s packed with features, while still being incredibly easy to use.

We use WPForms here on WPBeginner and across all of our other websites.

You can use the drag and drop builder to create a customer support form quickly, so your users can submit a support request to your team.

The free version of the plugin lets you build a basic contact form and includes spam protection, email notifications, and more.

The pro version of the plugin takes these features even further and turns it into a useful service desk tool. It lets you create more advanced forms with conditional logic, form abandonment functionality, geo-location, and more.

Every form submission goes directly to your WordPress dashboard, so you can quickly respond to customer queries. You can also set up instant form notifications that automatically send you an email when a user submits a form.

You can notify yourself or your team members in charge of customer support.

There’s also a user journey addon that lets you see what your visitor did on your website before submitting a form. This makes it easy to see where your user got stuck, so you can resolve their issue faster.

Plus, there are over 3000 different software integrations, including service desk, HR software, project management tools, marketing automation tools, and more.

Pricing: The Basic plan starts at $49.50 per year and has features for simple form creation. But, to get access to user journey reports, advanced integrations, and more, the Pro plan is $199.50 per year.

What is the Best Help Desk Software (Expert Pick)?

In our expert opinion, there are several different help desk software solutions that can be the perfect choice for your business.

If you’re looking for the best email help desk that brings all of your customer support channels together, then Help Scout is the best option.

If you need a great all in one help desk tool that integrates perfectly with LiveChat, then HelpDesk is perfect.

If you want a help desk plugin to manage all of your support tickets right from the WordPress dashboard, we recommend Heroic Inbox.

If you want a customer help desk that also includes a business phone system, then Nextiva is a great choice.

Regardless of which help desk software you use, you’d want to use WPForms since it helps you forward the message from your website to the right help desk software.

Aside from the top help desk software on our list, we also looked at other providers like Zoho Desk, Jira, LiveAgent, FreshService, HappyFox, Zendesk support, and more.

However, we decided not to list them to help you avoid choice paralysis, so you can quickly find the best help desk software for you.

We hope this article helped you find the best help desk software for your business. You may also want to see our picks of the best email marketing services for small businesses and our guide on how to choose the best web design software.

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