6 Help Desk And Live Chat Tools For Small Organizations

Budget constraints preventing you from buying a help desk tool? Check out these top-rated free software options.

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As a customer service manager, you may be aware of the multiple benefits of help desk software, including a more efficient ticketing process, improved customer service experience and customer satisfaction, and increased employee productivity.

ProProfs Help Desk. Customer support software ProProfs Help Desk helps you close tickets faster and more efficiently, leading to delighted customers. This cloud-based tool has a simple, email-like design that makes ticket management effortless for agents. Businesses of all sizes can use ProProfs to address all their help desk needs in one tool.

Search a portfolio of Live Chat software, SaaS and cloud applications for non profits. Save time with reviews, on-line decision support and guides.
6 Help Desk and Live Chat Tools for Small Organizations Managing customer requests from email works well when requests are few and far between. As volumes increase, you might need a better way to manage inquiries. Responding to customer requests in a timely manner can become a challenge when your inbox is already overflowing.
See all ProProfs Help Desk Features. Live Chat Tools. These tools focus purely on embedding a live chat widget on your website. If you’re just looking to use a quick and simple solution, a full helpdesk could be overkill, and a live chat tool could work better for you. LiveChat “The fastest way to help your customers.”.
The 20 Best Help Desk Apps and Knowledge Base Tools for Customer Support The 9 Best Live Chat Apps for Customer Support in 2019 Support Your Customers Better and Faster: Lessons from the Pros at Trello, HubSpot and Disqus.

According to our survey of more than 500 small business leaders this March (methodology below), 59% required new business software to respond to COVID-19, and among those businesses, nearly half (45%) needed new software for their customer support team.

If you’re one of those businesses that needs new help desk software, you might find yourself in a jam: you need the software, but you don’t have room in the budget as you try to minimize costs in the wake of COVID-19. If you’re in that position, this article is for you.

By browsing the top, free solutions on the market, you can find a tool that meets your immediate business needs while offering the flexibility to expand capacity and capabilities when needed.

This article looks at six highly rated free help desk software options. View the full list of free help desk software solutions.

What does “best” mean? Each of the six tools included in this article appears in our Top 20 Help Desk Software report, based on verified user reviews and web search interest (full methodology here). We then reviewed those top 20, and identified the six that offer a free option. They are listed in alphabetical order.

Capterra’s Top 20 Help Desk Software report (Source)

Each of the options listed below is completely free, meaning that it’s not a free trial, or a free expansion to a paid tool.

So what’s the catch?

Free help desk software is typically limited in the number of users allowed, or features included, or some other capability that limits its usefulness depending on the size of your support team. The idea is that if you like the limited version, you’ll likely be willing to pay for the expanded paid version. Of course, if you have a very small team with limited needs, you might never need to upgrade, and that’s fine, too.

6 Help Desk And Live Chat Tools For Small Organizations Near Me

6 best free help desk software for customer support teams

1. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based multichannel help desk solution for businesses of all sizes. Its free version includes email ticketing, social media ticketing (only for Facebook and Twitter), knowledge-base management, and reporting.

The unique selling proposition of Freshdesk’s free version, called Sprout, is the support for unlimited agents. The plan offers ticket trend reporting, which lets agents track the status of their open and closed tickets in real-time.

Freshdesk offers four other plans—Blossom, Garden, Estate, and Forest—which include expanded features such as event-based triggers, service level agreement (SLA) management, chat and chatbot-based support, as well as surveys.

Cost to upgrade: $15/agent/month (when billed annually) for the Blossom plan, which adds automations, integrations, and more.

Ticket management in Freshdesk (Source)

2. JIRA Service Management

JIRA, the software developer that produces Atlassian project management software, offers a free help desk tool for teams with up to three agents working on one service desk. This plan includes unlimited customers (or at least as many as your three agents can handle), service management (ticketing), operations management, 2 GB of storage, and more. The knowledge base requires Atlassian’s Confluence team workspace tool, but that is also free for up to 10 users.

Cost to upgrade: For $20/agent/month, teams can upgrade to the Standard plan, which includes live chat support, 250 GB of storage, and additional features.

A service request in JIRA Service Management (formerly JIRA Service Desk) (Source)

3. Spiceworks IT Help Desk

Spiceworks is an online network for IT professionals based in Austin, Texas, and in addition to hosting that community, they also offer free help desk software (cloud or self-hosted). The company generates revenue primarily through ads on the network.

The software itself is a complete help desk solution with ticket management, reporting dashboard, customizable user portal, and more.

Cost to upgrade: All of Spiceworks’ software—including inventory management, remote support, and website down checker—are completely free.

The Tickets interface in Spiceworks IT Help Desk (Source)

4. SysAid

SysAid is an IT service management and help desk solution for business of all sizes. The solution is available both as a cloud-based and on-premise deployment option.

Its free version is deployed on Windows or Linux servers and supports up to two agents and 100 end users. This version offers ticket management, incident management, workflow automation, knowledge-base management, and reporting functionalities.

The free version’s USP is its asset management functionality, which allows users to track IT assets and devices. It helps agents find assets easily, while handing queries that require hardware replacements.

If you want to manage more than two agents or more than 100 assets, you can upgrade to any of the three paid plans—Basic, Full, and À La Carte. In addition to all the free features, these plans offer configuration management database, SLA management, patch management, and multiple email boxes.

Cost to upgrade: SysAid has custom pricing. Contact the vendor for a quote.

Incident reporting in SysAid service desk software (Source)

5. Workbooks

Workbooks is positioned as customer relationship management software, but the free version includes all the capabilities necessary to run a service desk, including ticketing system, knowledge base, and communication. It also includes marketing management, sales management, reporting, and more.

If that seems too good to be true, remember that the free version does come with its limitations. It only allows two users, 1 GB of storage, and one database, and it does not include automation, integrations, multi-language support, or custom layouts.

Cost to upgrade: For $30/user/month (when paid annually), teams can upgrade to the paid version, which includes 10 GB of storage, customization, automation, integrations, five databases, email/live chat/phone support, and more.

The customer support screen in Workbooks (Source)

6. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk and customer service solution. Its free version offers an email ticketing system, ticket and agent tracking, SLA management, a community forum, and knowledge-base management functionalities for up to three agents.

The free version’s USP is the reporting functionality. It offers ticketing reports, agent dashboards, and manager dashboards that provide managers a complete view of the customer support operations.

Users can upgrade to three paid plans—Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. These plans offer advanced features such as social media ticketing, custom ticket templates, and advanced reports.

Cost to upgrade: For $12/agent/month (when billed annually), teams can upgrade to the Standard plan, which adds phone support, community knowledge base, reporting and dashboards, and more.

Ticketing dashboard in Zoho Desk (Source)

The final decision: Which free help desk solution should I invest in?

After you’ve reviewed this list of products, the next step is to select one that will best fit your business needs. The following steps will help you make that decision:

Calculate the total cost of ownership for the upgrade plans, including training, implementation, and support costs. Check with the vendor to ensure that updating the product you choose is under/within your budget.
Review the features in this list and select the ones necessary for optimum business performance. Eliminate products that don’t offer the essential features for your business.
Compare the free usage limits of the products (such as the number of agents and available features) and shortlist products accordingly.

After these considerations, you may come to the conclusion that a free option won’t meet all of your needs. If that’s the case, we recommend browsing our complete Top 20 Help Desk Software report, which lists 20 top options based on verified user ratings and web search interest.

For more information on help desk software, you can check out the following resources:

Streamline your software search with our Top 20 guide

Quickly find the right tool with this snapshot of the most popular help desk software

Methodology

This article was updated in November of 2020. Products considered for this article fulfill the following criteria:

1. Must be free

For the purposes of this article, we classified a product as free if:

It offers a free, standalone version of the software.
It is not a trial version of the software, in which you must purchase a paid version after a limited amount of time.

2. Must meet help desk software definition

The products that met the above criteria were then evaluated against our help desk software definition: Help desk software helps organizations manage internal and/or external ticketing by tracking and resolving support requests and incidents.

This check verified the basic help desk capabilities and appropriateness for the category. A product was classified as help desk software if it contained all the core features—ticketing, knowledge base, and communication.

3. Must appear in the Top 20 Help Desk Software report

Products that appear in the Top 20 must offer core help desk functionality and have at least 20 unique user reviews between June 2018 and June 2020. Complete Top 20 methodology here.

Survey methodology

Results based on Capterra’s survey of 503 small-business leaders, defined as presidents/vice presidents, C-suite, or owners/founders at U.S. companies with 2 – 250 employees in March 2020. 370 out of the 503 respondents lead small businesses that conduct most or all of their business virtually.

Disclaimer

The content in this piece provides the opinions and points of view expressed by users and does not represent the views of Capterra.

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There are plenty of statistics demonstrating the importance of good customer service. One study found that 33% of Americans would consider switching companies over just one bad customer service interaction.

U.S. companies lose $62 billion each year due to poor customer service, and seven in 10 U.S. consumers say they spend more on companies that provide great service. The list goes on and on.

As a result, it would behoove you and your company to make sure that when your customers contact you with an issue, they'll leave satisfied and tell their friends about what a great experience they had.

1. Don't just hire anyone

6 help desk and live chat tools for small organizations work

Resist the urge to grab the first person who submits a decent resume and throw them into help desk support. More than just about any other work, customer care is a special job requiring a certain touch, so you must carefully interview applicants to determine if they’re the right fit.

Making the wrong choice means unhappy customers, and you can't afford that. Look for applicants with empathy, listening skills, a positive attitude, the ability to adapt and make decisions on the fly, and -- most of all -- patience.

2. Hire enough people

Another temptation is to try to do too much with too little. You need proper staff to take care of customer service requests. If you don't hire enough people to handle the job, you'll have rushed support calls and delayed responses, which lead to unhappy customers.

Do not underestimate the importance of customer service. Zappos built an online shoe and clothing retail empire mostly through exceptional customer service, and many other companies pour a huge amount of money into their customer service teams for good reason.

If your team is struggling to keep up with customer service requests, get them some more help.

3. Assign the right people to the right tickets

Your customers' support requests often cover a wide range of problems. Sometimes they have specialized customer needs that most of your support team members are unable to handle.

You must have a system in place that allows you to funnel specialized ticket requests to people who have the expertise to answer them without frustrating the customer.

For example, if you sometimes have customers calling with complicated IT server maintenance issues, and your IT help desk support mostly deals with initial setup, have ITIL service desk analysts on standby who can personally handle those customers.

4. Use canned responses

Your customers' time is valuable, but so is your customer service team's time, so you must limit repetitive calls as much as possible.

You'll find that customers call and ask the same question, so develop some canned responses your team can use in each situation. This not only saves them time, and it also allows you to custom-tailor a satisfactory response for your customers, who will be happier as a result.

5. Don't go overboard with automation

If you have an automated system for handling customer service calls, avoid trying to handle everything through this service. Your customers will be fine with automation to a point, and many will even be grateful since it helps them solve their problems faster.

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But when they want to talk to someone and you don't offer an obvious way to do it, you’ll be dealing with angry customers, and you don't want that.

Use automation as a sorting method for your customers rather than something that's supposed to solve all of their problems without talking to your support desk. Use an automation system to get customers to the right person who can quickly and personably answer their questions.

6. Use multiple channels

Customers like to communicate in different ways -- some prefer a phone call, others like email, and still more are happy poking around your website for the answers. As a result, you should offer multiple channels for your customers to contact you.

A phone number or email address is the most obvious way to provide your customers with access to your support team, but you should also look into live chat software or a support ticket system.

7. Create a knowledge base and self-service portal

Sometimes your customer doesn't necessarily want to talk to a member of your team. If they can find the answer on their own, that's just fine by them (also, that support may be available 24 hours per day).

As a result, you should provide an in-depth knowledge base and self-service portal so they can solve problems on their own. This not only increases customer satisfaction, but it also takes a lot of the load off your support staff.

8. Solicit customer feedback

The truth is you really don't know how well your customer support team is performing until you hear from your customers. Solicit feedback by sending your customer base surveys to gauge how they regard your customer support and what you could do to improve.

The voice of the customer is invaluable information that will help you take your customer support to the next level and avoid wasted effort on your part.

9. Use software

Customer service software offers so many powerful tools that will help you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer support. Automation tools will handle much of the busywork that ties up your team's time so they can focus on handling customer issues.

Help desk metrics and analytics tools will help you take a deep dive into the data to spot any concerning trends and make adjustments that will improve performance.

And help desk software will keep your team more organized and provide them with access to the information they need to properly handle customer queries.

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Does your customer service system need an overhaul?

If you’re struggling with customer retention and suspect that your customer service system is not up to par, it’s time to find out for sure. Have a discussion with your team to determine if they feel overwhelmed and if they’re confident in their ability to handle customer queries.

Take a day to monitor customer service calls to get a sense of how they are handled. And send a survey out to your customer base to find out what they think of your customer service and how it can be improved.

Once you’ve conducted this audit, you should have all the necessary insights to develop a new customer service system and staff it with the right people. Don’t put off doing this -- the longer you wait, the more customers you risk losing.