Finding a help desk ticketing system can be tricky.

What is a help desk ticketing system?

A help desk ticketing system is your support team’s toolkit. It gives a team the everyday tools they need to do their job well, from answering tickets to collaborating with other team members. Different systems flex a range of capabilities. You can choose a help desk that includes all of your requirements or one that serves as a hub for integrations that collectively form your support stack.

Either way, a help desk is the center of your support team. If your team was running a ship, it would be the “bridge” or command center. If you were in a kitchen, it would be your oven and stovetop. It’s where you work every day, whether you’re a customer support professional, manager, or support leader.

As you consider whether to invest in a help desk, appoint a specific team to manage the selection process unless you’re a very tight team. A manager or senior leader, plus two high-performing support professionals and a junior-level customer service professional can bring balance to the conversation. Together, they can assess whether you need a change and which direction to move in if the time is right.

How can a help desk ticketing system help you?

A help desk ticketing system helps you transform potential challenges or complaints into wonderful customer experiences. If your team members have the training and support they need to offer empathetic, effective, and efficient customer support, they can leverage a help desk to transform retention rates — and collectively take ownership over a specific aspect of the revenue stream.

Without a help desk, a small team can still provide great support. But it’s difficult to go above and beyond for customers at scale and even more challenging to measure the success of the team’s efforts. A support ticket system isn’t just a tool for support professionals; it’s also the way that managers and business leaders can assess and optimize the customer experience. If you want to leverage a support-driven philosophy to drive growth, your team needs technology that empowers a better way of helping people.

Think about the kind of information support professionals receive every day through a help desk. Not only can it centralize indispensable metrics about individual and support team performance, but it’s also a treasure trove of data that can empower every aspect of a company, from product through sales.

Just imagine, for example, that you roll out a change to one of your most beloved products. If your help desk experiences a flood of negative customer feedback, that’s business intelligence that would otherwise be difficult to analyze and present in a digestible form. In this scenario, support leaders can share clear, up-to-date data that leaders can use to realign or fortify their decisions moving forward. In other words, a help desk also becomes the catalyst for cross- department collaboration and ensures a company’s alignment with the needs of customers.

Who can use a help desk ticketing system?

If your day-to-day efforts on a support team are not translating to a positive customer and employee experience, it’s time to consider a new help desk. Everyone in this industry works hard. But when there’s a genuine gap between the aspirations of a company and the ability of a support team to serve people well, it can cause high employee turnover and low customer satisfaction.

Most small support teams start with a simple, cheap solution like a shared inbox or an email distribution list. It seems to work well until your business starts to scale. All it takes is one request for help falling through the cracks for you to lose the trust of an important customer.

That’s where a help desk can come in. If you can empower your team with a support stack that gives them transparency, insights, accountability, and the space to collaborate, they actually have a shot at making people’s lives better. Here are some indicators that your team is ready for a new way of doing things:

What to look for in a help desk ticketing system

Matchmaking your team’s needs to your first-choice support ticket system ensures that your team can boost the customer experience through each and every one of their actions. As you look at options, consider how your customers prefer to interact with your company. Do they prefer to call or email? How soon do they expect a response from your team? Would you be comfortable using self-service tools?

Even if your current system doesn’t have an easy way to answer these questions, your selection team can sift through a shared inbox and speak to the team about it. If your customers could wave a magic wand and have their needs met, what would that look like?

The same way you dig into the priorities of your customers, you need to assess the needs of your team. Make a short list of must-include capabilities or functionalities of the help desk or support stack.

As you walk through this process, remember that a help desk doesn’t have to include every feature on your list. Sometimes, the ideal fit is a customizable support stack with a core help desk tool that integrates with other apps and products to build your dream solution.

Making a final choice

When the team arrives at a short list, you get to have some fun: Take each help desk ticketing system for a test drive. Ask everyone to work with each help desk from the perspective of both a customer and a team member. Collaborate on “fake” tickets and get a feel for how this system would affect your ability to work together. You’ll also want to pay close attention to the reporting capabilities — both the level of detail and the usability of the metrics are important.

Following these steps will bring you to a help desk ticketing system that elevates your team’s ability to make people’s lives brighter every day. By giving you a dynamic tool to prevent internal challenges and solve customer problems, a great help desk can be the key to retention and growth.