We’ve all been on the wrong end of a bad customer service experience. The response we get (or don’t) shapes our perception of the company and its brand. Help desk ticketing software is a key part of making a good first impression for your customers.

But how do you ensure that you don’t miss the mark? Your journey towards selecting the right platform for your needs starts with this help desk software requirements checklist.

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This article will help you figure out some of the basic requirements for help desk ticketing software. But before we get into that, let’s talk about what help desk ticketing software is and some of the ways it can benefit your organization.

Article Roadmap

• What Is Help Desk Ticketing Software?
• Key Benefits
• Key Requirements
  • Agent Productivity
  • AI-based Capabilities
  • Call Center Management
  • Email Management
  • Live Chat
  • Platform Capabilities
  • Reporting and Analytics
  • Security and Compliance
  • Ticket Management
  • Integrations and Extensibility
• Conclusion

What Is Help Desk Ticketing Software?

Help desk ticketing software is a mediating interface between an organization and its customers. It takes complaints from customers and turns them into tickets which can be viewed, categorized, routed and finally resolved by a customer service team or agent. It simplifies the customer service process by providing an easy-to-use platform for managing and resolving support tickets.

When customers face an issue while using your product or service, you want to ensure that they can receive help, even if they can’t speak to an agent right away. A help desk ticketing system allows customers to submit a support ticket detailing their complaint, with the system then routing them to the appropriate agent.

Primary Benefits

According to a 2020 survey report by Salesforce, 91% of customers agree that a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to make another purchase from the same company.

How can help desk ticketing software help you provide a more positive customer service experience for your customers? Here are some of its advantages.

1. Speed Up Issue Resolution

No one wants to spend all day on the phone with a customer service representative. Customers value short wait times and quick issue resolution. Help desk ticketing software can help you simplify and streamline your ticketing and issue tracking workflow to resolve customer complaints in less time.

Dynamic dashboards, automatic ticket allocation and tools for categorizing, prioritizing and tracking particular tickets can help your customer support teams address and resolve tickets in an organized way.

2. Improve Efficiency and Accuracy

By keeping tickets organized and trackable, help desk ticketing software can reduce delays and human errors, like lost tickets or duplicate replies. Features like automatic ticket allotment, multi-channel support, ticket tracking and ticket histories give your agents a fuller picture of each customer’s issue and help them provide more thorough support.

3. Improve Productivity

Artificial intelligence, conversational tools and automation are some of the key CRM trends for 2022. Automated ticket allotment, AI-based ticket categorization, automated call response and IVR (interactive voice response) can help you reduce the workload on your team while simultaneously improving productivity.

Automated ticket management also helps agents focus on the most important parts of their jobs: customer handling and issue resolution. AI-enabled reports and performance analysis allows managers to accurately monitor and analyze individual agent performance. These insights make it easier to maintain consistent quality of service throughout the department.

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Key Requirements

We’ve covered the advantages of help desk software, but what are some of the critical features you should look for? Let’s go through our checklist of the most important help desk ticketing software requirements.

1. Agent Productivity

Human agents will always be the key component of any help desk system. Despite the rise of self service tools and AI-based chatbots, human agents remain indispensable when it comes to complex issues or specific customer needs.

Help desk ticketing software can improve agent productivity by simplifying and automating operational processes. Streamlined ticket management, automated ticket allocation and intuitive dashboards helps agents manage and resolve tickets more efficiently.

Additionally, features like agent ranking and performance tracking help you analyze your staff and figure out where agent performance may be lacking. Many systems have built-in incentives to help motivate staff, including gamification, milestones or a rewards system based on the number of tickets handled or other performance metrics.

Streamlined ticket management can boost agent productivity. Source

• Agent Availability
• Agent Grouping
• Agent Performance Report
• Agent Ranking
• Agent Workspace
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey
• Internal Collaboration
• Setup Business Hours
• Time Tracking
• To-do List
• User Mentions

2. AI-based Capabilities

AI has revolutionized operational processes in many different sectors. Help desk systems are no exception. The introduction of AI-based chatbots has been one of the most visible advancements. Around 69% of customers surveyed by Zendesk were willing to interact with chatbots for simple customer service requests, a 23% increase from last year.

But that’s not all. AI is also helpful for automated ticket categorization and routing. Tickets are categorized by ticket or issue type, assigned a priority level and then routed through appropriate channels to the right agents. Additionally, AI tools can read and analyze the tone of a ticket and suggest appropriate responses.

AI-based intent and sentiment analysis. Source

• AI-based Response Suggestions
• AI-based Ticket Categorization or Tag Suggestion
• AI-based Ticket Routing
• AI-based Ticket Sentiment Analysis
• Chatbots

3. Call Center Management

Phone support remains the second most popular communication channel for customers, making efficient call center management fundamental to the success of any help desk system.

Tools like call recordings and transcriptions help monitor service quality. Automated call response and IVR is used in tandem with human agents, can reduce call response times. Collaborative tools like call conferencing, routing and manual transfers allow agents to handle tickets collaboratively to ensure the best possible issue resolution experience.

• Call Analytics
• Call Conferencing
• Call Monitoring and Barging
• Call Recordings
• Call Routing
• Call Transcription
• Call Transfers
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

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4. Email Management

Email management tools are another important requirement, especially given that email remains the most preferred support communication channel for customers. Customizable email templates and signatures help agents respond quicker to common support queries. Email scheduling and forwarding are also useful tools for collaboration, allowing agents to loop in coworkers when they need assistance and always ensure timely responses.

Example of email ticket management and collaborative resolution. Source

• Custom Email Signatures
• Customizable Email Template
• Email Forwarding
• Email Scheduling

5. Live Chat

Real-time support tools like live chat are an effective way of eliminating long wait times. They allow you to provide immediate responses to customer queries.

Live chat tools can be AI-based, human-driven or a combination of the two. AI tools like chatbots can receive the initial contact, categorize it according to type and priority, and then forward the ticket to a human agent for further processing.

Tools like manual chat transfer and routing are useful for collaborative issue resolution, while aspects like queue limits can prevent overloaded customer support lines. Chat history allows managers to monitor agent performance and maintain productivity and support quality.

• Browser-based Chat
• Canned Messages
• Chat History
• Chat Routing
• Customizable Chat Widget
• Manual Chat Transfer
• Proactive Chat Invitations
• Set Queue Limit
• Website Visitor Tracking

6. Platform Capabilities

Help desk software also includes platform capabilities, like native apps for iOS and Android. This is useful for organizations that want to run their help desk systems through multiple channels and platforms.

You can customize your help desk system to better serve your organization’s needs and reflect your brand. Customizable branding and multi-brand support are especially useful for large organizations, allowing you to use the same help desk software for multiple subsidiaries with independent branding. You can also add custom knowledge bases for self-service and customer portals.

• Customizable Customer Portal
• Customizable Knowledge Base
• Custom Notifications
• Custom Web Forms
• Forum Moderation
• Multi-brand or Multi-product Help Center
• Native iOS and Android Apps
• Workflow Automation or Rules Management

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7. Reporting and Analytics

Built-in reporting and analytics capabilities help you create intelligent strategies for the future. You can use data to track response times, identifying gaps to address before they become an issue. You can also schedule pre-built or custom reports to monitor the performance of your help desk system and optimize it accordingly.

Dynamic data visualization simplifies reports. Source

Custom dashboards and dynamic, easy-to-understand data visualizations can help you make sense of data. This allows you to optimize your operations accordingly and improve performance.

• Custom Dashboards and Visualization
• Custom Reports
• Pre-built Reports
• Scheduled Reports

8. Security and Compliance

86% of consumers surveyed by Cisco in 2021 described data privacy as a major concern for them, and 47% have actually switched companies or providers due to privacy concerns. As consumers become more conscious about these issues, organizations must take steps to secure consumer data.

Security measures like data encryption, data redaction and masking, single sign-on and two-factor authentication are crucial to ensure that your customers’ personal details, as well as your company’s, are protected. It’s also important that your help desk system complies with GDPR norms and has regular security patches with updates on top of base security features.

• Audit Log
• Data Encryption in Transit and at Rest
• Data Masking or Data Redaction
• GDPR Compliance
• Roles and Permissions
• Two-factor Authentication

9. Ticket Management

The ability to sort, search and filter tickets is a basic requirement. Along with this, you should also be able to organize your tickets using custom tags, and set priority levels to ensure proper routing and timely resolutions.

Proper ticket channeling is important for maintaining a well-structured workflow. Cohesive pipelines and automatic ticket routing help accomplish this. Collaborative tools like ticket sharing, ticket splitting and shared inboxes can promote teamwork. Additionally, ticket histories are effective for tracking and monitoring the journey of tickets from submission to resolution.

Ticket histories can be a useful tracking tool. Source

10. Integrations and Extensibility

Most of what we’ve gone through are functional requirements. However, technical requirements are equally important.

Integrations and extensibility matter because you need to make sure that your help desk software is compatible with other softwares used by your organization. CRM software integration is especially important, considering that customer service is an indispensable component of CRM.

Other points of integration include collaboration software like Slack and MS Teams, email, and social media. These integrations are particularly useful if you are offering multi-channel support.

You may also need other technical features like data import and export, which allow you to import or export data from your help desk system in various formats like XLS, CSV, PDFor Excel files. This helps in maintaining data back ups and in preparing reports.

• Collaboration Tools Integration
• CRM Software Integration
• Data Export
• Data Import
• Ecommerce Platform Integration
• Email Integration
• Email Marketing Platform Integration
• Social Media Platform Integration
• Telephony Partners Integration

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Conclusion

Maintaining a streamlined and fast-paced help desk ticketing workflow is essential for customer satisfaction. The right help desk software can go a long way in helping you achieve this. We hope this article helped you gain some insight into the kind of features and requirements you should look out for in your ticketing software.

To get started on your software selection journey, check out our free requirements template.

What help desk software requirements do you think are most helpful? Let us know in the comments below!