Best 7 Service Desk Software for Your Customer Support Needs in 2024 [Buyer's Guide]

Every customer support team is faced with the daunting task of keeping up with the rush and swirl of today’s customer expectations.

Multiple studies show that customers consider speed of response time as the most important attribute of customer experience. And customers regard speed as equally important as price.

But too often, support agents get lost in this labyrinth of endless service requests. Without the right tools and processes, it feels like you’re always racing against the clock to respond on time.

And where does this lead to? Worn-out agents. Angry customers. Lost revenue.

But there’s a way out of all this. The right service desk software will help you achieve that fast response time you’ve always strived for.

Here, we’ve put together a list of the 7 best service desk tools that’d help you streamline your support, improve response times, and give your customers the experience they deserve.

But first, let’s set some context.

What is service desk software?

Service desk software is a tool used by customer support teams as well as IT teams to organize, manage, respond to, and track service requests. These service requests could be external (customers) or internal (employees or partners). Also referred to as help desk software, these service desk tools help teams track performance while handling incoming requests in real time.

Modern service desk solutions go beyond basic ticketing systems by incorporating features like AI-powered automation, knowledge base software, integrations, collaboration tools, and advanced analytics reporting.

Using service desk software helps you achieve:

• Quicker response times,
• Reduced errors,
• Well-organized workflows, and
• Enhanced customer experience.

Top 7 service desk solutions to achieve fast response times

Now that we’ve brushed up on what service desk solutions are, let’s delve into the 7 leading service desk software in the market that you can use to automate your workflows and enable quicker response times.

Here’s a table with the quick view of the 7 best service desk software:

DevRev

DevRev provides an AI-native service desk software that helps you deliver real-time and personalized support. Whether your use case is IT or customer service, DevRev lets you hyperconverge your tech stack and empower teams to deliver support that’s quick and context-driven.

DevRev was built from the start with AI in mind to avoid the pitfalls of bolting AI onto legacy systems, so that you can get seamless data interoperability, robust performance, advanced security, and effortless scalability.

Its AgentOS features a smart knowledge graph that seamlessly integrates diverse data sources, ensuring up-to-date, contextual information for AI and human agents.

Key features:

• Unified inbox: DevRev’s unified inbox automatically categorizes incoming tickets to help you streamline conversations from every channel into a single view. With this, you can prioritize tickets faster and monitor ticket stages and ongoing conversations at a glance so you never miss your service level agreement.
• Powerful AI assistance: Turing AI identifies recurring patterns in support queries to suggest recommended next steps, similar tickets, and related articles so your agents are empowered to tackle every query
• GPT bot for in-app support: The PLuG widget is a self-learning GPT chatbot that automatically responds to user queries based on intent. Its Semantic Search enables users to find answers on their own. With this AI-powered deflection, you can reduce the workload of support agents.
• AI-first Product CRM: DevRev Build helps you bring the voice of your customer to product planning and engineering development. Interconnect your customer, product, user, and employee work data and Gain complete visibility of customer tickets so you never miss another feature request or bug.
• Robust AI-powered analytics: DevRev gives a comprehensive view into your customers, product, users, and sessions so you can make data-driven decisions with confidence.
• Bidirectional sync with tools: The Airdrop capability allows effortless bidirectional syncing with your existing teams and tools while still leveraging the DevRev platform.

DevRev pricing:

The Support and Build applications come with separate pricing.

• Support App: Starts at $19.99/user/month
• Build App: Starts at $9.99/user/month

Both Support and Build come with a 45-day free trial period each.

G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Zendesk

Zendesk’s AI-powered service desk software comes specifically pre-trained on IT and customer service ticket data so that you can start using the tool immediately.

Key features:

• Omnichannel personalized support: Zendesk’s Agent Workspace updates agents about incoming messages and allows real-time responses across email, chat, phone and messaging. Its comprehensive user profiles allow personalized responses at scale.
• AI-powered chatbots:The AI capabilities of Zendesk’s chatbots helps you automatically detect customer intent during interactions and provide accurate replies during conversations.
• Reporting and analytics: The pre-built dashboards are prepopulated with best practice customer service metrics to help you analyze your service performance.

Pricing: Starts at $19/agent/month (billed annually).

G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars

Here’s a useful resource for you: DevRev vs. Zendesk comparison

Help Scout

Help Scout is a service desk software designed to streamline customer support by providing teams with the tools they need to manage and respond to service requests efficiently.

Key features:

• Shared inbox: This feature allows teams to manage, organize, and respond to requests quickly across multiple channels.
• AI-powered capabilities: Help Scout’s AI condenses long email threads into a few bullet points, helping team members get up-to-speed on cases quickly. It can also draft an entire response to a request, basing it on past conversations and help articles in the knowledge base.
• Versatile live chat tool: The Beacon live chat tool provides real-time support and also creates messages and surveys to collect user feedback from specific segments of your audience.

Pricing: Starts at $22/user/month (billed annually).

G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars

Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management is a helpdesk ticketing system that allows Dev and Ops teams to collaborate at high velocity, so they can respond to business changes and deliver great customer and employee service experiences fast.

Key features:

• 400+ forms and templates: Use pre-designed forms and customizable templates that make it easy to get started and provide service faster.
• Automated workflows: Set up automated workflows to easily move support cases from one team to another without alerting your customers. Link related Jira tickets to provide better support, or auto-assigning issues to streamline processes.
• Flexible reporting: The platform’s reporting capabilities help you identify product areas that experience the largest number of escalations. With this context, you’ll know where to shift resources to, or create new help articles and training.

Pricing: Free for 3 agents, paid plan starts at $22.05/agent/month.

G2 rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars

Freshservice

Freshservice, which is Freshworks’s service desk software offering, allows support teams to manage inquiries and issues. The platform comes with built-in workflows and integrations to help teams offload low-value tasks and help them collaborate and communicate better.

Key features:

• AI copilot: The platform’s AI-powered copilot makes it easy for agents to standardize services, draft articles, improve messages, automate responses, and optimize processes.
• Omnichannel service desk: Freshservice allows you to give users faster and more conversational service on their channels of choice, whether it’s email, Slack, Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Agents will also get an unified view as the platform auto-categorizes and summarizes tickets…

Pricing: Starts at $16.66/user/month (billed annually)

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

SysAid

SysAid is a help desk software that allows you to set up support workflows without the need to code. Its generative AI capabilities helps teams resolve tickets faster and deliver faster and more accurate service.

Key features:

• Ticket automation: The platform automatically categorizes and prioritizes every incoming ticket, and helps you to assign the tickets to the most appropriate person or resolution group through automatic routing rules.
• Monitor ticket journey: You can monitor ticket progress, make in-line actions, and effortlessly switch between various filters to get the right information at the right time.
• Workflow orchestration: This feature automatically runs script-based processes to automate basic to intricate multi-step workflows, freeing up a significant portion of agents’ workload.

Pricing: Available only on request.

G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk offers help desk software for all business sizes—startups, SMBs, and enterprises—to help teams with faster issue resolution, increased accessibility to customers, and building long-lasting customer experiences.

Key features:

• Omnichannel ticketing: Zoho Desk’s omnichannel ticketing system collects support tickets from different channels like email, social media, live chat, phone, and webforms to organize them in a single interface, so agents can stay organized and reply faster.
• Contextual AI: The platform’s AI capabilities identifies key aspects of a ticket and adds them as tags. Plus, you can automatically create and customize responses based on ticket content.
• Automate repetitive activities: Zoho Desk lets you automate tedious tasks like ticket assignment, SLAs and escalations, and workflows to help you save time and effort.

Pricing: Starts at $9.53/user/month (billed annually)

G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars

How to choose the best service desk software? 6 factors to consider

To choose the best service desk software among the tools mentioned above, evaluate these 6 factors well:

• Integration with product development: Look for service desk software that seamlessly integrates with your product development tools. This ensures that customer feedback and support issues can be directly linked to development tasks, allowing your teams to quickly address bugs, feature requests, and other product-related concerns.
• AI-driven automation: Choose a helpdesk ticketing system that leverages AI to automate routine tasks, such as ticket routing, issue prioritization, and customer communication. AI-driven features can significantly reduce manual workload, enhance efficiency, and ensure that critical issues are handled promptly.
• Real-time collaboration across teams: Opt for a help desk software that facilitates real-time collaboration between customer support, product management, and development teams. This cross-functional communication is crucial for ensuring that everyone is on the same page when it comes to addressing customer needs and improving the product.
• Unified customer and product data: The best service desk software should provide a single source of truth by unifying customer interactions, feedback, and product data. This holistic view enables support and development teams to make data-driven decisions that enhance both the product and the customer experience.
• Customizable feedback loops: Look for software that allows you to create customizable feedback loops, ensuring that customer input is consistently fed back into the product development process.
• Scalability and flexibility: Ensure that the service desk software you choose is scalable and flexible enough to grow with your business. The tool should be able to handle an increasing volume of customer interactions and adapt to the evolving needs of both your product and support teams.

If you’re about to scroll up to check which tool checks all these boxes, we’ll save you the trouble. It’s DevRev—an AI-native platform that unifies customer support and product development.

DevRev transforms experiences for customer service staff, support engineers, product managers, and software developers by analyzing structured and unstructured data like customer conversations, searches, and session analytics.

Book a demo now to see how DevRev’s service desk software helps you deliver world-class customer service.