Benefits and Top 5 Platforms

Editor’s note: Veranika explains how help desk automation serves to create a positive customer experience. If you are interested in employing a fitting service desk automation platform, check ScienceSoft’s customer service consulting offering.

Today, clients interact with companies across various communication channels. Employing a help desk solution streamlines your agents’ work activities, as they can receive and respond to customers’ issues from a unified workspace and deliver personalized, high-quality customer support. Help desk software enables support automation to help you save 670 working hours per year, reduce the number of phone calls by 10%, and allow 25% of your help desk resources to be available for incident resolution.

Benefits of a help desk automation platform

Help desk automation tools allow companies to take customer service to a new level by automating ticket processing and customer updates on the status of their requests. Moreover, they can automatically send customer surveys to capture customer feedback to analyze your agents’ performance and provide training if necessary.

Among the numerous benefits of implementing help desk automation or an automated ticketing system are:

• Faster response time. When receiving customer queries submitted via different communication channels, a help desk solution will facilitate collecting all the necessary information and routing a customer to the right agent, thus decreasing the response time.
• Increased agents’ productivity. 86% of companies claim that automated solutions contributed to boosting their employees’ productivity. The automation of repetitive help desk tasks (ticket registration, filling in customer information, etc.) and self-service capabilities for customers save agents’ time and allow them to focus on more demanding tasks.
• Improved customer experience. Customers expect their issues to be resolved quickly. Chatbots with natural language processing capabilities can help customers resolve simple issues without bothering your agents.

Top 5 help desk automation software

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Hallmark features:

• Omni-channel – empowering agents to resolve customer issues across multiple channels like email, social networks, etc.
• Self-service portals – creating a self-service portal for customers to search for the solutions to their problems or request assistance.
• Customer Voice – creating and automatically sending customer surveys to get customer feedback across different channels. It helps understand strong and weak points in customer support.
• Power Virtual Agent – creating, testing, and launching a chatbot with natural language processing capabilities that can resolve standard customer issues.
• Dashboards and reports – automatically creating reports to monitor your agents’ performance.

Limitations: Limited number of integrations with third-party services.

Pricing:

Professional Edition – $50 user/month.

Enterprise Edition – $95 user/month.

Virtual Agent – $1,100 tenant/month.

More about Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Salesforce Service Cloud

Hallmark features:

• Omni-channel – routing customers’ issues submitted via various communication channels (web, email, phone, chat, social media, etc.) to the right agent based on skills and availability.
• Service process automation – creating rule-based customer service workflows.
• AI-powered contextual recommendations for agents to follow and provide a better customer experience.
• Self-service portals and communities – creating self-service portals and communities with a drag-and-drop editor and integrating a knowledge base into them. Embedding a chat where clients can ask agents for help in case they cannot resolve their issues on their own.
• Einstein bot – creating, testing, and launching a chatbot with built-in natural language processing capabilities to resolve common questions without an agent’s help.

Limitations: No possibility of on-premises implementation.

Pricing:

Essentials Edition – $25 user/month (billed annually).

Professional Edition – $75 user/month (billed annually).

Enterprise Edition – $150 user/month (billed annually).

Unlimited Edition – $300 user/month (billed annually).

More about Salesforce Service Cloud

ServiceNow® CSM platform

Hallmark features:

• Advanced Work Assignment – defining routing conditions to automatically assign tickets to agents based on their availability, skills, and affinity.

• Virtual agents – creating chatbots to be integrated into self-service customer portals to resolve common customer issues.
• Predictive intelligence – using machine learning capabilities to analyze case descriptions, automatically categorize and route tickets, recommend solutions to resolve issues faster.
• Communities – creating forums for your customers and employees to share ideas, experiences, and solutions; connecting customers to experts to quickly solve issues and analyzing forum conversations to understand your customer and employee needs.

Limitations:

• Limited customization capabilities.
• Limited number of integrations with third-party services.

Pricing: CSM Standard – $125 user/month.

CSM Professional – $175 user/month.

Virtual Agent CSM add-on – $25,000/year.

1,000 additional portal visits – $60/month.

More about ServiceNow Customer Service Management

Zendesk Support

Hallmark features:

• Web Widget and Mobile SDKs – embedding FAQ sections or live chats into any app or website.
• Answer Bot – creating AI-powered chatbots to provide your customers with instant answers to common questions.

• Reports and dashboards – tracking key help desk metrics (first response time, customer satisfaction, etc.) using 20+ built-in reports.
• Satisfaction Prediction Scores – identifying what characteristics are likely to result in your customers’ satisfaction based on your agents’ past customer support and satisfaction rating data.

Limitations: Limited customization capabilities.

Pricing:

Essentials Edition – $5 user/month.

Team Edition – $19 user/month.

Professional Edition – $49/user/month.

Enterprise Edition – $99 user/month.

Elite Edition – $199 user/month.

Answer Bot – $50/month.

More about Zendesk Support

Freshdesk

Hallmark features:

• Canned responses – creating pre-formatted replies to the most common customer questions.
• Automatic email notifications – notifying customers about changes happening in their ticket.

• Freshconnect integration – discussing tickets with experts across your organization right within the helpdesk.
• Freddy AI – creating a chatbot to engage with customers and resolve common issues.

Limitations:

• Limited number of social media integrations.
• Limited reports customization capabilities.

Pricing:

Blossom Edition – $15/user/month (billed annually).

Garden Edition – $35/user/month (billed annually).

Estate Edition – $49/user/month (billed annually).

Forest Edition – $99/user/month (billed annually).

Freddy Ultimate – $75/agent/month + $500/ Freddy sessions/month.

More about Freshdesk

Download PDF file: Top 5 Help Desk Automation Software

Achieve better customer service with help desk automation

Automated help desk improves the quality of service you provide to customers. In particular, it allows your agents to respond and resolve customers’ issues quickly due to process automation and streamlined knowledge sharing. If you need assistance in choosing and implementing a help desk automation platform, contact ScienceSoft’s team.