What Is a Help Desk (And Does Your Small Business Need One)?

We live in a time of instant gratification. The public expects to be able to message your company on Instagram and receive a reply within minutes. Similarly, a Facebook complaint or tweet is treated with the same gravitas as a formal request via email.

If you’re having trouble keeping up, you’re not alone. Fortunately, a help desk can make immediate response possible across numerous channels, even if you don’t have a big support team. But just what is a help desk, and how does it work?

In this post, we’ll answer those questions. We’ll explain what a help desk is, and how it can benefit your small business if you’re not already using one. Plus, we’ll show you the key indicators of quality help desk software, so you can make an informed choice!

What Is a Help Desk (And What Does It Do)?

A help desk is a platform that a company uses to provide customer service. It’s a key connection point between representatives of the business (support agents) and users or buyers.

It’s common for professionals to use terms like “help desk”, “ticketing system”, and “service desk” interchangeably. While the differences are mostly semantic, it’s important to clarify what a help desk is not:

• It isn’t a knowledge base, although the ability to create a self-serve knowledge base is sometimes one feature of a help desk. A knowledge base is a searchable help center, where customers can browse support articles to find answers to commonly asked questions. 
• It isn’t a CRM (Customer Relationship Management software). CRMs overlap with help desks in some ways, but they’re more sales-oriented and are built for nurturing leads and encouraging conversions. Most help desk software allows for CRM integration. 
• It isn’t a service desk. A service desk is designed to support a company’s internal technical infrastructure, while a help desk is where customers communicate directly with you.  

The Role of Service Tickets in Help Desk Systems

As software, help desk systems enable you to manage, organize, and respond to customer inquiries in the form of service tickets:

A service or support ‘ticket’ refers to any customer inquiry, request, or issue you receive in your inbox. They can be pulled from a number of channels, like social media, live chat, and email, but are (ideally) all housed in the same place. 

Help desk software then allows your team to manage the lifecycle of tickets, from the moment a customer submits their inquiry through resolution of their problem.

At Groove, we like to think of them as conversations rather than tickets. The technical term is unavoidable, but it’s important to approach complaint resolution with empathy and care.

Seeing each customer solely as a problem to be resolved isn’t the most productive mindset. Instead, every conversation is a chance to assist, connect, and improve brand loyalty.

Common Help Desk Variants

‘Help desk’ is something of a broad term. It’s a category of tools, rather than a defined solution that always works the same way and offers the same feature set.

There are several common kinds of help desk. The size, type, and scope of your business will determine which is most relevant to your needs.

How do help desks differ? What do they look like, and who are they targeted to? Here are a few examples (note that most of these aren’t mutually exclusive, and can overlap):

When choosing a help desk, you’ll need to consider the size and nature of your business alongside your goals. For example, if you have a small team, you probably don’t want the cost and complexity of an enterprise tool. You’ll be better off with a streamlined, easy-to-use platform.

Likewise, if your team is fully remote or based in multiple locations, a physical help desk won’t do. You’ll require an online solution that lets employees log in from anywhere and collaborate on customer requests.

6 Key Features To Look For in a Help Desk Solution

The ideal help desk will lead to higher retention rates, lower churn, improved loyalty, and increased brand advocacy. 

How can a help desk do all of this? Isn’t it the service agent’s job to keep customers happy, not the software they use?

In a sense, yes. Software can’t replace human compassion and problem solving. 

But an agent is only as effective as the software they use. Managing complaints or concerns via a traditional email client like Gmail or Outlook isn’t feasible (or advisable) for a business once it begins to grow. Even more difficult is managing communication across multiple channels – email, social media, live chat, phone…

That’s where a help desk comes in, to provide a centralized support solution. Let’s dig deeper into the features a quality help desk should offer.

1. Omnichannel Support for Centralized Communication

What does it mean to centralize communication, why is it useful, and what kinds of things might a help desk offer to make it possible?

Customer satisfaction is a crucial metric, and one of the most important for determining the longevity of your business. Improved customer satisfaction can increase LTV (Long-Term Value) and reduce churn. 

Unsurprisingly, customers want their problems resolved quickly and effectively. Studies continually reaffirm the importance of speed in CX, with 50% of customers polled less likely to do business with a company that takes longer to respond than they would like. 

Therefore, the most effective way to boost customer satisfaction is by enhancing efficiency and cutting down on response times. Centralized communication can help with that, via a help desk that offers omnichannel support.

This means it integrates across channels (emails, tickets, social media sites) for support on a unified platform:

You can respond to all the inquiries your business receives through Facebook, Instagram, or Gmail in one place. Even phone calls, live chat widgets, and contact form requests can be funneled into your shared inbox.

Another important feature to consider is data integration. Centralized support allows for unified customer information. If a customer calls your support team to follow up on a ticket, a help desk can immediately connect the caller’s profile to the original inquiry.

Customers should be able to begin a conversation in one channel and continue it on another without any loss of clarity or context. That’s what it means to go above and beyond for your buyers.

2. Workflow Organization and Collaboration

Once requests come in, it’s time to organize them. A help desk should provide clear and easy-to-use options for filtering and categorizing requests in line with your business’ workflow. 

A shared inbox should allow for collaboration, delegation, and automation (triggered responses, email templates, and tagging rules) to keep your entire customer support team organized. 

For example, the use of smart folders and rules makes it easier to respond to complaints. Requests can be easily labeled by type or degree of urgency (or both). You’ll want lots of customization options so you can prioritize effectively.

This allows for seamless collaboration between team members. Smart folders and customizable rules allow you to:

• Assign urgency to each ticket, based on the nature of the complaint.
• Sort tickets and identify which should be responded to first, based on urgency. 
• Resolve each ticket, or pass it along to the appropriate team member.
• Monitor responses from the customer, to provide further help if needed. 

Help desk software should also allow you to tag inquiries and route them into unified folders, assign tickets to specific agents, collaborate on generating canned responses, and create automation rules in tandem with the above.

Tags are useful for identifying common, recurring topics within customer conversations. Your team can then create response templates (canned responses) to the most popular inquiries. This ensures consistency across your team, while cutting down on response times.

3. A User-Friendly UI That’s Easy To Navigate

Your help desk should reduce workload, stress, and the need to switch between tools. Otherwise, what’s the point?

If the help desk is actually going to be useful, it should be user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to navigate for your customer support team.

It’s also a good idea to make sure your team actually needs and will use all (or most) of the help desk’s features. Otherwise, you risk paying a premium for a toolkit full of bells and whistles that go to waste.

What makes a help desk UI attractive and user-friendly? It starts with:

• A functional, streamlined ticketing system
• Clear, concise language explaining key functionality
• Adherence to the principal of least effort required
• Helpful resources, including a self-serve knowledge base and clear onboarding process

If you can, get your hands on a demo or free trial before you commit to any help desk solution. Give your team the chance to see it in action and try a few basic tasks – that’s the best way to know if it’s a tool that will make their lives easier or harder.

4. Live Chat Integration

Live chat is a useful tool that most customers have come to expect. Customers also tend to react more favorably to live chat agents, with around 80% reporting satisfaction.

Live chat is beneficial because it facilitates real-time conversation that feels personal (either in-app or web-based), without requiring a phone call:

However, this is a less common option. Some help desk software won’t include live chat functionality. Often, you’ll need to turn to third-party software for a web-based widget. Other help desks offer this feature, but it’s paywalled behind more expensive plans. 

So ideally, you’ll want to a help desk that offers live chat support on its standard plans. For example, our own help desk Groove (which we’ll talk more about soon!) partners with a third party to provide live chat functionality.

This is done through a widget that connects smoothly to your website and support dashboard. Live chat conversations are routed back into the shared inbox, where they can be reassigned internally to an agent.

5. Data-Driven Metrics Tracking

Help desk platforms should allow you to track support metrics with ease. This set of features offers real-time insights into potential CX problems:

CSAT, Net Promoter Score, Average Resolution Time, First Response Time, and Ticket Resolutions are all valuable KPIs to track. And that’s just a start – there are plenty of others.

Can these metrics really help to quantify issues of quality?

Yes. Support might be high-touch, but metrics show where your team is falling short. This way, you can productively address issues before they balloon.

For example, KPIs like Average Resolution Time indicate response effectiveness. A spike in resolution times warrants investigation. Was there a product update? A bug? You can correlate increases or decreases in efficiency with internal operations to solve root problems.

Of course, metrics are only useful if they’re easy to access and well organized. So you’ll need a help desk that clearly presents data across all of your agents, service tickets, and customers through a central reporting dashboard.

6. Scalability Baked Into the Software 

We can’t understate the importance of being able to scale your CX support pipeline to include more agents and workflows.

Why switch platforms once your team has grown?

Your chosen platform should be able to grow with your team, and support ten agents just as easily as two. You might also want more advanced features as your business’ needs expand, without having to pay a premium for each individual option.

This might include:

• The ability to handle a lot of tickets without performance issues
• A simple way to add more agents to your dashboard
• Easy permissions management for those agents
• Options for adding new customizations and workflows
• Integration with more complex business applications, such as CRMs

For a small business, there’s a sweet spot in help desk solutions. You’ll want something with affordable starter plans and a low barrier to entry, but that offers plenty of room for growth over time.

Groove: A Help Desk Solution Built Specifically for Small Businesses

There are a lot of help desks out there. However, many of the most popular options pour their time and effort into courting big companies with dozens of support agents. Their tools and plans really aren’t designed with the needs of smaller businesses in mind.

We created Groove to address that problem. We wanted to strip away the jargon, keep the plans simple, and deliver a product you can start using immediately – with no steep learning curve.

Here are just a few of the reasons Groove might be perfect for your own small business:

• 5-minute easy setup, and an interface that feels familiar if you’re used to Gmail or Outlook
• Clear, user-friendly organization options for designing your ideal workflows
• A carefully-chosen feature set that gives you what you need, without overcomplicating your support dashboard
• Comprehensive onboarding, and additional support from a compassionate team when you need it
• Easy-to-understand, scalable plans and pricing, with no hidden fees
• A 7-day free trial, with no credit card required

If you’ve never used a help desk before, Groove offers a seamless first-time experience. You’ll be up and running right away – and since our plans focus on easy scalability, you won’t have to switch platforms as your business grows!

Streamline Support with an Intuitive, All-in-One Help Desk

There’s no one perfect help desk solution for every business. No software can be ‘perfect’. Instead, as with all the tools that are core to your company’s operations, you’ll want to select a help desk based on your business’ unique situation. 

For small businesses switching over from traditional email clients, ease of use is non-negotiable. Your help desk is the hub for all your customer service operations. It has to provide the options and features you need, while simplifying your workflows (not over-complicating them).

Looking for a help desk solution that’s an easy transition for both your support agents and your customers? Sign up for a free Groove trial, and try it out for yourself!