Top 50 Help Desk Features for Better Team & Ticket Management

HelpSpot’s email management features are designed with simplicity in mind — we’re careful not to go overboard on extras that clutter the interface, cause confusion, and hike up the price.

As a result, HelpSpot is one of the easiest help desk systems to learn and use: Your team won’t require any training to use HelpSpot and can be productive on day one. Below you can see all of our features, starting with our core 4.

HelpSpot's Core Four

Features to organize your inbox, monitor agent performance, & improve customer satisfaction

Shared Inbox: Let your staff work out of one team inbox in a super intuitive dashboard
Knowledge Base: Keep all of your troubleshooting documentation inside your help desk
Reporting: Understand your customer’s issues & how your agents resolve them
Self-Service Portal: Help customers find answers to FAQs, submit tickets, & check request status

Channels

Centralize all of your incoming support requests in one team-friendly dashboard

Email Management: Connect unlimited email accounts
Contact Forms: Allow end-users to create & submit support tickets without an agent’s help
Agent Entry: Create new tickets on the fly & assign them out as you go
API: Link HelpSpot with other channels to unify all of your support tickets

Organizing Tickets

Forget weeding through a messy inbox & keep tabs on all of your support requests

Filters: Sort requests any which way to get a better look at customer issues
Single Assignment: Add agents to tickets so requests don’t get missed
Categories: Categorize all of your support tickets for faster search
Advanced Search: Find any ticket you need with search terms, custom fields, & more
Batch Operations: Wipeout repetitive tasks & save time by addressing tickets in bulk

Responding to Tickets

Help your agents work together to provide the best support experience for your customers

Ticket Interface: Get up to speed on any request without questions or outside messaging
Saved Responses: Save agents from rewriting common replies & speed up response times
Collision Detection: Real-time notifications tell you when another team member is working in the same ticket
Time Tracking: Time your team’s tasks & record the data for more granular reporting
Merge Tickets: Prevent duplicate tickets & keep all related requests together

Reporting

Customizable reports give you all of the data to better manage your agents & improve the customer experience

Volume Reports: Look at various metrics to see your team’s ticket volume by time frame, category, agent, & more
Speed Reports: First response times & resolution times show you how quickly agents address customer requests
Comparison Matrix: Glance at all of your team metrics to pinpoint patterns & get a full picture of your data
Email Reports: Send reports to anybody you need, as often as you need

Automation

Save time by training HelpSpot to check repetitive tasks off the to-do list

Triggers: Track ticket changes & take automatic action to guarantee timely support
SLAs & Automation Rules: Prevent tickets from flying under the radar & set alerts for inactivity
Automatic Assignment: Streamline ticket routing & distribute the right requests to the right agents
Recurring Tickets: Avoid monotonous support tasks & auto-send saved responses for common requests

Customization

Give your agents the tools to work their best

Custom Fields: Track all of the relevant data about your support requests & use this info for better reporting
Dark Mode: Quickly toggle between light mode & dark mode to prevent headaches & eye strain

Branding

Personalize every aspect of HelpSpot to reflect your brand design

Multi-Brand Support: Create separate inboxes, knowledge bases, & self-service portals for each of your brands
Portal Templates: Add branded elements to all of your customer-facing portals & pages
Email Templates: Insert logos, colors, & more to completely control how email replies are displayed
Email Signatures: Give every email a personal touch with a custom agent signature

Security

Take complete control over your team’s shared inbox

Permission Groups: Manage all of your users, the tickets they can see, & the actions they can take
Authentication: Quickly reinforce HelpSpot with single sign-on support
Black Box: Setup custom black box authentication to protect against any outside source
GDPR Tools: Handle GDPR related requests & oversee customer data
Redaction of Sensitive Data: Remove credit cards and/or Social Security numbers from tickets

Integrations

Connect HelpSpot with all of your team’s daily tools

Live Lookup: Pull customer data from your CRM to HelpSpot in real-time
NPS/CSAT Surveys: Get started with Thermostat to better understand customer needs & improve satisfaction scores
Zapier: Create custom integrations to link HelpSpot with all of the tools in your tech stack

Hosting

Choose cloud-based or self-hosted help desk software to suit your needs

Cloud: HelpSpot’s Cloud service lets you get up & running in under an hour
On-Premise: Install & run HelpSpot on your own servers, setup is still a breeze
Cloud Infrastructure: HelpSpot partners with trusted data centers to keep your content secure
Scaling: Modify HelpSpot as your business grows & needs change

Test all of HelpSpot’s email management features for free with our 21-day trial! Link your email accounts and see how HelpSpot makes it faster and easier to get through your team inbox and provide helpful support.

What to keep in mind as you shop for the best help desk software

Before you sit down to research help desk brands, list out the specific pains you’re experiencing and how you want help desk software to support your teams. Understanding exactly what your business needs in a help desk is crucial to choosing the appropriate features to better manage your team’s shared inbox.

Then, when shopping help desk software, you should think about these things:

First, choose the type of help desk software that suits your needs: Do you need email management help desk software? Help desk software for your customer service team? Or an IT help desk ticketing system?

Some help desk software is recommended for specific end-users — and even though HelpSpot is designed as broader email management help desk software, our help desk is also versatile enough so that it can be customized for different use cases.

You can read more about how to tailor HelpSpot for different user groups in our posts here:

This is also the time to consider whether or not you need cloud-based or self-hosted help desk software. HelpSpot is one of the only help desk brands that still offers (and supports) a self-hosted help desk solution, and we don’t plan on changing that because — even though cloud-based software is convenient — there are cases where teams require self-hosted software. For example, healthcare groups that operate on HIPAA-compliant servers and businesses that have to adhere to GDPR requirements need on-premise options.

Next, look at:

The available features: What ticket and team management features does your help desk provide? Does that cover all of your bases or are you foregoing any key features? Are you paying for extras?
The ease of use: Do you understand how the features work and how to navigate the software? How much training time will your team need to get onboarded? How realistic is it to deploy and make the most of the software?
The available customer support: Can you lean on the help desk brand to help when you have questions or need assistance? Do they charge extra for support?
The available integrations & options to customize: Can you connect your help desk with your CRM and the other tools your teams use on a day-to-day basis? Do integrations and customization cost extra? How flexible is the help desk to accommodate changes later down the line?
The pricing model: How does pricing work? Are you choosing a help desk package and upgrading as you go? Or paying per agent? How does the cost compare with other help desks on your radar?

We designed HelpSpot to check these five boxes and work for a variety of organizations — from small startups to global enterprise businesses. Here’s how:

We focus our feature-set on email (ticket) and agent management and don’t pack in a bunch of extras.
All of HelpSpot’s features are based on the email systems you’re already comfortable with so there’s virtually zero learning curve when switching to HelpSpot from a platform like GMail or Outlook.
We provide complimentary customer support anytime you need assistance. We can answer questions, help with setup, or even provide assistance with learning the software.
We allow our users to tailor HelpSpot to suit their unique specifications: You can connect as many email accounts as you need, organize and field requests by brand, and connect HelpSpot with any other software or support channels you use to manage customer requests.
We offer pay-per-agent pricing and the cost is completely transparent. All customization is free, we don’t charge extra for support from our team.

You can get started with a 21-day free trial of HelpSpot here.

Other FAQs about help desk software features

What are the main benefits of help desk software?

Many teams switch to HelpSpot’s help desk software because it:

Helps teams keep better track of support requests by consolidating incoming tickets from email and other support channels like phone systems, live chat, and social media
Lets teams juggle requests from multiple brands and keep brand communications separate
Makes it easier to keep tabs on service level agreements (SLAs) and other time-sensitive tickets
Provides collaborative tools so teams can work out of a shared inbox more efficiently
Has built-in reporting functionality so you can easily track customer issues and agent performance
Enables “audit-ability” so management can search back through any request and see the fine details
Speeds up repetitive tasks like ticket assignment and replying to common queries
Prevents blunders like missed requests and duplicate replies so you can keep customers happy and provide quick, helpful support

All in all, HelpSpot helps you organize and manage support tickets and provides tools that make your agents’ jobs easier.

What is service desk software? What is the difference between service desk and help desk software solutions?

Service desk software — typically called IT or ITIL service desk software — is help desk software designed for IT teams that field service requests from both internal staff and external users. IT service desk software is typically sold as part of, or in conjunction with, IT service management (ITSM) software.

IT service desk software is different from other help desk software, like HelpSpot, because it has extra features, like asset management, to help you monitor and manage your organization’s entire IT infrastructure.

This robust software can be a good solution for IT teams that have a well-established internal IT department that needs these sophisticated tools to manage their workflows. However, we recommend sticking with more email management help desk software if you just need core ticket management and shared inbox features and aren’t handling complex IT issues.

What are all of the different forms of help desk solutions available?

There are three broad categories of help desk software:

Email management software
Customer service software
IT service desk software

As their names suggest, email management software is for teams who need to better manage support requests over email; customer service software is designed for customer support teams that need multichannel functionality to consolidate requests from several points of contact; IT service desk software is for IT teams that need extra tools to manage more complex support requests.

There is also cloud-based help desk software and on-premise help desk software to consider. These are different from “categories” of help desk software because all three types of help desk software we listed above can be found in both cloud-based and on-premise options.

The difference between cloud-based software and on-premise software is where it operates. Cloud-based software is run on the cloud and supported by our HelpSpot team, it requires no installation or setup on your end. On-premise help desk software is run on your own servers. It requires installation and set-up, but we’ve designed our self-hosted help desk software to be fairly simple to get running. The benefit of choosing on-premise software over cloud-based software is that it gives you better control over data storage, backups, and software updates.

As we talked about above, HelpSpot is a customizable email management help desk: It’s designed with all of the core help desk functionality like a team inbox, agent queues, ticket templates, automation rules, and reporting. But it’s also built with Zapier so that it can integrate with any other software your teams use to interface with customers and provide support. That means customer service teams, IT teams, marketing and sales teams, HR groups, operations teams, (and more) can tailor HelpSpot to suit their specific needs. Plus, since HelpSpot is available in both cloud-based and self-hosted versions, we can accommodate all teams.

Test Our Help Desk Features — Get Started With a Free Trial

Ready to get started with help desk software? We offer a 21-day free trial of HelpSpot so you can get set up and have time to test our different help desk features.

To talk with our team about what you need in a help desk and learn more about what HelpSpot can offer, get started with our free trial today.