Help desk ticketing system

A ticketing system makes it easy for internal and external customers to get the support they need on their preferred channels. Choosing the right ticketing system with features that best fit your needs can set your teams up for success as your business continues to scale.

Our guide can help you compare the best ticketing systems and learn more about the tools—like automatic ticket creation, intelligent routing, and AI-powered bots—that can streamline your workflows and supercharge your employee and customer service software.

• What is a ticketing system?

• A comparison chart of the top 17 ticketing tools

• Overview of the 17 best ticketing systems

• What are the features of ticketing tools?

• What are the benefits of a help desk ticketing system?

• Best practices for IT ticketing software

• How to implement help desk ticketing software

• How to choose the right ticketing software for your business

• Try our online ticketing system for free

A ticketing system is a support tool teams use to track, manage, organize, and prioritize customer requests.

But it can—and should—do so much more. With the right ticketing software, support teams can:

• Provide support across all the communication channels customers depend on from one location

• Personalize conversations at scale

• Use it in tandem with other systems and software

• Streamline workflows

• Automate repetitive tasks

• Make better business decisions with analytics and reporting

• Collaborate more easily

• Collect customer feedback

Why does your business need a help desk ticketing system?

Your business needs help desk ticketing to organize, prioritize, and consolidate support requests. Help desk ticketing systems can quickly assign issues or inquiries to the agent best suited to handle the request—with the context of the customer interaction—and track the ticket progress from end to end. The system also provides a single view of the customer conversation, which helps support staff coordinate their efforts.

How does an IT ticketing system work?

An IT ticketing system translates all end-user issues from disparate sources into tickets. The system tracks the status of each ticket as support staff members work on solving the issue. A ticket records all interactions with a user as well as internal conversations between staff members on the issue.

With an IT ticketing platform like Zendesk, a ticket can be recorded as a question, problem, incident, or task. A single problem can be an underlying cause of many incidents. For example, if the company’s email server is down, multiple incidents can be linked to that problem. When you mark the main problem as solved, each user’s incident ticket is updated with the new status.

When customer and employee support agents close tickets, they don’t just disappear. Tickets contain valuable data that can give you company and customer insights. IT ticketing programs can slice data in various ways to reveal performance metrics and generate reports.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk offers an omnichannel ticketing system designed to seamlessly connect your support team with customers across all channels, such as email, messaging, chat, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and community forums.

The centralized hub also allows managers and admins to evaluable their team’s performance with pre-built dashboards and custom reports. Using information from these reporting and analytics tools, managers can find ways to improve efficiency through resource planning, customer request prioritization, ticketing workflow optimization, and more.

Context is king with the Zendesk ticket system

Zendesk ticketing software arms your team up with everything they need to provide customers with truly personalized service. With Agent Workspace, your teams have a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey, so they can stop searching for information across systems and apps and focus on the customers and employees they’re serving.

This unified view gives your agents full context and details—including order history, loyalty status, and web activity—for every customer interaction through an organized workflow.

Problem-solve at lightning speed

Beyond having a centralized hub for a seamless workflow, Zendesk software makes it easy for your team to identify issues as soon as they arise.

Tickets are assigned unique reference numbers and statuses to help teams manage and prioritize their workflow. To stay on track, teams can also set up alerts for tickets that agents haven’t responded to in a timely manner.

Our built-in issue tracking system enables your support team to easily identify issues the moment customers raise them. Agents can send the information gained from the issue tracker to notify the software development team of bugs or create new self-help resources for customers. By identifying problems early, your team can take swift action to ensure high levels of service satisfaction.

Zendesk offers a simple IT ticketing solution

Our IT ticketing solution contains a variety of features that make solving IT issues a breeze. Here are just a few examples.

• Integrations: You already have your favorite apps for a variety of tasks. Zendesk comes with pre-built integrations for over 1,300 apps (including IT asset management services) so you can keep your ideal workflows going.
  

• Ticket collaboration: Sometimes, support tickets require a team effort. Zendesk makes it easy for teams to collaborate on tickets publicly or privately without confusing customers.
  

• Satisfaction Prediction Score: With enough data, our help desk ticketing system can predict customer satisfaction within each ticket. This gives agents a better understanding of what works. It can also help you save at-risk tickets before it’s too late.
  

• Knowledge base: A self-service portal helps end users help themselves. By leveraging IT support staff knowledge, you can reduce incoming service tickets and better manage support requests.
  

• Live chat: Zendesk offers support anywhere, so customers can always reach you. The conversation stays connected, whether it starts on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, live chat, or email.
  

• Chatbot: Zendesk bot capabilities empower companies to make the most of their ticketing system solution.
  

• Macros: Macros let you fill in predetermined responses to common requests and problems. For example, your IT help desk can create a preset response for password-related problems.
  

• Security and compliance: Zendesk provides multiple user authentication options, including business and social single sign-ons. Redaction capabilities make it simple to keep passwords and sensitive information confidential. Zendesk Enterprise Support also offers optional HIPAA compliance.

Mobile ticketing system

Great customer support should be tied to the customer—not the computer, fancy headset, or even a particular day or problem. The Zendesk mobile ticketing system has native mobile apps that are built for team leaders, agents, IT, or anyone who doesn’t want to take the “help desk” literally. Agents can catch up on tickets, clean up their queue, and free up their workflow (and mind).

Zendesk offers support from your iPhone and Android:

• Notifications give agents updates on their assigned tickets

• Create new tickets on the fly and make quick updates with macros

• Get to the right ticket immediately using search and deep-linking from email

• Filter through the queue with Views and swipe to easily move to the next ticket

Pricing:

• Suite Team: $55 per agent/month

• Suite Growth: $89 per agent/month

• Suite Professional: $115 per agent/month

Free trial:

14 days

2. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk provides a ticketing platform aimed to help small customer-facing support teams as they grow. It offers multichannel support, allowing customers to connect with companies via email, chat, web, or social messaging apps. Zoho Desk also supports many integrations—including Slack, Salesforce, and Zendesk—and integrates easily with its own native products.

While it’s fairly basic, Zoho Desk does feature a customizable dashboard with reporting and analytics tools. There’s also a mobile app and a free plan, which includes an email-based IT ticket system, private knowledge management, and multi-language support.

Features:

• Omnichannel support

• Instant messaging

• Help center and knowledge base

• Ticket management

• AI chatbots

• Reporting and analytics

• SLAs

Pricing:

• Standard: $20 per user/month

• Professional: $35 per user/month

• Enterprise: $50 per user/month

Free trial:

15 days

Learn more about Zoho Desk for Zendesk.

3. Freshdesk

Freshdesk offers a help desk system with an interface that works for businesses of all sizes. The software consolidates all communications into a shared inbox so teams can tag and collaborate on tickets. Additionally, incoming customer support requests can be automatically converted into tickets and routed to the right team or agent.

Freshdesk allows you to automate tasks like outbound ticket notifications with status updates, auto triage, and hourly ticket scans to check for action items. Freshdesk also has out-of-the-box integrations and several third-party integration options.

Features:

• Automations

• Custom ticket views

• Custom email server

• Time tracking

• Marketplace app

• Email ticket routing

• Knowledge base

• Helpdesk and ticket trend report

• SLAs

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per agent/month (up to 10 agents)

• Growth: $18 per agent/month

• Pro: $59 per agent/month

• Enterprise: $95 per agent/month

Free trial:

21 days

Learn more about Zendesk for Freshdesk.

4. HappyFox

HappyFox is a cloud-based CRM that provides help desk ticketing solutions for different industries and company sizes. The ticketing system software boasts several features, including custom ticket queues, ticket tagging and sorting by category, and self-service options—like knowledge base articles and FAQs.

The ticketing platform has safeguards to avoid agent collision, meaning only one agent can update a given ticket at a time. Other capabilities include applying bulk actions to related tickets, search and filter options to find tickets quickly, and quick replies for immediate communication with the customer.

Features:

• SLA management

• Smart automation

• Knowledge base

• Custom email domain mapping

• Basic reporting

Pricing:

• Mighty: $39 per agent/month

• Fantastic: $59 per agent/month

• Enterprise: $79 per agent/month

• Enterprise Plus: $99 per agent/month

Free trial:

14 days

Learn more about HappyFox Workflows for Zendesk.

5. Help Scout

The help desk ticketing system from Help Scout can support large teams with more than 500 users but also works for small teams who need flexible ticket management tools. Thanks to shared inboxes, teams can collaborate and manage customer requests from a centralized location. Help Scout’s API and broad selection of integrations mean the system should work seamlessly with your existing customer channels and databases.

In addition to its ticketing system, Help Scout provides reporting and analytics dashboards and built-in knowledge bases for self-service options. If you’d like to test out Help Scout before you commit, you can try it free for 15 days, with access to the full suite of features.

Features:

• Rule-based automation

• Extensions and integrations

• Website live chat

• Custom reports

• Ticket routing and prioritization

• Knowledge base content management

• Multichannel communication

Pricing:

• Standard: $25 per user/month

• Plus: $50 per user/month

• Pro: $65 per user/month (annual only)

Free trial:

15 days

6. LiveAgent

LiveAgent’s ticketing system for customer service provides a universal inbox that collects and consolidates tickets across channels. The ticketing tool helps teams stay organized and streamline workflows for efficiency. LiveAgent emphasizes its live chat service with features like a real-time typing view, website monitoring for chat engagement, and proactive chat invitations based on active agent availability. The help desk ticket system automatically converts messages from live chat into support tickets, too.

LiveAgent has native integrations for several apps support teams commonly use. In addition to paid plans, LiveAgent offers a free version with limited features, including a ticketing tool, basic reporting, seven-day ticket history, one chat button, one phone number, and one email address.

Features:

• Unlimited ticket history

• API and integrations

• Help portal and forum

• Advanced reporting

• Unlimited email address

• Customer service

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per agent/month (limited features and integrations)

• Small: $12 per agent/month

• Medium: $35 per agent/month

• Large: $59 per agent/month

Free trial:

14 days

7. KB Support

KB Support is a WordPress-friendly help desk ticket system. KB Support’s ticketing system for small businesses is commonly used in the ecommerce industry. Because of its broad range of integrations, KB Support is a flexible option to grow with your scaling business. The WordPress plugin includes support for ticketing from web forms and email, agent permissions, custom ticket statuses, preset replies, and a WooCommerce integration.

Aside from its ticketing features, KB Support also has a built-in knowledge base you can use to provide self-service options for your customers. You can even restrict certain articles for logged-in users only.

Features:

• Native automations

• Email ticketing

• WooCommerce integration

• Tracking and measurement

• Ticket routing

• Custom ticket statuses

• FAQ support

• Customer feedback

Pricing:

• Starter: $74 per year (single site)

• Professional: $102 per year (single site)

• Enterprise: $150 per year (single site)

Free trial:

Not available

8. Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk is a cloud-based help desk ticketing system that enables teams to automate their ticket management with rule-based criteria and consolidate conversations across channels. The help desk ticketing software categorizes tickets in a tree structure and allows you to create custom views for a tailored agent experience.

The ticketing system has two portals—one for employees and one for customers. To support agent productivity and improve the employee experience, Vision Helpdesk also offers gamification features that businesses can use to set up agent achievements with rewards.

Features:

• Workflows

• Email ticket creation

• Reporting and analytics

• Ticketing

• Shared inbox

• Optimized knowledge base content

• Multichannel support

Pricing:

• Starter Help Desk: $15 per agent/month

• Pro Help Desk: $25 per agent/month

• Satellite Help Desk: $30 per agent/month

• Pro Service Desk: $40 per agent/month

• Ent Service Desk: $60 per agent/month

Free trial:

30 days

9. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot provides its ticket system software through its Service Hub product. In addition to providing broad help desk functionality, Service Hub helps support agents prioritize tickets, automate workflows, and provide personalized experiences across many service channels. HubSpot’s software also features conversational bots, live chat messaging, and customer portals to aid with customer self-service.

HubSpot offers native integrations with its own line of HubSpot products and hosts a wide array of third-party integrations. HubSpot does offer a limited free plan with a support ticket system, custom fields, shared inboxes, reporting, canned snippets, and other CRM features.

Features:

• Conversational tools

• Shared inbox

• Help desk automation

• Knowledge base functionality

• Customer feedback

• Custom surveys

• Reporting and analytics

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per agent/month (limited features and integrations)

• Starter: $45 per agent/month

• Professional: $450 per month

• Enterprise: $1,200 per month

Free trial:

14 days

Learn more about HubSpot for Zendesk.

10. Front

Through its shared email inbox, Front connects your entire customer service team. A range of companies from startups to ecommerce and SaaS businesses use Front to manage their customers’ experience. Beyond that basic functionality, Front tries to foster a culture of teamwork, collaboration, and transparency on your service team.

Front allows agents to collaborate on tickets before responding to customers. The software features a shared draft tool that lets the entire team monitor a ticket’s progress throughout its lifecycle, even when the ticket gets assigned to a single agent. Plus, Front supports ticketing for messages from every channel, including email, chat, social media, and SMS.

Features:

• Email, chat, SMS, and social media ticketing

• Ticket collaboration tools

• Limited integrations

• Ticketing rule templates

• Up to 10 users

Pricing:

• Growth: $49 per seat/month

• Scale: $99 per seat/month

• Premier: $229 per seat/month

Free trial:

7 days

11. AzureDesk

AzureDesk’s help desk ticketing system strives to help companies achieve high customer satisfaction. The software has core features like reporting, ticket management, knowledge base management, and email-to-ticket conversion. It allows your teams to categorize tickets using tags to streamline ticket management.

This help desk ticket system allows you to use an unlimited number of email addresses, making it easy to convert emails from any address into a support ticket. AzureDesk’s flexible software can also support many pre-built customer service integrations.

Features:

• Smart automation

• Ticket tags

• Private notes

• APIs and app integrations

• Live chat widget

• Agent signatures

• Advanced reporting

• Ticket management

• Shared email inbox

• Brand customizations

• Knowledge content management

• Omnichannel support

Pricing:

• Plus: $50 per user/month

Free trial:

14 days

12. SupportBee

Designed as a simple, intuitive ticketing system, SupportBee can improve customer service team processes. SupportBee’s centralized workspace allows for multichannel support and gives agents an easy way to collaborate and assign ticket requests. It works like a shared email inbox that simplifies workflows, allows private comments, and has a private inbox view so individual agents can readily see their action items.

SupportBee’s plans include unlimited tickets and inboxes, which makes it easier to scale up if needed. Reporting features offer ticket insights and metrics on agent production and efficiency. SupportBee supports integrations with many third-party applications, enabling you to boost your workflow, project management, and notification capabilities.

Features:

• Shared inbox

• Canned snippets

• Basic integrations

• Knowledge base

• Customer satisfaction ratings

• One team

• Two-factor authentication

Pricing:

• Startup: $15 per user/month

• Enterprise: $20 per user/month

Free trial:

14 days

13. Awesome Support

Awesome Support is a customer support ticketing system plugin for WordPress that works right out of the box. Every interaction gets logged so your team can view the complete ticket history. You can set up triggers that automatically send ticket updates to customers via email. You can also configure ticket automation to assign and route tickets to the best agent to handle a request.

The software features ticket forms that include customizable fields so you can display the most important information your agents need to support the customer. Awesome Support offers a free version with limited features as well as customizable plans with a library of add-ons so you can tailor your ticketing system to fit your business needs.

Features:

• Canned responses

• Unlimited ticket history

• Unlimited agents and tickets

• Email support

• FAQs

• Integrations and add-ons

Pricing:

• Standard: $149 per year (single site)

• Pro: $229 per year (single site)

• Enterprise: $289 per year (single site)

• Agency: $409 per year (single site)

Free trial:

Not available

14. TeamSupport

TeamSupport is a customer support ticketing software solution designed to meet the needs of companies serving B2B technology customers. In addition to functioning as a ticketing management system, TeamSupport boasts reporting features that help with root cause analysis to minimize ticket volume. TeamSupport also offers external and internal knowledge base functionality and a customer forum.

The ticketing tool allows you to create your own basic ticket management page with customizable fields. The software also has features that help your agents provide a better customer experience, like automatic knowledge base article suggestions relevant to a customer’s issue.

Features:

• Customer and ticket management

• Customer self-service

• Knowledge base (single product)

• Customer satisfaction rating (CSAT)

• Customer Distress Index (CDI™) scoring

• Basic reporting

• Pre-built dashboards

• Ticket collision

• Integrations

• Ticket automation and routing rules

Pricing:

• Essential Support: $49 per agent/month

• Enterprise Support: $69 per agent/month

• Complete Customer Support Suite: $119 per agent/month

Free trial:

14 days

15. Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management features ticketing software that helps teams meet specific business needs. Jira ensures your teams get started quickly with pre-built templates, ticket tools, and automation options that work right out of the box. A single view allows teams to keep track of customer requests and conversations across communication channels. Jira offers several integrations that help teams handle tickets, collaborate, and manage tasks and product development in one place.

Jira’s software also enables you to build and manage a knowledge base so you can always have up-to-date information in real time. The reporting software provides managers with crucial metrics, while automation options help eliminate repetitive tasks and improve agent efficiency.

Features:

• Reporting and analytics

• SLAs

• Out-of-the-box ITIL processes

• Automations

• Integration library

• Self-service options and knowledge base

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per agent/month (up to 3 agents)

• Standard: $21 per agent/month

• Premium: $47 per agent/month

• Enterprise: Custom

Free trial:

7 days

Learn more about Zendesk for Jira.

16. Mojo Helpdesk

Centralize communication and streamline workflows for internal and external customers with the Mojo Helpdesk ticket system. Mojo keeps teams organized by allowing them to automate ticket routing and tagging when a new request comes in. The customizable knowledge base can help reduce customer requests by providing self-service options.

Mojo’s ticketing platform is flexible and easy to use for any department, from IT support and facility and maintenance management to human resources and customer service. The centralized inbox gives agents a complete view of customer information, while auto-responders and reminders help agents stay on top of requests.

Features:

• Self-service knowledge base

• Ticket automation and triggers

• Smart routing

• Contact ticket portal

• Email integration

• Time tracking

• Agile summary

Pricing:

• Team: $14 per agent/month

• Business: $24 per agent/month

• Enterprise: $34 per agent/month

Free trial:

21 days

17. Hiver

Hiver’s email ticketing software helps agents streamline ticket requests from customers and employees for improved experiences. Hiver’s shared inbox allows your support teams to track tickets from end to end, ensuring no requests slip through the cracks. Internal notes within the shared inbox enable agents to collaborate with contextual discussions in one place.

Hiver’s ticketing solution offers automation options, like automatic email responses, automatically removing junk emails from the queue, and routing tickets based on availability and workload, with round-robin distribution also available. Analytics and reporting features allow management to track key metrics and gather actionable insights. Hiver includes SLAs to make sure you handle issues in a timely manner.

Features:

• Centralized view

• SLAs

• Email tracking

• Data collection

• Reporting and analytics

• Automation

• Personalized email templates

Pricing:

• Lite: $19 per user/month

• Pro: $49 per user/month

• Elite: $69 per user/month

Free trial:

7 days

The best IT ticketing tools offer a combination of features that are easy to set up and use. Here are some key features to consider while comparing different online ticketing services.

Ticketing software receives, logs, and sorts incoming tickets to streamline problem resolution. Simple ticketing software is the price of entry for any professional customer service team, even if it’s a team of one. Check out these five powerful benefits your team can enjoy with the right help desk ticketing system.

Boost agent productivity and efficiency

Finding new and better ways to provide great customer service is invaluable. Help desk ticketing software can help you boost productivity and efficiency in several ways, including automating low-value, time-consuming tasks. By automating tedious tasks, ticketing tools allow agents to spend more time on high-value tasks—like serving customers and training.

Lower costs with self-service and AI

Improved efficiency and productivity mean that your organization can more easily provide top-notch customer service with fewer agents, reducing costs without impacting service quality.

Additionally, building out a knowledge base that provides self-service resources—like help center articles and FAQs—can help customers find answers on their own quickly and conveniently. AI-powered chatbots can proactively connect with customers to offer these resources, deflecting potential tickets and keeping the queue more manageable for your customer service team.

Increase customer loyalty and retention

IT ticket systems help keep teams organized with streamlined workflows and contextual information all in one place. As a result, agents have the customer data and context they need to deliver the timely, personalized service that customers expect. And they don’t need to ask customers to repeat information—a common pain point for angry customers.

When customer support is easy, customers will stick around—and maybe even spread the good word about your brand.

Create actionable data insights

Ticketing systems centralize every customer interaction—including support requests and agents’ responses—so they double as a learning tool. Managers can use it to discover patterns, areas of improvement, and data that help them make changes to enhance the customer experience.

For example, management teams might learn from a spike in tickets that help center articles need to be created or updated. They can also identify certain situations where agents are struggling, indicating the need for coaching or additional training. The opportunities to learn and grow over time are endless, and good help desk ticketing software makes them possible.

Enhance collaboration between departments

Ticketing software can help break down communication silos between teams and increase collaboration across departments. Shared inboxes provide a single view of customer tickets, keeping everyone looped in on issues, conversations, and updates. Intelligent routing automatically assigns a ticket to the best agent to handle the inquiry rather than passing the request from agent to agent.

Ticketing software has exciting capabilities, but even the best solutions need the right processes built around them to maximize their value. Here are a few best practices for help desk ticketing software that can help you get the most out of the product.

• Invest in agent training

  When businesses invest in new software, they often only use a fraction of its capabilities. To avoid this pitfall, create a training program to get your agents up to speed on the system and the features that can make their jobs easier. Depending on the IT ticketing software you use, the vendor may offer training sessions, which is a great way to familiarize your team with the system without the administrative burden.

• Personalize conversations

  The right ticketing software consolidates the entire customer journey across channels, including interactions, personal data, conversations, purchase history, resolved and open issues, buying behavior, preferred channels, and so on. This provides your team with valuable information that allows for personalized experiences. Our CX Trends Report found that customers understand that businesses collect their personal data, but they expect companies to use it to create a tailored customer experience.

  Personalization goes beyond simply addressing customers by their first name. It means proactively communicating with them on their preferred channels, using and implementing feedback to improve products or processes, sending relevant offers and product suggestions, and collaborating across teams to ensure all employees have the customer data they need.

• Empower agents to uncover sales opportunities

  Your support agents are on the front lines and collect a wealth of knowledge about your customers every day. Empower them to uncover sales opportunities so you can drive revenue and growth. By connecting your help desk ticketing solution with your marketing tools and systems, you’ll give your agents the context to identify any opportunities to involve sales—or upsell and cross-sell products in the moment.

• Collect customer feedback

  Gathering and implementing customer feedback can show customers they have a voice and are valuable to your business. Ticketing software helps you collect direct and passive feedback by presenting you with spikes in support tickets surrounding certain issues. Within the tickets, the conversation can provide insight into how the customer feels about the situation and detail any feedback they offer.

  You can also automate feedback surveys that trigger after an interaction or a ticket update. Net Promoter Score® (NPS) and CSAT surveys offer quick insights into your products, services, or brand perception with numerical ratings.

Ready to reap the benefits of help desk ticketing software? Here are six steps you can follow to ensure you implement your software properly.

Determine your purpose and document your goals

Explicitly defining your purpose and documenting your goals will help you achieve buy-in with your team and other stakeholders. Plus, it’ll keep everyone focused. If you get stuck at any point during your implementation, you can always return to your goals to help guide your path forward. Common goals include lower average resolution time, reduced costs, and higher customer retention.

Define your service level agreement (SLA)

Your SLA lays out expectations for your team and your customers as it relates to certain aspects of your business. Details can include the service your support team provides, your business hours, support channels, and expected response times. You can create external SLAs with customers or internal SLAs to govern internal expectations. Either way, the important thing is to have one because it will help you determine the details of deploying your ticketing software.

Assign roles and responsibilities

Every agent, manager, and administrator should know exactly what they’re supposed to do in any given situation. It’s critical to define who does what, when, where, why, and how. Assigning roles and responsibilities allows you to facilitate more seamless communication because when team members have questions, they know who to contact and the processes to follow. Clear roles and responsibilities also lay the groundwork for how you will manage user permissions in your ticketing system.

Create workflows for ticket routing

Ticket routing is the core function of IT ticketing systems, so defining your ticketing workflows is fundamental to your software implementation. Here, you will determine how to handle inquiries based on when they're received, the type of inquiry, the channel(s) involved, the customer who inquired, and any other criteria relevant to your operation.

Remember that you probably shouldn’t automatically assign an agent to every ticket. Instead, create ticketing workflows that only escalate customer issues to agents when self-service tools—like knowledge bases, chatbots, and FAQs—aren’t enough to resolve the ticket.

Test your ticketing system

It doesn’t take much for a customer to leave your company for a competitor. So once your system is set up, take the time to test it out and work out any bugs. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and submit different kinds of requests. Walk through the process and look for points of friction or dead ends. Only once you’ve exhaustively tested the system should you take it live. Using a free trial is a low-risk way to help you with this process.

Report on performance

Even a perfect ticketing system is never really finished. There are always aspects of your workflows that can be improved. Spot opportunities for optimization by regularly tracking customer service performance, collecting feedback from agents, and surveying customers.

If your IT professionals spend all their time sorting through emails or figuring out who responded to what ticket, it’s time for a change. Your ticketing software will be among your customer support team’s most heavily used tools, so it’s important to pick the right one.

To help guide your decision-making, here are some common questions and answers about ticketing software.