Help desk and customer success software

Turning each customer's email into a ticket, and looking after customers once they have bought

Your order from an online shop hasn't arrived. You email the shop's support address. Within a minute, a reply comes back with a number: ticket #48213. Your email has become a ticket. It gets a priority and an owner, and it waits in a queue until someone answers it. Then it is closed. The software that holds that queue is called a help desk.

The email about the missing order becomes ticket #48213 with a priority and an owner, waits in the queue, is answered by the support team, and is closed.

The help desk is older and simpler than the cloud contact centre of Market Segment 15.1, Contact centre software (CCaaS). It is the tool of a support team that answers in writing, not of a floor of agents taking calls. It is sold as a subscription, usually priced per support agent. Its buyers range from small online shops to the world's largest companies.

The help desk is also where India's best-known software company began. Freshworks was founded in Chennai as Freshdesk, a help desk sold to small companies around the world.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

This Market Segment has two sub-segments:

The help desk

the ticket, from the moment it arrives until it is closed.

After the sale: customer success

This newer discipline works on customers before they have a problem. It gets them started, watches how they use the product, and keeps them from leaving.

Companies also run a help desk for their own employees, for IT problems rather than customers' ones. That kind is covered in Market Segment 16.1, IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations software (in Industry Vertical 16, IT management and workplace tools).

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The help desk
After the sale: customer success

The help desk

Customer service help desks, multi-channel ticketing, shared inboxes, support automation for e-commerce

Back to your missing order from the start of this Market Segment. The shop's support team answers it from a help desk like the ones below.

Freshworks

is the Chennai company whose shares are now traded on the stock market in New York. Its Freshdesk help desk and Freshchat messaging are sold to tens of thousands of small and mid-sized companies. Freddy, its AI agent, answers tickets before a person does. Freshworks has engineers in Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. It has more job postings than any other company in this Market Segment, and in this Industry Vertical. It also sells Freshservice, a help desk for IT teams. (More on it in Market Segment 16.1, IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations software, in Industry Vertical 16, IT management and workplace tools.)

Zendesk

is the help desk most of the world's support teams know. It combines ticketing, live chat, messaging and a help centre, the website of help articles that customers can search. Its Pune centre is one of its largest engineering bases, and almost all its job postings in India are in Pune.

Hiver

founded in Bengaluru, sells the help desk that lives inside Gmail. Many teams answer customers from a shared inbox, such as a support address that several people read. Hiver turns that inbox into a ticket queue, with no new tool to learn. It has engineers in Bengaluru.

Kapture CX

also founded in Bengaluru, sells a customer-service CRM and support automation to Indian and South-East Asian enterprises. A CRM is the system that holds a company's record of every customer. Kapture CX has engineers in Bengaluru.

Richpanel

sells the help desk built for online shops. There, most tickets ask where the order is, and Richpanel answers those itself. It has engineers in Bengaluru.

The larger platforms. Three companies covered mainly in other Market Segments also sell help desks:

ServiceNow

built a workflow engine for IT tickets: software that moves each ticket through set steps, from one person to the next. It sells the same engine for customer tickets, which the industry calls customer service management. It has engineers in Hyderabad and Bengaluru for this work. (More on it in Market Segment 16.1, IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations software, in Industry Vertical 16, IT management and workplace tools.)

Salesforce

sells Service Cloud, the help desk of the largest enterprises. It has engineers in Hyderabad and Bengaluru for this work. (More on it in Market Segment 14.1, CRM software, in Industry Vertical 14, CRM and sales tech.)

DevRev

was founded by one of Nutanix's co-founders. Its AI platform puts the customer's ticket and the engineer's bug in one system. So the engineers fixing a problem see the same record as the support team. It has engineers in Bengaluru and Chennai. (More on it in Market Segment 16.3, Work management and knowledge platforms, in Industry Vertical 16, IT management and workplace tools.)

Zoho Desk and Intercom are not covered in this Market Segment.

The ticket answered before it is read.

Every help desk here now ships an AI agent that answers the ticket itself. So the queue the help desk was built to manage is getting shorter. The help desk is becoming the place where the AI agent's answers are checked, and where the hard cases wait. The AI-agent companies of Market Segment 15.2, Conversational AI for customer service, are selling to the same buyers.

An AI agent now answers the ticket first, and the help desk becomes the place where its answers are checked and the hard cases wait.

After the sale: customer success

Customer success platforms, health scores and retention, customer onboarding

Now look at the online shop from the start of this Market Segment from the other side. It pays a subscription for its help desk. To the help-desk company, the shop is the customer, and it can leave when the subscription comes up for renewal. Customers leaving like this is called churn. Customer success is the work of keeping them. It makes sure customers use the product well, spots the ones at risk, and fixes problems before they complain.

Gainsight

invented much of the discipline it sells. Its customer-success platform gives each customer account a health score. The score comes from how much the customer uses the product, how many tickets it raises and how it answers surveys. The platform tells the account manager, the person responsible for that customer, which customers are at risk of leaving. It also runs the guides inside the product and the online community that help keep them. Gainsight has engineers in Bengaluru.

Rocketlane

founded in Chennai, sells the first ninety days. These are the onboarding and implementation projects that take a customer from a signed contract to a working product, set up for its own needs. Rocketlane runs each project as a shared plan that the customer can see, and tracks the services team's time against it. It has engineers in Chennai.

Gainsight builds each account's health score from product usage, tickets and survey answers, and tells the account manager which customers are at risk of leaving.

That is the life of your email about the missing order. It became a ticket in the shop's help desk, and an AI agent may have answered it. Meanwhile, the help-desk company's customer success team is working to keep the shop as a customer.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What customer service and CX companies hire for.

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