Help desk and customer success are two kinds of software that look after a company's customers in writing and over time. The help desk handles each customer's problem, from the moment the customer writes in until the problem is solved. Customer success looks after customers after they have bought, so that they keep buying.
The help desk is built around the ticket. A ticket is a record of one customer's problem, with a number, a priority, an owner and a status, such as open, waiting or solved. Say a customer emails a small online tea shop in Darjeeling: the tea she ordered a week ago has not arrived. Within a minute, she receives a reply with a number: ticket #4182. Her email has become a ticket. It is marked normal priority and given to one member of the support team. It waits in a queue with the other tickets until he answers it. When the parcel is found and delivered, he marks the ticket solved, and it closes.
The software that holds this queue is help desk software. It is simpler than contact centre software. It serves a support team that answers mainly in writing, by email, chat and messaging, rather than a floor of agents taking calls. It is sold as software as a service (SaaS), usually priced per support agent each month. The help desk is also the company's system of record for support: the one official place where every customer problem and its answer is stored. One of India's best-known software companies, Freshworks, began in Chennai as a help desk sold to small companies around the world.
There are also two lighter kinds of help desk: a shared inbox turns a Gmail support address into a queue, and an e-commerce help desk answers "where is my order?" by itself.
Customer success software works on customers before they have a problem. It is used mainly by companies that sell software by subscription to other businesses. It watches how much each customer uses the product, how many tickets it raises and how it answers surveys. From these, it works out which customers may not renew. Its first stage, setting up a new customer, is often run with customer onboarding software.
Most help desks now include an AI agent that answers tickets before a person reads them. So the queue is getting shorter. The help desk is becoming the place where the AI agent's answers are checked, and where the hard cases wait for a person.