Help desk software is the system in which a company's support team receives customers' emails, chats and messages, turns each one into a ticket, and works through the tickets until each one is solved. It is also called ticketing software or customer service software. Most help desks now also let an AI agent answer a ticket first, before a person sees it.
A ticket is a record of one customer's problem. It has a number, so that the customer and the company can refer to it. It has a priority, such as low, normal or urgent. It has an owner, the person responsible for answering it. And it has a status, such as open, waiting for the customer, or solved. The help desk keeps every ticket and every reply. So it is the system of record for the company's support.
The help desk also holds the rules that sort the tickets. A rule might send all refund questions to one team, or mark a ticket urgent if the customer uses words such as "fraud". The company sets a service level agreement, or SLA, which is a promise about how fast tickets are answered. The help desk counts the time on every ticket and warns the team lead before the promise is broken. Most help desks also include a help centre. This is a website of help articles that customers can search, so they can solve simple problems without writing in.
Take, for example, a coaching app for students preparing for engineering entrance exams. On a Sunday night before a mock test, a student in Kota writes in the app: "The recorded physics class will not play." The help desk creates ticket #77351. A rule sees the words "class will not play" and the label "paid student", so it sets the priority to high and puts the ticket in the queue of the technical support team. The SLA for high priority is a first reply within one hour. First, the help desk's AI agent reads the ticket. It checks the student's account, finds an old version of the app, and replies with the steps to update it. The student replies that the class now plays. The ticket is marked solved after 12 minutes. A support executive only reads the summary the next morning.
The help desk exchanges data with the systems around it. It reads the customer's details from the customer relationship management (CRM) system. It sends ticket counts to customer success software, which watches which customers may leave. It hands the first answer to an AI customer service agent, or to a bot built on a conversational AI platform.
How is a help desk different from contact centre software? The contact centre is built for phone calls and live queues of agents. The help desk is built for written questions that can wait minutes or hours. A help desk for a company's own employees, for IT problems, is called IT service management (ITSM).