As your business operations and client base will expand over time, utilizing a top ticketing system software will become increasingly important and a huge priority for your customer support department to run successfully. Without one, your team of customer service agents won't be able to swiftly and efficiently handle customer service requests, queries, and incident reports that can continue to pile up on different customer service channels.

On the other hand, a top-notch ticketing system can make it easy for the customers to get immediate answers for their requests, queries, and questions via phone, email, live chat support, or even a self-knowledge base. Even more important, such systems can streamline the customer service by automatically creating support tickets, providing pre-written answers to common questions, and ensuring that the requests go to the customer service representative who can best respond to them.

After all, recent studies have showcased that it costs up to seven times more to attract a new client to your business than to retain a current one. Also, loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a business to friends and family if they're content with the company's customer service. Conversely, 95% of consumers will tell other people about having a bad customer service experience with a given company, while 87% will share their good experiences.

This all speaks volumes about how customer service can make or break a business in 2021. Customers who need to wait for days or weeks or go back and forth with calls and emails to get a question answered won't hesitate to leave a bad review or burn a company on social media.

That being said, we took our time to research the top ticketing systems based on ease of use, pricing, automatic ticketing creation, sorting, and integration with third-party systems. From the enormous field of contenders we checked out, the following five stood out, each for different reasons you can read about below. So, without further ado, here’s our refined list of top ticketing systems for customer support agents.

Zoho Desk

Established in 2005 with the initial release of a cloud-based word processor and CRM, Zoho quickly increased its offerings to many different products, including the start of Zoho Desk in late 2016. Zoho Desk is the customer service ticketing system with the best price because it offers all the features your agents may need in a ticketing system at pretty affordable plan rates.

Like all other ticketing systems on our list, Zoho Desk provides multichannel support, permitting customers to contact customer representative agents via live chat, email, social media, or a web form. Zoho Desk also has telephone support, including call routing, voicemail, and automated ticket creation from incoming phone calls. In addition, it uses an intuitive and straightforward dashboard that gives customer service representatives an overview of all tickets and a separate dashboard for managers to track and analyze customer service agent performance.

This customer support ticketing system features powerful automation that automatically assigns customer support tickets to the proper representative, sends notifications of changes in their status, escalates SLA violations, and permits agents to create their own workflows. The system supports many integrations, including Slack, Salesforce, G Suite, popular project management and email platforms, and telephone solutions like RingCentral.

Zoho Desk offers four pricing plans, one of which is free, and the other three are paid plans. Up to three agents can use the free plan. It is a fantastic option for companies that want to test out a particular customer support ticketing system before committing. In addition, all paid plans include a fifteen-day free trial period in which companies can test the software and see if it’s the right solution to their needs.

Zendesk

Created in 2007 primarily as a customer service platform emphasizing customer relationship management, Zendesk is a widely utilized ticketing system with solid qualities and added focus on marketing.

Zendesk comes with a shared inbox that can let agents gather customer requests and inquiries from live chat, emails, web forms, and social media applications like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. In addition, Zendesk’s automation streamlines customer support activities, like automatic triggers, canned responses, customizable workflows, and an answer bot that directs particular queries to relevant articles.

Nevertheless, where Zendesk differs from the other customer service ticketing systems is its marketing-oriented approach. Since it can easily integrate with popular customer relationship management software like Zoho CRM, SugarCRM, and Salesforce, Zendesk can allow you to collect valuable customer data for propelling new leads to your sales pipeline. Also, if a support ticket turns into a question about a product or service that your company offers with Zendesk, you can quickly reroute the conversation to your sales team. Also, it provides the possibility to automatically activate live chat modules to assist in closing the sale when a client is lingering on a product at the checkout page.

The Zendesk ticketing system also offers robust analytics, reporting, and upgrade options for Sales Suite, creating even more sales possibilities from your ticketing system. It also provides an app marketplace that permits you to integrate it with software like Trello, Slack, Aircall, Harvest, etc.

Zendesk has three paid plans which are adequate for businesses of all sizes. Of course, a free trial is available that unlocks all of the features of their paid plans (team plan, professional plan, and an enterprise plan).

Freshdesk

Interestingly enough, the Freshdesk ticketing system was created in 2010 after its founders experienced frustrating customer service over a broken TV. From that moment on, the company has developed a wide variety of sales, communication, and marketing tools under the umbrella of Freshworks.

Even though Freshdesk can scale to support companies of all sizes, its affordable pricing plans, ease of use, and enterprise-level automation make it perhaps the perfect choice for small businesses that don't have hundreds of customer service agents in their departments.

Freshdesk ticketing system's star feature is the shared inbox, making it easy for teams and employees to assign, sort, and collaborate on customer service tickets. The system automatically converts incoming emails, voicemails, and social media support requests into tickets and prioritizes and assigns them to the right customer service representatives.

Freshdesk also utilizes automation methods to help agents eliminate dull, repetitive tasks and focus on customer tickets that require more time and attention. For example, from an agent's perspective, you can send automatic email notifications to your customers based on their ticket status, carry out multiple actions on tickets with a single mouse click, and set them to automatically move to the next phase based on time and event triggers. It also comes with a customer service agent collision detection feature to prevent occasions where multiple agents work on the same ticket without knowing.

The Freshdesk ticketing system's paid plans integrate many platforms like Google Apps, live chat apps, Zoho CRM, Dropbox, OneDrive, Mailchimp, and others through Zapier. They offer three paid plans and a pretty full-featured free plan. Their 21-day free trial can unlock all of their features, including those of their "enterprise plan," to check if their solution fits your business's needs. In addition, all Freshdesk users get 24/7 email support, and paid users also have 24-hour phone support on weekdays.

Happy Fox

Established in 2011, Happy Fox is another respectable ticketing system on the help desk scene. HappyFox is a customer support ticketing system distinguished for its ease of use since it balances a full suite of ticketing features with a well-thought interface that can be customized for any workflow.

The system’s dashboard makes it easy for customer service agents to manage ticket requests across multiple communication channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And while you can use it to communicate with customers by phone via third-party integration service, Happy Fox acknowledges that most modern-day customers prefer not to talk to an agent over the phone and focus more on email, live chat, and social network ticketing.

Happy Fox works on a robust algorithm that can identify which representatives are available and can be fine-tuned to weight agent limits and contemplate specific representatives over others. In addition, higher management can automatically escalate customer service tickets if the system pinpoints a particular ticket that could be addressed and resolved only by higher management employees. The system also comes with a self-service portal connected to the company’s knowledge base so clients can quickly find answers to frequent questions without creating a new ticket, allowing companies to cut down on calls.

Happy Fox offers two plans suitable for small and medium companies, with two other plans for enterprise-level organizations. Even though the company doesn’t offer a free trial version, you can schedule a dome tour on the product that your company necessitates.

JitBit

Founded in 2005 by Alex Yumashev, JitBit is an uncomplicated ticketing system mainly built on providing customer support from emails. JitBit is perhaps the best ticketing system for email support because it’s a simple help desk focused on email ticketing without all the whistles and bells. With this system, you can start processing customer tickets in less than 60 seconds in a much less complicated manner than many of the other systems we have already reviewed. However, that doesn’t imply that JitBit is more limited than the other ticketing systems. Even though the software focuses on email ticketing, it also offers support via web portals and live chat.

This system provides everything a business needs to organize and manage their email customer service support, even with complex setup or complex features. After connecting the JitBit system to your email server, you can determine triggers that will send automatic replies, assign agents to the tickets, and set due dates for them. Extra features include customizable reports, agent collision detection, suggesting articles from the company’s knowledge base, and importing and exporting data with other software. JitBit could be directly integrated with Jira, GitHub, Slack, and thousands of other platforms through Zapier. The company offers four different plans designed to suit companies with from one to nine customer service agents.

A Better Way?

Nevertheless, even though all ticketing systems are made to provide top-of-the-range customer support, automate customer service workflows, and assist customer service representatives in being more productive while at work, they are not flawless products of innovation and technology. As a result, they can sometimes struggle to meet the ever-changing digital landscape of forward-thinking organizations. But what if we tell you that you can further empower the ticketing system of your selection thanks to artificial intelligence and its subcategories?

Every company, especially enterprises that handle hundreds and even thousands of customer tickets, should strongly consider the possibility of integrating AI-powered software within their ticketing system to automate a great deal of their customer service processes even further and improve ticket analysis.

With these systems, you can integrate your software within your existing customer support ticketing system and be able to: automatically tag and route new tickets, implement a robust customer feedback framework within your ticketing system, draw relevant info and understand complex worded requests to resolve them automatically, understand the voice of the customers, and gather and analyze customer ticket data.

In addition, since handling support tickets in a robust CRM setup demands as little turnaround time as possible to achieve the best possible customer satisfaction, thanks to machine learning, NLP, and RPA, these solutions can help you to direct, redirect, and allot the incoming tickets to appropriate personnel with the expertise required to address them.

Each customer ticket could be automatically enriched with extracted relevant information from other internal systems and provided with insights about the customers’ historical threads and their previous interactions with the company’s customer service team to increase the overall operational efficiency of your processes. Last but not least, artificial intelligence technologies that are effectively the basis of this software can help your organization resolve regular customer tickets automatically with almost no human touch at all, sparing your agents’ time and letting them focus on other, more critical customer service tasks.

The Bottom Line

Selecting a ticketing system for your company and agents really depends on your specific needs and case. For instance, if your agents find themselves answering the same questions repeatedly, a ticketing system that will automatically respond with answers to common queries can be helpful. Or, if your customer service representatives are well-versed in different products or services, customizing which tickets go to which representatives can help your company improve its overall customer service and provide better customer experiences. The bottom line, you should go with a sophisticated ticketing system tailored to your service agent’s needs, one with a wide range of software integrations, and the one that will help them the most in completing their daily tasks and customer service operations.