Help Desk Software Features
All help desk solutions come with a different set of features and modules. We tried to find the popular features most of the help desk apps have:
Ticket management - the core of any help desk system. There should be a "incoming tickets" queue, that can be filtered, sorted, categorized in many different ways.
Web-based UI - Accessible from everywhere in the world, from any device - a Mac, a PC, a smartphone, a tablet. Makes life easier for both users and technicians.
Single Sign On Authentication (SSO) - with SSO a helpdesk application will automatically identify users, who have already logged in to your company website, or internal portal, or some other in-house web-app. Also, single-sign-on should preferably work with your Active Directory and Windows-authentication. If your company IT-infrastructure is Microsoft-based - look for this feature.
Search and Indexing module - This module allows both users and the technical support staff to search across past tickets and the Knowledge-base (the latter is also a crucial feature of any helpdesk app).
Mobile app (optional) - an iOS/Android app that will allow access to the helpdesk tickets on the go. Great feature for technicians mostly, regular users don't often need it, while the technical staff will surely benefit from being able to handle tickets literally from everywhere.
Email integration and automated responses - enough said. A helpdesk system should be able to convert incoming emails into tickets. With all the file attachments, images etc. And it should look like a regular person-2-person email conversation from the customer's end.
Analytics & reporting - is used to track the support team's performance by displaying their response speed, resolution times, customer satisfaction ratings etc.