When you and your team use a shared email (like Gmail or Outlook) to field customer inquiries, you end up with a disorganized inbox and a lack of clarity about who’s working on what.
Email-based help desk software simplifies email support by solving the following problems:
- Agents checking multiple email inboxes to respond to customer inquiries, which results in missed emails.
- Agents not knowing who (if anyone) is working on a ticket, so tickets end up going unaddressed or having two or more agents responding.
- Managers don’t have accessible data about support inquiries, so they have to make educated guesses about your business and the customer experience.
All of these issues lead to a lot of wasted time and frustration for your team.
In this post, we discuss how an email ticketing solution can solve these problems by reviewing HelpSpot’s core help desk features. We also discuss a few other popular help desk software you might have seen in your search.
We’ll cover:
- HelpSpot
- Zoho Desk
- Freshdesk
- Zendesk
- Jira Service Desk
HelpSpot consolidates all your incoming email requests into support tickets and organizes them in a central inbox for easy response and agent management. Start a free 21-day trial.
1. HelpSpot: Simple Email Management, Support for Multiple Brands
HelpSpot’s centralized inbox, individual agent queues, and customer portals empower teams to provide timely and well-organized feedback to customer support requests.
Let’s take an in-depth look at HelpSpot’s email management features:
One Inbox, Unlimited Email Accounts
You can connect an unlimited number of email accounts to HelpSpot’s central inbox, so all your support emails are organized in one dashboard.
Once connected, you and your team can see custom views of the centralized inbox using filters. For example, you can see all your ticket escalations, making it easy to respond to the highest priority customer issues. Or you can use multi-brand support to organize your inbox by each department and company brand, and customize team inboxes with unique branding elements.

Agent Workspaces & Single Assignments
All your support tickets are found in the central inbox until they’re assigned to a specific agent, then it’s routed to the agent’s queue.
Only one agent is assigned to a ticket at a time, or the ticket will be marked as unassigned. This makes it easy for staff to see all the new tickets and eliminates confusion about who’s working on what.

You can also use automation rules to instantly assign tickets to support agents upon creation. For example, you can assign all new tickets in one category, like a feature request ticket, to a specific agent, such as your product manager. Or you can use round-robin ticket routing so email requests are equally distributed to team members over time.
As you add more users to your HelpSpot instance, collision detection prevents your team from doing duplicate work by showing you if other team members are currently viewing the same ticket.
Ticket Interface with Saved Replies and Email Templates
From HelpSpot’s ticket interface, your team has everything they need to:
- Quickly respond to frequently asked questions using asaved responseor email template.
- Tag teammates in private notes to easily collaborate without leaving your workspace. (You can also read more about managing a team inboxhere: The #1 Best Way to Manage a Shared Inbox)
- Include knowledge basearticles (more on those in the next section)in customer replies to quickly provide in-depth support.
- View customer information from previous tickets or find them in your other company software, like your CRM, using Live Lookup.
- Pin relevant information at the top of the ticket, like detailed instructions for other agents.
- Merge two (or more) tickets into one.

Knowledge Base & Customer Portals
A knowledge base is an internal book of important company procedures. Building out a knowledge base with troubleshooting docs for your team lowers response times since agents can quickly find answers to customer questions. HelpSpot’s help desk knowledge base offers a simple way for your team to create articles and store them in an intuitive book format so they’re easy to find.
You can also make your articles customer-facing and let them solve their issues on their own, by adding them to your customer portal. It takes a matter of minutes for you to launch a self-service portal in HelpSpot, where end-users can:
- Read FAQsand help articles to common questions, reducing your overall ticket volume.
- Submit a new ticket with the necessary information upfront, simplifying your agents’ workflow.
- Check the status of a ticket and get an update without having to contact you, increasing customer satisfaction.

Multi-Brand Support
Multi-brand support gives each brand or department in your company its own support inbox, customer portal, and knowledge base, with custom branding.
This feature lets enterprise companies provide a unique customer experience for each brand and department, without cluttering the centralized inbox. Some teams using HelpSpot support over 500 different brands with multi-brand support.
One way teams use multi-brand support is to create a brand for your IT support team (to handle technical service requests) and one channel for your customer support team (to handle product questions).
Read more: Multi-Brand Help Desk: Manage All of Your Brands with HelpSpot
Help Desk Reporting
HelpSpot has an intuitive reporting dashboard so you can easily see the number of new support requests. Our customer service reports are completely customizable, so you can dig into data any which way using filters. We also provide preset reports for key KPIs, so you can quickly see metrics like time to close and time to first response.
We believe easily accessible data is fundamental to business, so our reporting is in clear graphs that all agents can dig into. We also have an open-source API, so you can connect HelpSpot with other reporting or data visualization tools you use to consolidate information.

See how HelpSpot’s real-time reporting and streamlined email ticket management system simplify your shared inbox with a free 21-day trial.
2. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk offers a cloud-based email ticketing system alongside a marketing and sales platform. Zoho Desk customers positively reviewed the system’s intuitive design and quick setup but also mentioned a long learning curve.
Their email help desk tool comes with reporting, team collaboration tools, sentiment analysis of your tickets, a chatbot to have customer conversations on your website, and iOS and Android apps so you can receive notifications out of the office.
Due to its advanced functionality, Zoho Desk is a better option for teams that are looking for a little more than just email management.
Read more: Zoho Desk Alternatives | Top 8 Help Desks for Customer Service
3. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is the dedicated email help desk inside the Freshworks software suite. It’s a cloud-based email ticketing software and comes with omnichannel support and customer call center tracking.
Freshdesk offers ticketing, collaboration, and automation tools to do things like respond to customer emails, create agent assignments, set SLA deadlines, and engage customers with a chatbot.
Freshdesk is a lot more than an email help desk, their software ecosystem also comes with an HR platform, sales funnel, and marketing tool. This makes Freshdesk a solid option for enterprise companies looking for more than a help desk — but also demands companies have the resources to set up a large platform and afford extra add-ons.
Read more: Freshdesk Alternatives: 9 Help Desk Software for Support Teams
4. Zendesk

Zendesk is a robust customer support software; they provide a cloud-based help desk with email integration, IT help desk features, mobile apps, and a CRM to track sales leads.
Their help desk solution comes with multi-channel support (email, social media, phone support, and chat messaging), a help center, a community forum, and an AI-powered chatbot. With so many features, Zendesk users will get a lot of freedom to customize the platform during setup.
Zendesk is the largest help desk ticketing system on the market, and may not be the best help desk for small customer service teams, but will benefit a large enterprise that can take advantage of its advanced features and integrations.
Read more: Zendesk Alternatives: 6 of the Best Help Desk Competitors
5. Jira Service Desk

Initially built for software development teams to track bugs, Jira Service Desk now offers an IT service management (ITSM) help desk software. Jira comes with customer request support for email, bug tracking, IT asset management, project management, and a knowledge base platform.
Overall, Jira is recommended for companies that need all of the extra software available in the ITSM ecosystem, or for teams who want to sync their help desk with other IT tools in their tech stack. However, this also means it may not be the best for small businesses looking specifically for email help desk features.
Read more: Jira Service Desk Alternatives for On-Premise Users (5 Tools to Try)
Try HelpSpot’s Email-Based Help Desk Software for Free
HelpSpot is notably different from most help desk vendors because our platform is designed with a focus on solving the problems of using a shared inbox: missed emails, disorganization, and confusion about who’s working on what.
HelpSpot only charges a single fixed price based on the number of seats you need, so you don’t have to worry about working around other tools or being pigeonholed into upgrading your platform. (Then, if you want to build out HelpSpot by connecting it with other tools, we’ll help you set up integrations and tailor your help desk to your team workflows.)
Try HelpSpot’s free 21-day trial to add your email accounts and streamline all your customer queries into one easy-to-use email ticketing system.
FAQs
Which software is a software which controls the flow of email? ›
Gmail. Similar to how Microsoft delivers its email management software, Google's Gmail is available for free on its own or with premium features as part of Google Workspace.
What is email help desk? ›HelpDesk is a ticketing system. It means it's a tool to manage your email communication with customers. It works like a mailbox but has additional features designed to make customer support easier. When you implement HelpDesk, you get a powerful toolset that helps you organize your emails.
What is help desk software used for? ›Help desk software allows companies to accept, track, and respond to support requests in an organized fashion. Many help desk programs also provide knowledge bases, self-service portals, SLO management, and reporting. Choosing the right help desk software for you depends on your company's specific needs.
Which of the following tools is a cloud based help desk tool? ›Zendesk. With the Zendesk cloud help desk, agents can access apps, systems, and integrations for change management, asset management, team collaboration, and more.
How do I organize my work email inbox? ›- Sort your emails into folders. ...
- Create a to-do list from your emails. ...
- Use tags and folders to make searching for emails easier. ...
- Create actionable folders for incoming emails. ...
- Use your email provider's task list function. ...
- Set up an auto-action process. ...
- Categorize with labels, tags and flags.
Microsoft Outlook
Best email management software for those who prefer the Microsoft ecosystem. Outlook is Microsoft's email offering, and its functionality is almost identical to Gmail's.
Outlook Helpdesk add-in is designed to collect tickets from emails, track and resolve issues within stipulated time, while sharing this information with your entire team. In particular, it automatically processes incoming requests, assign technicians, set due date and send automated notifications.
What is CRM help desk? ›Is help desk a CRM? A help desk system is similar to a CRM but isn't identical. A help desk tool allows customers to get technical support online. Customer Relationship Management Systems hold information about customers and allow agents to provide better customer service by using this data.
What is the difference between help desk and support desk? ›While a help desk can fix a broad range of IT issues, desktop support is dedicated to fixing only desktop or laptop issues. It can't help with printers or networks, but it can help you install programs or get a broken computer running. Desktop support is typically included in the help desk function.
What is help desk software called? ›Generally, help desk software is part of an umbrella category called the service desk, which includes asset management and IT service management, and the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
What is Zoho help desk? ›
Zoho Desk is a cloud help desk software that helps you support your customers, no matter how they reach out to you, wherever you are, via a single interface.
What is an example of a help desk? ›Some examples of internal help desks are: Customer support - answer customer requests from any channel. Business operations - manage operations of any business unit, e.g., logistics, marketing operations. Vendor or partner support - manage communication with vendors or suppliers.
What are two types of software that can be used to access the cloud? ›- AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
- Google App Engine.
- Microsoft Azure Web Apps.
- Google Cloud SQL.
- Nutanix Beam. Nutanix Beam is a cloud management solution for Azure, GCP and AWS. ...
- Spot by NetApp. Spot by NetApp is a cloud automation tool that delivers efficient cloud optimization. ...
- Cloudbolt. ...
- nOps. ...
- Scalr. ...
- CloudHealth by VMware. ...
- Morpheus Data. ...
- Flexera.
- Only Keep Emails Requiring Immediate Action in Your Inbox. ...
- Create a “Waiting Folder” for Action-Pending Emails. ...
- Make Subfolders or Labels Your New BFF. ...
- Set Inbox Rules or Filters. ...
- Use Your Calendar to Track Emails That Require Follow-up.
A Microsoft account is a free account you use to access many Microsoft devices and services, such as the web-based email service Outlook.com (also known as hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com), Office Online apps, Skype, OneDrive, Xbox Live, Bing, Windows, or the Microsoft Store.
What is iManage email management? ›Intelligent Document and Email Management
iManage connects documents and emails and saves them in a single unified folder, organized by client, project, or legal matter. This structure puts all of the relevant information in context and at your fingertips, so you can focus on delivering value.
Outlook.com is a free email service for your personal email. Anyone can go to https://outlook.com and sign up for a free email account.
Does Office 365 have a ticketing system? ›Office 365 Ticketing System is a helpdesk ticketing management software that was launched by Microsoft to help enterprises effectively manage ticketing issues.
What is the name of Microsoft ticketing tool? ›Dynamics 365 Features for Help Desk
Automatic ticket creation based on incidents and requests submitted by users via email, web, phone, and other channels.
Can you use Microsoft teams as a ticketing system? ›
The advantage of using a ticketing system in Microsoft teams is that an organization or business entity can direct tickets to specific users or groups. This means that a customer is assured of getting their issue resolved and inquiry responded to.
Is CRM part of Office 365? ›Microsoft combines Microsoft Office 365 with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to give users an offering with the Microsoft Office applications they know so well and a CRM solution that is accessible over the Internet.
Is CRM just email? ›But hey, the difference is clear. CRM focuses on helping you manage the relationship with your customers - both current and prospective. While an email marketing tool is focused on automated marketing and helps you reach customers cost-effectively.
Is HubSpot a help desk? ›With HubSpot, your team can spend less time on help desk management and manual data entry, and more time helping customers succeed.
What is a call center vs help desk vs service desk? ›The comparison between a help desk vs a call center is a little more distinct: a help desk is a problem-solving IT department, while a call center focuses on general customer service. Call center agents are not experts in IT and may refer a customer to the help desk as required.
What is Windows help desk? ›Windows help desk gives businesses the ability to expand their capability and capacity to the fullest. A robust windows help desk keeps customers happy by identifying issues and accurately routing them to the right support team to solve them. It also enables support teams to manage their workload.
What is the difference between Jira help desk and service desk? ›A help desk is considered to be focused on break-fix (what ITIL calls incident management), whereas a service desk is there to assist with not only break-fix but also with service requests (requests for new services) and requests for information (such as “how do I do X?”).
What kind of tool is Zendesk? ›Zendesk is a complete customer service solution that's easy to use and scales with your business. Learn more about Zendesk for Service. Zendesk Sales CRM enhances productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility for sales teams. Learn more about Zendesk for Sales.
How do I set up a help desk office? ›- Step 1: Plan your help desk workflow.
- Step 2: Add customer service channels.
- Step 3: Bring your support team in.
- Step 4: Define SLA policies.
- Step 5: Create automated ticket workflows.
- Step 6: Configure agent productivity features.
- Step 7: Set up and customize your self-service portal.
In our Zoho review, we found one of the biggest benefits of Zoho CRM is that it offers a free plan that while limiting, is still quite valuable. All plans let you create contact lists, generate leads with drag-and-drop forms, include customization and workflow automation and offer email marketing.
Is Zoho Assist really free? ›
Zoho Assist's forever free plan can help small businesses enhance their remote productivity absolutely free of cost.
Why do people use Zoho? ›Hey! How can we help? Zoho People is an online Human Resource Management System designed to manage and access all your employee data from a centralized location. To get started, all you need is a device with an internet connection and a Zoho account.
What is help desk structure? ›A Help Desk structure should have one main contact channel. This is one phone number where users can report issues or request service. The only caveat could be that the Help Desk also has a main email address and self-service portal. This is acceptable, but again only one of each as with one main phone number.
What does help scout software do? ›Help Scout enables large teams to provide customer support via email with their tool. The platform features integrations with live chat, phone systems, CRMs, and email marketing tools.
How can I be a good help desk support? ›- Phone etiquette matters. The first few words set the tone for an entire call. ...
- Don't be prescriptive. ...
- Read the ticket notes. ...
- Write useful ticket notes. ...
- Look at past history. ...
- Know when to escalate a case. ...
- Stay on top of current policies. ...
- Make it yours.
There are four main types of cloud computing: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and multiclouds. There are also three main types of cloud computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
What are the 3 basic cloud services? ›- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) ...
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) ...
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Types of cloud services: IaaS, PaaS, serverless, and SaaS
Most cloud computing services fall into four broad categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), serverless, and software as a service (SaaS).
Other Cloud Storage Options
Of course, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and Amazon aren't your only cloud storage options. SugarSync is a Dropbox-like alternative with apps for every mobile platform.
Google Cloud offers a variety of products and services to help organizations make the most of cloud storage. By using Google Cloud, organizations are using the most sustainable cloud in the business, with the most robust artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.
What is the most common type of application the cloud is used for? ›
One of the most important applications of cloud computing is data backup. Users can use cloud-based backup services to automatically send data from any location over a wired connection. This ensures the backup procedure and data security.
What is the most used cloud solution? ›Amazon Web Services (AWS) Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an Amazon company that was launched in the year 2002. AWS is the most popular cloud service provider in the world.
What is the best cloud database solution? ›- Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
- Amazon Relational Database Service.
- Google Cloud SQL.
- IBM Db2 on Cloud.
- Oracle Database.
Google Cloud cost management tools provide visibility, accountability, control, and intelligence so that you can scale your business in the cloud with confidence. Tailored to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes, these tools help reduce complexity and increase the predictability of your cloud costs.
Which one is an email software? ›Some webmail providers that you probably recognise are Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail etc. But there is also email client. An email client is a software program that allows you to access, read, and send emails from your computer.
What is the flow of emails? ›An email workflow is a series of automated emails that are sent based on the subscriber's contact information, behavior, or preferences. These emails work together to accomplish a goal, like on-boarding a service or purchasing a product.
What are the two types of email software? ›There are two main types of email service providers to choose from: Email clients and webmail.
What is emailing software? ›Email software is intended to communicate important information and conduct business between clients, prospective buyers, and coworkers. Features include address books, app-based integration tools, mailing lists, file sharing, folders, and more.
What is the most used email system? ›What is the most widely used email service? According to Statista, Gmail is the most popular email client in today's world, with more than 1.5 billion active users globally. If you're going to focus on designing your emails for one email provider, Gmail is a good place to start.
What are the three most widely used types of email systems? ›There are 3 main types of email protocols: SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).
What are the most commonly used email platform? ›
Gmail. Gmail is the most used and popular email service provider with over 1.2 billion users all around the world.
How do people organize their emails? ›It's a good idea to label all work-related emails accordingly and, if possible, keep them in separate folders. You can then organize these folders manually or use a bulk email organizer to remove emails quickly and efficiently from certain senders, archive old messages, and more.
What are the 5 emails? ›- Educational Emails:
- Informational Emails:
- Promotional Emails:
- Lead Nurturing Emails:
- Newsletter Emails:
- The subject line. Arguably the most important component of the email, the subject line is the deciding factor in whether your message is read or deleted. ...
- The salutation. ...
- The bit in the middle. ...
- The ending.
In this lesson, I'll teach you about the three types of emails you should be sending out regularly to your subscribers-- transactional, broadcast and triggered emails.
What are the 3 types of email accounts? ›What are the Different Types of Email Accounts? If you have an email account for your business, you probably have one of the three main email account types which are POP, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange.
What type of email account is Outlook? ›There are many different types of email accounts you can add to Outlook, including Microsoft 365, Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and Exchange accounts.
What is the most important thing I should do with every email? ›The most important aspect of the email is to make sure the other person knows what you're saying. Keep it straightforward. A first impression via email is never easy, because your tone and word usage can make or break a relationship.
What are the email software features? ›- Customer profiles. The best email management software captures your customer in an insightful customer profile. ...
- Integrations. ...
- Reporting. ...
- Quick replies and auto-replies. ...
- Automated workflows. ...
- Collaboration.