NeutralPickHow to choose the best help desk software for your team: questions to ask vendors
This guide is for a small customer support team: a few people answering customers by email, website chat or phone, often from one shared email inbox today. The questions below show whether the help desk software will stop customer requests from being missed, and what it will really cost as your team grows.
In this guide, a vendor is a company that sells help desk software. A ticket is one customer request, such as an email or a chat, that the software keeps track of until it is answered.
Why a sales demo is not enough
Every help desk looks calm in a sales demo: a few tickets, each one neatly assigned to someone. Real support is busier. For example:
- two people reply to the same customer without knowing,
- a ticket waits all weekend because nobody was responsible for it,
- a customer writes by email, then by chat, then phones, and each person they reach has to start again from the beginning.
A sales demo rarely shows any of these. So ask about them in writing, and ask every vendor exactly the same questions. Then you can compare their answers directly.
Before you contact any vendor
Write down your answers to these four points. They decide which questions in the checklist matter most to you.
- How customers contact you. Email, chat on your website, phone, social media, messaging apps. Which of these matter now, and which will matter next year.
- How many people answer customers, and when. Full-time staff, part-time staff, and people from other teams who help sometimes. Most help desks charge per person, so this changes the price.
- What the help desk must connect to. Your CRM, your online shop or billing system, and the tool your developers use to track bugs.
- What you promise your customers. How quickly you reply, your support hours, and the languages you answer in. The software should help you keep those promises.
The checklist
The questions are in three groups. Must have means most small support teams cannot do without it. Nice to have means it saves real time or trouble. Optional means it only matters for some teams. When you open the checklist in NeutralPick, you can move any question to a different group to match your answers above.
- Must have
- Turns every email into a ticket with one person responsibleDoes every email to our support address become a ticket that can be assigned to one person, with its status visible to the whole team?This is the main reason to move away from a shared inbox.
- Stops two people answering the same ticketDoes it show when someone else is already reading or replying to a ticket, so two people don't answer the same customer?Two different replies confuse the customer and waste your team's time.
- One history for each customerDoes each customer have one history that shows all their email, chat and phone conversations together?Without it, customers have to explain their problem again every time they contact you.
- Assigns new tickets automaticallyCan it assign new tickets to people automatically, by topic, by language or in turn, using rules we set ourselves?Tickets that nobody is assigned to are the ones that wait the longest.
- Export all tickets and history at any timeCan we export all tickets, replies, internal notes and attachments ourselves, in a standard file format, at any time?This is what lets you move to another help desk later. Some exports leave out notes or attachments.
- Signs a data processing agreementOften required by lawWill you sign a data processing agreement covering our customers' data, and can you tell us in which country that data is stored?Data protection laws in many countries require a written contract with any company that handles personal data on your behalf.
- Nice to have
- Reply-time targets with warningsCan we set reply-time targets for each type of ticket, counting only our working hours, and warn people before a target is missed?Targets that also count weekends and holidays give misleading numbers.
- Saved replies that can be editedCan people insert a saved reply that fills in the customer's name and details, and edit it before sending?Saves time on common questions while still sounding personal.
- A help centre customers can searchDoes it include a public help centre where we can write articles, on our own web address, at no extra cost?One good article can answer the same question for many customers, without a ticket.
- Website chat that becomes a ticket when nobody is onlineWhen nobody from our team is online, does website chat collect the customer's details and turn their message into a ticket?A small team cannot be online for chat all day.
- Customer details from your other systemsCan it show the customer's orders or account details from our shop, billing system or CRM next to the ticket?People answer faster when they don't have to switch between different tools.
- Reports on number of tickets and reply timesCan we see the number of tickets, the time to first reply and the time to resolve, per person, per channel and per topic, without exporting the data?Shows where customers get stuck, and when you need more people.
- Optional
- A satisfaction survey after each ticketCan it send a short satisfaction survey when a ticket is closed, and link each score to that ticket?Useful once you have enough tickets for the scores to mean something.
- Cheaper access for occasional helpersCan people from other teams read tickets and add internal notes without paying for a full user licence?Often needed when someone from sales or a developer helps with a ticket.
The button opens this checklist in NeutralPick. There you can:
- Remove the questions that don't matter to you, add your own, and move questions between groups.
- Add each vendor you are considering.
- Send each vendor its own private link, so they answer every question in writing. Or, if you have already had a sales call or a product demo with a vendor, fill in their answers yourself from what they told you.
- See every vendor's answers side by side.
Want to see what a finished comparison looks like first? See an example comparison with three made-up help desk software.
Answers to look at carefully
Vendors often answer the points below in vague terms. When you get a vague answer, ask the follow-up question shown here. A vague answer often means the honest answer is "no" or "only partly".
- "Omnichannel" (every channel in one place). Ask: which channels are included in the plan we would buy, and which ones cost extra?
- A price per person. Ask for the full yearly price for your whole team. It should include part-time staff, occasional helpers, the help centre, chat, phone minutes, and the price after the first year.
- "AI answers your tickets." Ask: how is the AI charged for, what does it do when it doesn't know the answer, and can we switch it off?
- Leaving later. Ask: what can we export when we leave, how long does our data stay available after we cancel, and does the contract lock us in for a fixed period?
What to do with the answers
- Put all the vendors' answers side by side.
- Look at the Must have questions first. If a vendor cannot do something you marked as a must-have, remove that vendor.
- If a vendor answered "Partial" to a must-have, ask them exactly what is missing.
- Book a product demo only with the vendors that answered well.
- In each demo, ask them to show you what they claimed in writing: one customer writing by email and by chat, two people opening the same ticket, and a reply-time warning.
- If a vendor offers a free trial, forward one week of your real support emails into it. That shows you more than any demo.
Why use NeutralPick to compare help desk software
- Every vendor answers the same questions. Each vendor gets its own private link to your checklist and answers in writing, so you can compare their answers question by question.
- All the answers in one table. You see every vendor's answer to every question side by side, instead of searching through emails and call notes.
- No vendor can pay to influence it. There are no adverts, no paid placements and no "featured" vendors. No vendor can pay to be shown to you or placed higher.
- Free, with no account. You don't need to sign up or pay anything.