Top 10 Helpdesk software

Important news about Helpdesk software

2022. Incident.io looks to beef up its Slack-based incident response platform with $28.7M funding



In the great, cosmic soup of startups, Incident.io emerges as the unlikely hero, brandishing $28.7 million to wage war against the age-old problem of tool fragmentation between engineering and customer success. For, you see, while engineering tools are about as cooperative with governance, risk, and compliance platforms as a disgruntled Vogon with a poetry critic, Incident.io proposes a delightfully unified approach: shove it all into Slack. Here, incidents pop up in a channel, heralded like minor apocalypses, and the ensuing chaos triggers workflows that magically evolve through each stage of catastrophe aversion. Updates fly around like gossip at a Galactic Senate meeting, links are shared, status pages morph, roles are delegated, and, when things get truly dicey, specialists are summoned via external contraptions like PagerDuty. New arrivals to the channel find a handy summary and Zoom link, plus a button to subscribe and witness the glorious unfolding in real time. Rather efficient, really, if you can ignore the impending sense of doom that clings to the word "incident."


2022. Zendesk is acquired for $10.2B



Zendesk rejected a $17 billion buyout in February, believing it was valued higher. Today, it was purchased for $10.2 billion by a group of private equity firms, significantly below that initial offer. However, the SaaS industry has changed substantially over the past few months and Zendesk has found itself at the center of it in a whirlwind of investor turmoil. Earlier this month, the company decided it would remain independent, a decision that led to a sharp decline in its stock price.

2022. Customer support management platform Assembled lands $51M



Assembled, which markets itself as a workforce management solution for customer support teams, today revealed that it secured $51 million in a Series B investment round. Assembled aims to forecast and plan for surges in customer calls, texts and emails using various prediction and scheduling methods. For instance, the platform utilizes historical support tickets and even Reddit activity to foresee upcoming volumes of customer inquiries (by queue, channel and location). Simulation models predict how situations like email backlogs might change over time with different staffing scenarios, while optimization algorithms generate schedules — adhering to guidelines such as shift duration, the interval between shifts and the degree of flexibility at a shift’s start.


2022. Customer service automation startup Lang lands $15M



Lang.ai, a startup creating a platform that automatically categorizes customer interactions to address service issues seemingly more efficiently, has secured $15M in funding. Lang employs AI to extract themes from customer inquiries in existing help desk systems such as Zendesk and Intercom. The no-code product adds labels like “Talk to agent,” “Delivery issue,” and “Platform question” to incoming messages, including emails and texts. By using Lang, businesses can visually organize themes identified in customer support data and set up automations that activate with specific labels (e.g., respond to queries about package deliveries with standard responses).


2021. Zendesk acquires AI automation startup Cleverly to advance customer service



In a move that might be described as startlingly clever—or at least, Cleverly—Zendesk has decided to hitch its wagon to the AI startup’s early-stage star. Cleverly’s gizmo-laden platform offers a smorgasbord of artificially intelligent wonders, including a triage function that tags incoming service requests faster than you can say “categorize workflow.” But that’s not all: the plucky little startup also boasts a feature they’ve whimsically dubbed AI-powered human augmentation, which essentially means helping customer service agents sound like they know what they’re doing. Their tech, unsurprisingly, already cozies up nicely with Zendesk and Salesforce, proving once again that in the world of software, compatibility is king.


2020. Customer support startup Gorgias raises $25M



In the vast, swirling cosmos of ecommerce helpdesks, one intrepid startup by the name of Gorgias has rocketed forth with $25 million in Series B funding to fuel its mission to, well, answer questions—lots of questions. This particular cosmic mission is backed by a fleet of more than 4,500 stores, from the stylish deck of Steve Madden to the rugged quarters of Timbuk2, Fjällräven, and even the smooth sailing of Marine Layer, among other illustrious brands. With revenue shooting up 200% this year, Gorgias is riding the gravitational wave of a grand shift where brands are boldly choosing to sell directly to Earth’s consumers, a leap that means fewer detours through Amazonian jungles. Nike’s decision to part ways with Amazon underscores this phenomenon, as it’s now every brand for itself in the brave new ecommerce universe. Gorgias, meanwhile, integrates seamlessly with Shopify, a bit like a hyper-intelligent droid buddy, using AI and customer data to cheerfully answer everyday questions like, “Where’s my tracking number?” By handling these mundanities, it liberates customer service humans from repetitive toil, delivering faster responses to eager consumers and ensuring the smooth humming of the ecommerce galaxy.


2020. Salesforce announces new Service Cloud workforce planning tool



Amid a world in the throes of a pandemic, where humanity seems determined to test its own limits of coordination and chaos, customer service agents are now scattered across the globe like breadcrumbs tossed into a gale. Naturally, this creates a delightful conundrum of workforce management. Enter Salesforce, arriving heroically with Service Cloud Workforce Engagement—a fantastically engineered suite designed to, at the very least, make things mildly manageable. The first trick up its sleeve is the illustrious Service Forecast for Customer 360, an arcane tool that claims to divine workforce needs through some combination of AI and perhaps divination, ensuring customer service requests are flung in directions that make a vague amount of sense. Next, we have Omnichannel Capacity Planning, a piece that helps managers herd agents across channels—whether it be phone, message, or carrier pigeon—according to where the chaos is greatest. Lastly, as a thoughtful flourish, there’s a training bit that, with an air of well-intentioned superiority, guides agents on how to say the right thing at the right time to avoid unintentionally starting an international incident.


2020. Facebook buys Kustomer for $1B



In a move that might be described as both boldly strategic and faintly terrifying, Facebook has decided to gobble up Kustomer, a sprightly little startup with the audacious goal of reimagining customer service. Their trick? Wrangling all those wild, unruly social media conversations, emails, and vague mutterings into one neat, unified picture of just how much customers adore—or, let’s face it, endure—the companies they interact with. For Facebook, which has been quietly amassing a tidy empire of business tools under the guise of making the world more "connected," this acquisition is a calculated step toward turning its platform into an indispensable nerve center for companies everywhere. With rivals like Snapchat and TikTok snapping at its heels, Facebook is keen to sweeten the deal for businesses, offering them even more reasons to hunker down within its ever-expanding ecosystem, perhaps for a modest fee, because who could resist?


2020. DigitalBrain snags $3.4M seed to streamline customer service tasks



Picture, if you will, DigitalBrain, a curious and rather clever contraption that parks itself atop the labyrinthine complexities of customer service software—think Zendesk, but with far less teeth-gnashing. Today, with a celebratory wave of $3.4 million in seed funding, DigitalBrain has declared its intent to make the lives of customer service agents almost suspiciously easy. Instead of darting about like headless chickens between countless systems to cancel an order or lodge a bug report, agents simply engage with DigitalBrain. They select an action, fill in the essential bits of information, and voilà! The problem vanishes into the ether. A bug? It politely nudges engineering with a tidy Jira ticket. An order cancellation? Records are updated and systems aligned with the kind of precision that makes you wonder if this thing knows more than it's letting on.


2020. Wix launches a new company, Wix Answers, to unify customer support



In a move that feels a bit like discovering the secret to the universe and then selling it as a pocket-sized gizmo, website-building behemoth Wix has unleashed Wix Answers—a shiny new enterprise-level customer support platform that hopes to take on the likes of Zendesk and Salesforce with a confident swagger. Originally dreamed up to soothe Wix’s own customer service headaches, the system has been cleverly spun out into its own independent (but still very Wix-y) entity. The result? A 360-degree omniscient eye that tracks every customer service interaction—be it chat, phone call, email, or carrier pigeon (probably)—and sprinkles AI-powered magic to help agents respond faster while whispering sly tips to make the whole operation smarter.