Desk, Freshdesk, and the recently IPO'd Zendesk lead all help desk software in new ratings

Apparently, to provide high-quality help-desk software as a service, you absolutely must have the word “desk” in your name.

But that’s just one of the lessons from G2 Crowd’s latest report.

Time to ROI, for instance, averages eight months. And Zendesk, Desk, and Freshdesk were the highest-rated services, winning “Leader” labels. G2 Crowd, a crowdsourced business software review site, asked about 350 software buyers what help-desk services were the best, which features were most-used, and what didn’t work well.

The best features across the board turn out to be the ticket-creation experience, at 90 percent average satisfaction, which makes sense since it’s a core part of help-desk software. Social integration, however, ranked lowest at 76 percent satisfaction. G2 Crowd’s report also shows that modern help-desk software is fairly easy to implement and integrate, requiring only about one month for companies to get up and running, on average.

Interestingly, G2 Crowd’s data also shows which services get compared and contrasted most frequently.

Freshdesk appears to be a top-compared solution, as it is one of the top three most-common comparisons on G2 Crowd’s site. The top comparison is Freshdesk versus Zendesk, followed by Zendesk versus Freshdesk, followed by Freshdesk versus TeamSupport, which was rated a Top Performer but not a Leader.

(If you’re wondering about the first two comparisons above, no, that is not a mistake. Rather, the order indicates what solution someone is comparing from and which solution they are comparing to, which can be significant in terms of what software is top-of-mind.)

Zendesk, of course, recently raised $100 million in an IPO, seeing almost a 30 percent stock price pop in its first day of trading. The company calls itself the “new face of customer service,” and many users seem to agree.

“It took us a very short amount of time to configure (Freshdesk) to work with our own environment (loading agents, integrating security, branding etc.) and the user experience is outstanding,” Paul Cardno, a 3M manager, said in the G2 Crowd report.

The poorest-rated solutions include Parature, Kayako, and IssueTrak.