Customer support
Support tickets are drowning us
Volume grew faster than the team. Response times are slipping and the cost per agent seat makes hiring out of it unattractive.
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Recognise this?
What it looks like from the inside
If three of these are true, the tool has stopped fitting the team. If one is, it is probably worth waiting.
- 01
First response time trending the wrong way
- 02
The same twenty questions arriving daily with no self-service answer
- 03
Agent seats priced so that adding capacity is a budget event
- 04
No reliable view of what is actually driving contact volume
What separates the options
The questions that actually decide a helpdesk
Everyone asks about price and seat count. These are the ones specific to this category — and the ones our questionnaire asks you.
- 01
How many tickets do you handle a month?
Under 500 · 500 to 3,000 · 3,000 to 20,000 · More than 20,000
- 02
Where do requests arrive?
Email and shared inboxes · Live chat in the product · They should be answering themselves · Phone
- 03
Do you have response-time commitments?
Contractual SLAs with customers · Internal targets only · None
5 options
What you could move to
Every credible helpdesk we have done the work on. The questionnaire ranks them against your answers.
Freshdesk
Full-featured ticketing at roughly half the price of the category leaders.
$15/seat
Front
Shared inbox that keeps email feeling like email while adding assignment and SLAs.
$29/seat
Help Scout
Simple, human shared inbox plus docs, priced for small support teams.
$25/seat
Intercom
Messenger-first support with AI resolution and in-product engagement.
$39/seat
Zendesk
The enterprise ticketing standard, with deep SLA and reporting tooling.
$55/seat
Prices are unverified estimates — useful for comparing orders of magnitude, not for budgeting. Confirm the current figure with the vendor before you commit to anything.
Questions
Before you move
Is switching helpdesk actually the fix?
Sometimes, and sometimes not. If the symptoms are about a capability the tool does not have — retention controls it cannot enforce, a price that scales the wrong way, an integration that does not exist — then switching solves it. If they are about how your team uses the tool, a new one will reproduce the same mess in a fresh interface within six months. The questionnaire asks what is driving the change precisely to separate those two cases.
Which helpdesk should we move to?
The credible options are Freshdesk, Front, Help Scout, Intercom, Zendesk. Which is right depends on your team size, budget and non-negotiables — a 12-person team with no compliance requirement and a 400-person team that needs EU data residency should not end up with the same answer. The questionnaire ranks all 5 against your specific situation.
What does it cost to fix?
Two numbers matter: the licence difference and the cost of the move itself. Median list price in this category is about $25 per seat per month, so the licence difference at 50 seats is usually a few thousand dollars a year either way. The migration is the bigger number, and it scales with history, integrations and headcount rather than with the tool you pick. The questionnaire estimates both.
How long does a switch like this take?
For a team under 50 with a handful of integrations, a few weeks of elapsed time and one to two weeks of actual work. Above 200 people, or with compliance in scope, plan a quarter. The single biggest variable is not the tool — it is how much history has to come with you, and how many other systems are wired into the one you are leaving.
Get the 5 options ranked for your team
About a dozen questions — team size, budget, timeline, what is non-negotiable — and you get a shortlist with the reasoning shown, plus what the move would cost.
Get my shortlist