May 23, 2022
Designing a client’s website isn’t a one and done activity. Once the site officially goes live, ongoing maintenance work is required to keep it ranking and performing well.
However, when you have multiple websites to manage (and new web design work in progress), you can quickly lose track of your support tickets and get buried under your clients’ change requests.
Having a helpdesk ticketing system for web designers changes the game by enabling you to organize, manage, and respond to all of your clients’ needs efficiently. Whether you’re a freelance web designer or a full-scale web design agency, here are 7 helpdesk tools you can use to manage your site maintenance support tickets and change requests like a pro.
As one of the most well-known tools on this list, Zendesk offers all the signature features you might expect in a help desk ticketing system.
Using its dashboard, you can view support tickets from multiple channels – including emails, cloud-based phone calls, social media, and live chat conversations – in a single space. And you can see entire conversation threads and historical helpdesk responses anytime you open a client’s ticket. This enables you to stay organized and respond quickly to client requests for new web pages, design updates, and bug fixes. Zendesk also allows you to create unique forms with custom fields for each type of change request to get all the information you need in one go. And when you’re ready to get started on the project, you can tap into Zendesk’s integrations to simplify project management.
Pricing: Accommodating both small business teams and large companies, plans start at $5 per month per agent.
As one of the more mobile-friendly options on this list, Groove is great for freelance web designers and design teams who aren’t always glued to the computer. Using its intuitive interface, you can respond to clients from anywhere, on any device. And if you need to loop your teammates into the conversation or route a change request to a specific designer, you can do that with just a few clicks. Groove even sends you real-time notifications on client and teammate responses to help you stay in-the-know on important client projects.
Best of all, Groove will show you if someone is typing a response to a client, so you don’t waste time typing up one of your own or accidentally send a duplicate response.
Pricing: Once you’ve had a chance to try Groove for 15 days, pricing starts at $9 per user per month for the platform’s basic functionality.
Beyond saving you the hassle of toggling back and forth between channels, Zoho’s helpdesk software is built to help you deliver better customer support.
Using its AI features, you can monitor customer sentiment in every message and pinpoint customer issues that need immediate attention. And you can share tutorials, step-by-step guides, and suggestions via a knowledge center to help your clients solve common problems on their own. These features ensure your clients get the timely support they need while allowing you to focus on complex site maintenance projects.
Pricing: Zoho is free for up to 3 users with all the standard functionality, and offers Standard, Professional, and Enterprise plans for larger customer support teams in need of additional features.
Built for maximum efficiency, Freshdesk includes several features that can help you shorten your response time. For instance, you can use its SLA guidelines to set response time rules, so your clients don’t ever have to wait too long for a site update or an answer to a burning question.
At the same time, its notification system is designed to keep you in the loop on every reply and change made to active tickets, which decreases the likelihood of any request falling through the cracks. And like several other helpdesk software tools, Freshdesk will also send you what they call “collision notifications” anytime you and a teammate are viewing or responding to a support ticket at the same time to save you the effort of typing an unneeded response.
If you find yourself dealing with the same FAQs over and over again – like how many hours they have left on their retainer contract for the month – you can also save canned responses to minimize the time you spend writing duplicate emails and messages. Pricing: Freshdesk offers a wide variety of plans to support web design agencies and freelancers alike. Basic functionality is offered for free to help small teams get started, but pricing ranges up to $99 per user per month for complete access to all of the helpdesk ticketing features.
While HelpScout offers a lot of the same functionality that standard helpdesk solutions do, it really shines in the organization category.
Using its integration features, you can compile customer data from all your separate tools, including your CRM and invoicing software. When the data has been moved into the helpdesk dashboard, you can use it to create rich customer profiles, automatically.
In addition, HelpScout helps you avoid the dreaded messy inbox by allowing you to create an individual “mailbox” for each client’s change requests. And once you have the mailboxes set up, you can attach them to your clients’ profiles to keep tabs on who you’re talking to.
If you do find yourself needing to route change requests to a different web designer on your team, all you have to do is add a tag to the ticket.
Pricing: After a 15-day free trial, HelpScout’s Standard Plan starts at $20 per user per month and ranges to $35 per user per month for customer support teams of 25 people or less. For larger web design agencies with more complex needs, HelpScout offers customized pricing.
With a clean, intuitive UI, Happy Fox allows you to organize all of your client tickets by status, category, or priority. But it doesn’t confine you to scrolling through support ticket categories chronologically to find the issue you’re working on. Instead, Happy Fox allows you to filter your support tickets by keyword to hunt down specific change requests faster.
Once you finish working on a given support ticket, you can also manually enter the amount of time you spent on it to keep tabs on your retainer contracts. And when you’re ready to update your client, you can send a direct message from the Happy Fox dashboard.
Pricing: Only available upon request. Given that the subscription cost is hidden behind a phone call with the sales team and the customer service agents, though, you’re probably looking at a large price tag.
Designed exclusively for web designers, Sitechange offers all the standard helpdesk support features you need to organize and respond to your clients’ change requests effectively.
You can group support tickets by client and subcategorize them by website page for effortless organization. You can also respond to clients directly from the support ticket to make communication more streamlined between you and your clients. And you can attach documents and files to your messages to minimize confusion or misunderstanding.
The real gamechanger for Sitechange is its time tracking features, though. Unlike other helpdesk platforms that require you to integrate with time tracking tools to calculate the time spent on each retainer contract, Sitechange allows you to track time from the platform. All you have to do is add your clients’ monthly time allotment to their profile and select their renewal date.
Then, as you enter time on individual support tickets, Sitechange will automatically deduct it from your client’s monthly allotment. And the time automatically renews when your clients reach their specified renewal date, making retainer contracts effortless to manage.
Pricing: Sitechange offers plans for web design freelancers, studios, and agencies, starting at $39
While there are a lot of help desk software options out there, finding a helpdesk ticketing system for web designers can be difficult. However, by first determining what your needs are and then selecting a solution that best aligns with those needs, you’ll find one that’s well-suited to your business and designed to help you improve your customer experience.
