What is the Best Issue Tracking Software?

Customer service teams are busy departments that need to keep track of many issues that are submitted every day. There’s no way you can manage these issues manually, and that’s why you need issue tracking software to support your team. You may be fielding a few thousand support cases each day, and you require a system that enables you to handle individual customer issues whenever necessary. 

When you have just a few inquiries per day, it’s possible to keep track of them in a spreadsheet. As your caseload mounts, you’ll need specialized software that supports you with tracking issues from customers. 

In order to keep track of customer issues, assign them to team members, and evaluate the status of the issues, issue tracking software becomes essential for your customer service team. It helps you solve many common help desk problems. Read on for our list of the best issue tracking software tools.

What is issue tracking software?

Issue tracking software is a system that documents, prioritizes, and resolves issues that are submitted by customers to your customer service team. It turns all issues into a ticket that can be managed by your service team and tracked from beginning to end. Agents are alerted when there is a change to a ticket and they are kept informed of who is managing the issue. 

Issue tracking software helps customer service teams stay informed about the demand from their customers, monitor active service cases and streamline their daily workloads. Complex tickets can be managed effectively by the issue tracking software so that nothing ends up slipping through the cracks. 

An issue tracking system is essential for busy teams who are dealing with high volumes of issues every day. 

Issues can be submitted internally from engineers or QA specialists and externally from customers or clients. Additionally messages can be added to the issue so your team can keep track of complicated inquiries, and collaborate with other members of the team. 

The benefits of using an issue tracking system

Analytics and performance

Issue tracking software should offer the capability to analyze the tickets sent to you by customers and keep track of how agents are handling their responses. You can monitor how long it is taking agents to respond to issues and the percentage of tickets that are closed. Without issue tracking software, you won’t have insight into performance. 

Ticket management

Issue tracking software usually gives you the ability to manage issues that are submitted to your customer service help desk. Issues are turned into tickets which are assigned a status such as open, pending or closed, and this allows your agents to easily manage inquiries. 

Support via multiple channels

Customers usually get in touch on a variety of different channels, ranging from email, to social, to phone, to live chat. Issue tracking software integrates all your channels so tickets arrive within the same system and agents have a broad overview of all customer inquiries. 

Gathers customer feedback

Issue tracking software typically allows you to close a customer issue and send out a survey to gather feedback. Surveys are useful tools that enable you to understand how well you have helped a customer and empower you to do better next time. 

Collaboration features 

Using this type of software, more than one agent can work together on an issue and speed up the time to resolution. Comments and tagging allow you to bring in particular agents when needed, whilst collision detection alerts agents to when an issue is already being worked on.

More efficient workflows

Issue tracking software normally comes with automation features that allow you automatically prioritize incoming tickets in order of importance. You can set up the system to automatically direct a ticket to a particular agent or department, meaning your agents can save time on performing repetitive manual tasks. 

13 of the best issue tracking software tools

1. Keeping

The first issue tracking software you’ll want to consider is our very own Keeping which works on top of Gmail to help you manage customer issues. Keeping is very simple to use and can be set up in minutes, and separates your support emails from the rest of your personal emails. 

Keeping allows you to assign and prioritize tickets, with collision detection preventing multiple agents from duplicating their work on a single issue. Depending on your plan, you can set up multiple mailboxes to keep your issues separate and organize your shared inbox. Automation enables you to use logic to automatically assign tickets to agents, prioritize important customers, or ignore spam and promotional emails.

Feature highlight: Advanced reporting provides you with the customer data required to understand how your team is dealing with customers. You can monitor first response time, volume of requests, and how each of your team members responds to issues.

2. Jira

Jira is a very popular bug and issue tracking software made by Atlassian, used primarily by engineering teams but can also be useful for customer service. It’s been built for teams to track bugs internally, so when companies are testing products issues can be submitted to Jira for review by the product development team. 

Jira allows you to assign issues to the right team members, so you know who is working on what. It affords a single view of all issues in the backlog, including both bugs and new features in development. Once you have captured your issues, you can prioritize them based on the level of importance, urgency, and the team’s capacity.

Feature highlight: automation means teams remain aware of an issue’s status with notifications as issues evolve from backlog to done.

3. ProProfs

ProProfs can be used as issue tracking software but it is also a cloud-based help desk ticketing system. Aimed at customer service teams, the big advantage of ProProfs is its integration with the rest of the ProProfs suite, including live chat and knowledge base. ProProfs ticketing system enables you to manage issues with prioritization and canned responses for faster responses. 

ProProfs help desk support software functions as a single point of contact that provides central information and support management service to manage your internal as well as external issues. Not only that, but it allows you to automate repetitive manual tasks, collaborate effectively, and form decisions that are backed by data.

Feature highlight: Advance your automation to the next level with Round-Robin or advanced ticket assignment, meaning that your issues are fairly distributed among the team and never form a backlog.

4. HappyFox

HappyFox offers simplified issue tracking that provides your customers with a modern and cohesive help desk system. You can resolve customer issues with an organized help desk that performs without the need for too many agents, making it perfect for smaller teams. With HappyFox, you can devote your time and effort to offering an outstanding customer experience rather than on help desk management.

HappyFox’s help desk software lets you tackle and resolve tickets more efficiently by categorizing them according to different metrics such as priority, due date, and status. You can automate manual tasks with predefined conditions in Smart Rules, saving your agents time and energy.

Feature highlight: Manage customer issues from more than one channel such as email, social, chat and phone calls in this omnichannel help desk.

5. Tara

Tara is sprint planning software that offers you the capability to track issues easily with its bug tracking tool. Cross-functional teams can track, manage and resolve issues with a system that was created for developers, designers, and QA teams. You’ll always be able to keep track of an issue through categorizing and prioritizing your tasks with labels. View the tasks, bugs, or features that require attention or are ready for QA in one targeted dashboard.

Tara enables you to collaborate seamlessly and make sure everyone is aligned through better communication with task commenting and instant notifications. You can attach files, images and links to your issues in order to give them context.

Feature highlight: You can connect with Git in a single click to access ongoing commits, issues, and pull requests right inside Tara. You can receive notifications on inactive pull requests to identify blockers and merge fixes faster.

6. Issuetrak

Issuetrak is issue tracking software with help desk capabilities. It’s aimed at IT support teams who need to manage customer issues with extensive automations that take away some of the busy work. The system alerts you when an issue has been sitting untouched in the system too long, prompting one of your agents to take over. 

From ticket submission to resolution, Issuetrak allows you to handle your issues effectively. Auto assignment expedites the resolution process so that the right agent always picks up your issue. Automatically escalate open or inactive issues to guarantee that no issue remains neglected for too long.

Feature highlight: Status updates are essential to delivering excellent customer service, so Issuetrak sends notifications whenever an issue is updated in the system, which means your team and other stakeholders are always kept in the loop.

7. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a popular issue tracking system that enables you to track your customer issues, with many integrations with third-party apps. Freshdesk is an omnichannel suite that brings together channels like phone, email and social for an integrated view of customer communications. Your customers can seamlessly transition between channels while agents always have access to their context and history. 

You can add private notes to tickets and tag other agents for full collaboration on customer conversations. You can prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets to the correct agents and create customer delight through more efficient processes.

Feature highlight: SLA Management allows you to set deadlines for ticket response and resolution depending on various business hours or categories.

8. Zendesk Suite

Zendesk Suite is the darling of IT teams as well as many other types of businesses. Its powerful capabilities make issue tracking a breeze, since you can take advantage of sophisticated, seamless support that flows across channels. Conversational support allows customers to move across channels, while retaining agents’ access to their history. 

Zendesk integrates with a help center and community forum so that customers can help themselves while your agents are busy. AI and bots give your customers instant answers so they can always find what they’re looking for. Agents can be more productive with collaboration features that streamline the connection between internal and external stakeholders. Agents can reply more quickly with templated answers and the correct context for each issue.

Feature highlight: Simplify the process of tracking, prioritizing, and responding to customers with a single agent workspace. You get the whole of the custom context with more than 1,000 pre-built integrations, so agents can offer superior, more tailored support.

9. Zoho BugTracker

Zoho BugTracker is bug tracking software that offers a simple, fast and scalable bug tracking system, helping you to manage bugs easily and ship fantastic products every time. BugTracker integrates with the rest of the Zoho suite as well as many popular third-party apps. 

The clean interface allows you to change the custom view to display open or closed bugs. You can see at a glance who has been assigned to which issue, and who is responsible for submitting the issue in the first place which helps with task management. It’s easy to collaborate with interactive modules such as Forums or Discuss, which allow you to check in with your team and find out what everyone is currently engaged with.

Feature highlight: Issue management means you can record bugs easily, and conduct bug tracking based on specified attributes. You can see how many bugs have been submitted, whether they’ve been fixed, and more with reports.

10. Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk is a help desk ticketing system that allows users to track and manage issues effectively. The help desk is composed of two portals, one aimed at internal staff and the second for customers or end users. Using the portal, the end users submit their issue or request and the system launches a ticket linked with a unique id. This type of help desk helps keep customers abreast of progress towards a resolution. 

Like many other help desk solutions, you can automate your ticket workflow by utilizing rule-based criteria, specifying what action the system should take on matching specific criteria conditions. You can adhere to specific standards, set up business hours, and define multiple SLA and multi level escalation rules, that deliver efficient responses and resolutions for your customers.

Feature highlight: Macros enable you to automate multiple ticket operations, including updating the status of a ticket, assigning to a particular department, the priority of the ticket and other ticket properties, with a single click.

11. Hubspot Issue Tracking Software

Hubspot Issue Tracking Software gives your team a broad overview of all of your customer issues by filing them in one shared inbox. You can generate valuable reports, prioritize incoming issues, and make use of automation for more effective customer service. Hubspot simplifies your understanding of what affects important metrics like response time and customer satisfaction. 

Use Hubspot to end up with a clear perspective of the most common issues in your issue tracking software, and prevent all tickets from getting stuck. It’s easy to connect with a customer’s history with your company by adding notes and tags to your issues. With context, your team can have a historic record of updated issues, and make sure every customer gets an effective, prompt response.

Feature highlight: You can use insights to achieve visibility regarding the volume of tickets each of your agents is managing, and see the length of time it takes to close each conversation. Your team can utilize this data to anticipate future needs and organize workloads.

12. Backlog

Backlog is one of a suite of tools by Nulab designed for development teams to work more effectively together. Backlog is an issue and bug tracking tool that allows your team to integrate your bug tracking process within the complete development of your products to track and resolve bugs without a hitch. You can even launch new Git repositories directly in Backlog, having your issues reflect each pull request, merge, build, and other updates.

Backlog is intended primarily as a collaboration tool, enabling you to capture, assign, prioritize, and resolve bugs and issues seamlessly and collaboratively. Issue templates are a handy feature of Backlog so your team knows exactly what to document for each issue. 

Feature highlight: Supports the import of data from Jira and Redmine so you can have access to your favorite tools in Backlog. 

13. ClickDesk

ClickDesk is a combination of live chat and help desk tool that enables you to track issues from your customers. It has a lot of key features, ranging from social toolbars to video chatting capabilities, allowing you to choose the way you interact with your customers. ClickDesk’s complete help desk software comes automatically integrated with their live chat tool to keep you ahead of issues and questions from your customers.

You can save time with ClickDesk’s custom help desk software rules. You can run a set of actions on specific tickets using customizable macros that result in status changes and email actions. Even better, you no longer need to prioritize and assign tickets manually. ClickDesk allows you to automate a range of actions including new email, new note, and delayed response.

Feature highlight: You can create multiple departments such as sales and support to handle issues effectively. Not only that, but you can assign particular agents and set permissions for better ticket handling.

How to choose the best issue tracking software for you

There are many issue tracking software on the market and you’ll need to choose an option that suits your business’s needs. First, decide whether the issues you want to track are internal or external, and assess whether you want help desk capabilities to help you manage issues. 

If you are a software company, you’ll likely want to invest in bug tracking software that helps you track the issues with your system. Customer service teams need issue tracking software that will offer ticket management functionality to enable you to receive external issues from customers contacting through different channels. 

Technical and product teams who are working in Agile have different needs from primarily customer-facing teams. Usually issue tracking software is part of a suite, allowing you to extend the functionality well beyond issue tracking. 

It’s important to balance cost against the number of features available, since the more features you have the more expensive your solution will be. You need to make sure your software is scalable as your team grows, and offers integrations with all your favorite tools. 

Wrapping Up

Being able to keep track of issues is essential for delivering great customer service and ensuring that tickets are fulfilled effectively and on time, as well as helping escalate the right tickets at the right time. If you’re relying on a spreadsheet to track customer issues you’ll soon find your team hits roadblocks to their productivity. 

You need to upgrade to the right issue tracking software to ensure your team is racing through those issues and providing an exceptional customer experience. In any busy team, there will always be issues that need to be dealt with and you require a system to streamline that process. 

When issues are resolved more efficiently, customers are happier and more likely to keep supporting your business. Your company looks more professional and is able to keep on fulfilling the needs of its customers.