HelpDesk & Asset Management Software - Choosing The Right One

If you are to buy a HelpDesk & Asset Management software, see the following checklist before you decide on one.

Comprehensive Help Desk Functionality

A good Help Desk product can dramatically rise the productivity of the Help Desk Personnel (which in turn will rise the organisation's productivity as a whole). Computer users can be made to submit their requests by mail, phone or through the web interface provided by the product. These requests gathered centrally will be attended to by technicians (who already are automatically notified about the request). Adding memos/notes to the requests & viewing the history of Requests can help too.

Buildable Knowledge Base (KB)

Even before a complaint is registered, Users can be made to search a prebuilt KB which will result in time savings for the Help Desk Personnel. The KB will also result in increasing the first call resolutions. The Help Desk personnel should be able to add on to, edit & delete from the existing KB.

Asset Managenment

What is considered here as an organisation's Assets are typical hardware components like PCs, Printers, Scanners etc & Licensed Software like MS Office, Adobe Photoshop etc. The product should allow these assets to be well tracked & their records to be maintained - from their purchase till end-of-life. It should also allow easy software license tracking which will contribute to a significant cost saving for the organisation.

Contracts (AMCs) Management

Most hardware components in an IT organisation come under some Annual Maintenance Plan. The product you choose should allow you to create & maintain various AMCs with the various vendors. If the product reminds you days before a contract ends (say, through an auto-generated email), it will be an added advantage.

Purchasing

Your IT department is constantly in need of spendable Hardware (floppies, CDs, printer ribbons, printers, PCs etc) and software. All these needs will be typically taken care by a separate Purchase Department. Seamless tracking between the two departments is an essentiality which will result in getting the required needs on schedule & their optimal use. Also, see whether the product you choose lets you mail the Purchase Orders to Vendors & track them too.

Out-of-the-box

The product installation should go on like a breeze. Moreover, it should be put into operation with nil to minimum initial configuration & all the features should be inbuilt with no extra development effort.

User friendly UI

The product you are looking at should have a very user friendly client interface as it'll be used by all employees in your organisation. The UI should be simple & at the same time offer easy-to-use features. If the product is web enabled, it'll make things much more easier - any user can login from anywhere using just a browser.

Pricing & Licensing

Most Help Desk products in the market are prohibitively costly with many hidden costs associated with them. Coupled with this, the products' licensing models can be tedious to understand & implement. Make sure the product you choose offers affordable pricing with an easy licensing model.

AdventNet's ServiceDesk Plus offers to solve all the above & has much more to offer. The product is available at a very affordable price starting from $495 & there's a Free Edition too that can manage 25 Workstations. For further information, mail to sales@adventnet.com or visit http://www.servicedeskplus.com

Natarajan Aravind
Market Analyst
AdventNet,Inc.
http://www.servicedeskplus.com

Help Desk Software and Customer Satisfaction

Improving Your Customer Service By Using Help Desk Software

In today’s increasingly competitive global marketplace it is more important than ever for organizations to pay attention to customer service. Good customer service starts from within, by attending to the needs of an organizations internal customers. Customer service enhancement builds loyalty and enables an organization to withstand changes whether due to external or internal turbulence. In a rapidly changing and often turbulent environment organizations can’t survive if this important element of success is overlooked. Good customer service will ensure that organizations can continue to remain competitive in a more dynamic and turbulent work environment.

One of the best ways to provide optimal customers service is to ensure that you can respond quickly and efficiently to customer inquiries and problems. Help desk software provides an organization the opportunity to do just that. Most provide comprehensive problem resolution and tracking that is usually web based and adaptable. That means you can use the help desk software to help customers anywhere in the world and adapt the software to meet the needs of your unique industry.

Help desk software is easily configured to help centralize help desk control issues, track and generate tickets, respond to requests, and provide automated communications via various outlets including through calls or via email. Many can also provide instant reporting and step-by-step solutions to resolve common customer complaint issues. If you are looking for an effective solution and method for resolving customer problems and complaints efficiently and effectively, you have to considers today’s top of the line help desk applications.

Article by Frank Owen, visit his web site on help desk software for more on help desk software. http://www.softwareforbusiness.net/help-desk-software/

Customer Support Solution - Does It Make A Difference?

Starting your own online business may seem to be the most lucrative option. But, if you really want to make a difference, then you will have to do a lot more than you can possibly perceive. You see, the success of your online business basically depends on how well the customers take to your products or services.

This is why you need to do everything in your capacity that will help in satisfying customer needs and expectations. Quality and pricing may still play the dominant role, but other than that, the thing that matters most is the effectiveness of your customer support services.

This is often the main headache for small time operators simply because, most of them often do not have the requisite funds as is necessary for starting and operating a full-fledged customer support center. Even if they do manage somehow, it does not help much because they have to share their profits with the outsourcing company.

However, you need not worry too much, because cheaper yet highly effective customer support solutions are now available in the market. You just have to go and get one.

There are many options available, but if you are looking for something that provides the best value, then just invest in a customer support software package. These packages are designed to automate your customer support services, making it possible for you to spend your precious time and effort on more productive activities.

You may not be able to visualize it initially, but you will easily see the benefits of using these software systems in just a week or two. You will no longer have hundreds of unread messages in your inbox, but you will find mostly customer queries, suggestions, feedbacks and complaints.

The software will automatically lead your customers to what they might be looking for, thereby doing away with the need to send emails to your inbox. Another benefit is that you will get protection from spammers that are always on the lookout for new mail ID's.

Make it a point, to send hundreds of mail messages over to the recipient. In effect, you will never again see spam mails in your inbox, if you opt for a customer support software package.

The good thing about customer support solutions is that most of them are available at affordable rates, making them the perfect option for small time operators such as you. What is even better is that most of them are available as free trials, allowing you to test the software before you actually invest your hard-earned money in buying it.

So, if you want the best results, just download some of the free trials and test them. You can then easily select the one that best suits your needs and requirements.

If you need a powerful solution for your support make sure you check out the Premium Response Customer Support Solution for more info.

Will A Customer Support Software Improve Your Life And Well Being?

Customer Support Software is a software solution that handles issues about certain products and services. The software is based online and uses the 'help desk' and 'trouble ticket' system to help and assist customers. An essential component of a marketing strategy and business, customer support software is highly productive in customer service management.

A more traditional method of offering customer-service was through an interstate, low toll phone line. However, as businesses grew and spread over the Internet, customer service came online and is easily accessible now to customers 24/7. An online customer service solution easily assures satisfaction to customers who are constantly seeking help and answers to their queries.

Custom support software is stand-alone software and can easily handle customer upkeep. In many organizations, it is used to integrate and stabilize the functioning of multiple channels, deliver response to multiple users, allocate distinctive task assignments and alarm systems to set alerts and escalation.

On the front-end, the software offers a friendly interface to handle email responses, offering priorities through the 'trouble ticket' system and assigning unique service requests. In advanced packages, the software even offers a separate inbox that can be used to browse customer queries, suggestions, feedback and complaints.

The Trouble ticket system is based on the priority and urgency of the query or complaint. The system was created to resolve problems within a specified time-line and under a specific service level agreement. Overall, the trouble ticket system can help classify, identify and handle a problem, creating a unique log in the centralized database.

To create a successful customer service department, an organized 24/7 support team of people is not sufficient. Creating an accessible and commendable database is also necessary. A well-organized customer service can help you customize the 'help desk' software for event logging, communication between operators and to maintain schedules.

Other add-on features that can improve a customer service:
* automation of work process
* integrating a group of features, so as to form a customized template
* ticketing system with a closed loop facility, that monitors, raises, assigns and manage issues
* self-help facility
* individual and group access to the mail servers and inbox
* VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) to conduct a real time conversation between agents and users
* Maneuvering and handling the existing self-help knowledge base

Available on the Internet are a variety of customer service software:

The Bridge CRM software solution:

BridgeCRM is a web based software that is used to conduct PC based Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It is used for small-time customer service support as it is suited for 10 users. The database used by the software makes procedures quick and easy.

ChatStat Customer Interaction Software system:

The Software is easy to use and is available with an instant online messenger interface. The messenger service helps agents to provide live chat support to clients and customers.

If you need a powerful solution for your support make sure you check out the Premium Response Customer Support Software for more info.

Automating Your Customer Support

 

My regular readers will know that one of the things I highly recommend doing with any online business is automating as many of your day to day tasks as possible.

From a personal point of view, one of the tasks that takes up a lot of my time is answering emails. It isn't just answering email that eats up the hours - sorting through and deleting spam and junk mail absorbs a lot of time too. In the good old days, I used to get a couple of spam emails a day. Now it is closer to 1000 a day!

In fact, when you look at it, email isn't always the best form of online communication. Not only is there the junk mail issue to contend with but also the fact that email is not 100% reliable. Emails do 'go missing' far more regularly than you might expect. Often this is simply because the recipients email software has decided that a particular email is junk and has transferred it directly to the 'Delete' folder. Other times it may be because the recipients ISP has decided that the email is junk and deleted it BEFORE it has even been seen by the recipient! (Yes this really does happen - imagine if your postman sorted through your mail and made the decision of which letters you want and which ones he should throw away?!)

One way to help avoid the spam problem when dealing with customer support enquiries is to make use of a contact form on your website instead of posting an email address. This will certainly help to cut down on spam but it still means that you have the problem of emails not getting to their destination (and when you have a frustrated customer waiting for assistance this is not ideal).

Therefore, probably the best option on the market presently is a full-blown helpdesk system. Setting up a dedicated helpdesk is a superb way of automating your customer support and speeding up the process of dealing with enquiries and support emails. Not only that but if you use a system that allows customers to create 'tickets', you don't have to rely on email as your customers can login to a special web page and view both their tickets and your replies online.

Another feature of many helpdesk scripts is an 'FAQ' or 'Knowledgebase' section. This is simply a collection of the most frequently asked questions/queries/problems along with answers and solutions. This means that customers can search the knowledgebase and hopefully find the answer to their question without having to contact Support at all.

Some of the more advanced scripts will even scan the customers support ticket prior to submitting it and then list a few possible answers to their questions just in case they didn't read through the knowledgebase before typing the ticket out - very clever stuff.

These scripts are also very powerful in terms of how they can benefit you. Just think how much time you could save if, say, 40% of your customer support emails just stopped coming due to the fact that your customers were now able to find the answers to their questions automatically.

Having an online helpdesk is also of benefit if you travel around a lot or if you are away from the office on vacation etc. Instead of having to take a laptop loaded up with previous emails from customers, you can simply login to your helpdesk admin page and all of your previous correspondence will be online and at your fingertips. It also means that you won't have to spend hours in an Internet cafe deleting a days worth of spam at a time just to get to the important emails since only the important emails will have made it through to the helpdesk in the first place.

As with most things, setting up a customer service helpdesk is one of those tasks that is always better done when you first start your online business. That said, it is fairly easy to integrate such a feature into your existing set up and that is exactly what I have done for all of my websites...

Over the next few months, I will be phasing many of my email addresses out - I simply can't stand the spam any more! With immediate effect, all customer support issues for all of my products and websites will be handled via a central Customer Support Helpdesk.

I am confident that this will improve the overall 'support experience' for both my customers and me :-)

If you are interested in installing a similar helpdesk on your own website/s, there are numerous options when it comes to suitable software. I chose a product called eSupport (link below) and whilst this is a very powerful script, I am hesitant to give it my full recommendation since the installation/set up process was, how can I put this, slightly painful. It doesn't help that there is no manual for the software which means that new users are left to figure out how it works by trial and error or by trawling through hundreds of posts on the company forum. That said, I am advised by the software creator that a manual is in the process of being written and will be available soon. As I say, an excellent and powerful script once installed and configured but definitely not for those lacking patience (and indeed, some computer knowledge). If you opt for this script, my advice would be to get the publishers of the software to install it for you. You can find out more about eSupport at: http://www.kayako.com

Other alternatives (neither of which I have tried myself) include Perldesk ( http://www.perldesk.com ) and Cerberus ( http://www.cerberusweb.com ). One advantage of Cerberus is that there is a free version :-)

Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html