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

Using Help Desk Software to Improve and Boost Efficiency

The computer age has broken many barriers and has a finger in almost every aspect in our daily lives. It has made life easier for so many businesses and has eliminated the need for countless hours of manual labor. In the world of customer service, computers have provided efficient and expeditious service in catering to all the customers needs. The assistance computers have provided has been irreplaceable and with the development of newer software with more features has provided companies the opportunity to increase their affectivity and their productivity. Such in the case of providing information and assistance to many clients, help desks have been provided a tremendous boost with help desk softwares.

Help desk softwares provide lots of benefits, they can: reduce customer downtime, reduce support call numbers, improve efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, improve communications and identify problems in your products and services to name a few. These help desk softwares are easy to install, very simple to use, compatible with most operating systems and an employee doesn’t need a degree in computer programming or have to be an expert in computer software to operate it. Only minimal training is required and anyone can use it. They can also provide reports on the performance of your help desk and your products and services. This is a great convenience for any company.

There are many help desk software available in the market. The internet has many sites that offer help desks software that presents the features stated above and much more. Technical teams from these sites will help you in setting up the system and provide training on how to use them. Managing your help desk for your customers or for your employees has never been easier. This is an investment that can pay for itself in just a short time.

But just what is a help desk? A help desk is the term called for a team wherein they provide information, assistance and solutions to problems that may concern anything. They can be for in-house where employees can ask for assistance regarding their computers or such, or they can be for outbound and inbound calls, where services may range from marketing to providing information and assistance. Many companies know have help desks in their structure, they can be accessed via a toll-free number where their customers may call for assistance or via the internet where they can email their issues and concerns. These help desks usually consists of levels wherein the first level is the front line wherein they receive the frequently asked questions or common problems. If issues are not resolved or a solution is not brought in, they are transferred to a higher level until the issue has been cleared.

To help facilitate these help desks, help desk softwares are needed. These help desks softwares manage all the calls and operations done electronically to automatically divide the calls and make the delivery of service efficient. The help desk software also records all the transactions and keeps a record for future reference like reports or as a precedent for similar problems. Aside from that, many help desk softwares are coming up with more features to make help desks more efficient and productive.

Make your company a competitive force and use help desk software to boost your help desks efficiency. Watch your sales grow and your productivity soar, help desk software are here to help you.

Online entrepreneur Sara Jenkins, is dedicated to helping others and their needs to succeed in life by offering free tips everyday. To learn more about her free tips program, and to sign up for her FREE how-to articles and FREE bonus how-to books and resources, visit http://www.HelpDesksWare.com

 

Customer Support Solution - How Would You Ensure The Same To Get The Best Possible Result?

A Customer Support Software is a web based customer support solution that allows robust tackling of Product or Service Support issues through help desk system and raising trouble tickets for issues related to customer priorities. A cost effective customer support solution is highly productive in customer service management.

You need a robust and reliable tool to accept, categorize, and manage customer issues that are widely diverse in nature. A Customer Support Solution is such a dynamic tool that integrates multi channel functioning, multi-user options, unique task assignments, setting alerts and escalation, response through emails, raising trouble ticket for problematic issues, assigning unique service request IDs, follow up and reviewing the status of service requests and completion of the task on time. A matured Customer Support Solution helps in resolving the problem categorized under the unique trouble ticket within a specified timeline under the Service Level Agreement.

This also helps to identify, stratify, and treat an incident or an issue through an all-inclusive and organized 24/7 support mechanism to deliver the best output within a specified time.

You are dealing with issues that are diverse in nature. Each one has different priority levels to the customer. Who do you think is best to solve a specific issue? How would you ensure the same to get the best possible result? Given your priorities and preferences it is almost difficult for you to search for people who have special skills for special issues each time. This is also a waste of time, effort, and resources. Therefore, the best way is to build a team that is best capable of troubleshooting. A Customer Support Solution is just the way to resolve such issues in service management.

For this, just a team of people with diverse knowledgebase is not sufficient. You also need an organized database. Therefore, here is the need for well-organized customer support solution or help desk software that log in issues, forwards these to respective operators and maintain a schedule and list of task and time allocated to these users and generates reports according to your business requirements.

Many customer support solutions have add-on feature to allow:
*Workflow automation
*Integrated advanced features to create customized templates
*Closed loop problem ticketing system to raise, assign and mange issues
*Advanced self-help functions for customers
*Group access to the mail servers
*Real time conversation between the customers and users
*Browsing the existing self-help knowledgebase.

Recommendations:
Some of the highly recommended and top rated Customer Service Solutions are as follows:

Premium Response
NetResults Tracker
ChatStat-Customer-Interaction-System
BridgeCRM
Click-N-Speak

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