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

 

The Bloody Service Desk

You know the scene… it is 9.15; the office staff are furtively munching toast and slurping tea (there is a no eating at the desk mandate in our office) and one of the staff is having a good old moan to his colleague…

“I just called the service desk for an update on that issue I raised yesterday and they can’t even tell me when someone will have a look at it! Bloody service desk, they’re all useless!”

His colleague replies…

“I know, you’re better just sorting it yourself…or asking that engineer with the long hair, he’ll just come and do it. I don’t know where they get that lot from…dismal!”

Remarkable, isn’t it? You would often think, when listening to this sort of feedback, that IT Managers have a knack otems, make sure they spend some time with your vital business functions and make this an ongoing activity.

Respect

Give them some! A great way to allow your desk staff to earn it is simple. Make sure that key people in each department and your senior mangers are obliged to spend at least one day a year on your desk. Thereafter they will hold your staff in high esteem. Believe me; nothing sharpens the mind to the plight of the service desk like the experience of taking a call from a user, or even listening in to one. It’s a magical vivification of understanding to watch. Former critics suddenly see the reality and for a short time at least, a newfound admiration for the service desk is born.

Governance

Then there is remit to consider. All IT functions need to know their delivery expectations: what they should do; for whom; how quickly; and when. The best way of consolidating this information is through Service and Operational Level Agreements (SLAs and OLAs). These define the expectations and requirements of the users and customers that IT staff and the service desk can reasonably achieve (with their resources and ability) and can be measured against.

Many organisations claim to be following ‘best practice’ and have agreements in place to govern the expectation of IT providers, but they tend to be documents that have been formalised by people who don’t use the service and don’t know what their users actually need to allow them to carry out their business process. Furthermore they define expectations that are neither achievable, nor measurable: SLAs that are wholly deficient. The final indignation is that these documents are often locked in a senior manager’s briefcase or cupboard and once signed, never see the light of day, get reviewed or become available to the users for whom they have been designed!

How can anyone feel anything other than annoyance for a service desk whose remit and objectives are shrouded in mysticism?

The key is to define efficient, ‘living’ SLA and OLAs that are continually reviewed; affirming that they meet business needs and are achievable and measurable. Making them available to everyone (including users and service desk staff) is also necessary.

Management commitment

Finally, Management Commitment: I know I have already mentioned this, but it is crucial in making sure that the service desk is venerated appropriately. By management commitment I mean more than funding the desk. After the initial investment it is imperative that senior managers ‘walk the walk’ not just ‘talk the talk ’on behalf of the service desk function. Support the service desk, understand and respect their remit. Back their decisions, extol their virtues and conform to due process like all other users.

The service desk will fail to be successful if senior managers (and their PAs!) don’t respect its position. The service desk should have a defined remit, critical and non-critical services to support, agreements to conform to, priorities to commit to and a host of activities to complete to keep the wheels in motion. Senior managers should not be allowed to ‘jump the queue’ for non-critical requests. It is essential in developing and maintaining a good desk that senior managers commit to and support the agreements that govern it. If the service desk is delivering service in accordance with the SLAs then they should be meeting the needs of all parties, even your senior management team, so there should be no need for nepotistic behaviours that will only serve to deliver the wrong messages to the rest of the organisation.

The great service desk

In summary, the most important factors supporting the creation of a great service desk are:

> Correct people
> Appropriate salary
> Tools
> Ongoing training
> Respect
> Provide governance
> Demonstrate management commitment!

So, next time you hear someone lamenting about the ‘bloody service desk,’ ask yourself…

Why is the service desk often perceived in this way? Are the staff really uniquely inane and deliberately obtuse or is it actually because we haven’t chosen the right people or provided them with the skills, tools and support they need to allow them to deliver service that meets the needs of their users.

Never underestimate the importance of the service desk. The correct level of investment in this uniquely important function can provide your organisation with an excellent asset.

If you can get it right they can serve you well, and not just by answering you calls for IT assistance. They can actually provide a broad range of services, everything from training and coordinating issues to providing a communications portal, collating management information and gauging that all important user perception.

If the investment in the service desk is correct so much can be achieved, a valuable support function, the window to your IT services. Let’s get rid of the ‘bloody service desk’ once and for all!

www.nes.co.uk

 

http://www.nes.co.uk

Providing Excellent Customer Support on a Small Budget

An integral part of any successful e-commerce website is an effective customer support solution. Your online business must be able to quickly respond to inquiries from potential clients and from existing clients, and then be able to address those inquiries accurately and efficiently.

There is no other area of an e-commerce website that is as important as customer service and support. If your online business fails to address this one issue, your business is nearly doomed to failure.

Small business owners usually rely on a simple email address or a contact form on their website to direct inquiries. The reasons for this choice are obvious.

Most small businesses are one person operations. There is seldom any need to provide anything more elaborate provided there is only one person handling all communications.

In the event that the site is being managed by only one person, it is recommended that you provide your customers a simple contact form attached to a simple contact script which can be found for free in numerous places online. A good starting point is: http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/

This is the recommended method because spammers ruthlessly use email harvesting software to gather email addresses from websites for their spam games. If your real contact email address is hidden inside of a CGI script, then the spam harvesters cannot find your address, thus protecting your email address from large amounts of spam email.

Anyone who is operating a website for profit and has no intention of ever expanding his/her business beyond current levels should not worry too much about expanding beyond a simple CGI contact script to run their customer service and support.

However, if you find yourself growing to the point of needing something better, then please keep reading.

Small business people often find themselves in the mode of needing to add extra support staff, but still being small enough to not be able to yet afford a customized support software solution.

Software driven help desks can be an expensive proposition. WonderDesk is a decent application to serve this market, but starting at $499 and going up to $8499, it can be a really expensive solution.

http://www.wonderdesk.com

Facing costs like this, many small businesses choose to try bringing on extra staff and trying to manage incoming messages through various POP email accounts.

While this method remains the cheapest solution, it is not always the most efficient. Think about this.

If you have email going to Bob and to Steve --- in a theoretical scenario --- and you have Bob handling sales and Steve handling support, all would seem well.

But what if Bob finds himself extremely ill and unable to work? What then? Now you are stuck with the very real possibility of sales inquiries not being handled until Bob can return to work. So the way to handle this becomes making sure that everyone has access to the accounts that handle sales inquiries and support inquiries. So, you make arrangements for both Bob and Steve to be able to get the email from the POP accounts.

Of course, this introduces a whole brand new problem. Now, both Bob and Steve are getting email from both accounts. But now, if Bob answers an email, Steve really has no way of knowing that Bob has already answered the email. If both Bob and Steve answer the inquiry, then your company now looks as if it consists of a couple of bumbling idiots. That is definitely not the image you want to portray of your company. Additionally, you don't want Bob and Steve answering inquiries that have already been answered because it is a waste of human resources.

Facing this problem, it would seem wise to use a web-based email interface. Problem here is that you will have to constantly monitor a web-based email account for new inquiries. Can you imagine the pain of relying on web-based email for the operation of your business? Unless your web mail system contacts you immediately upon the arrival of new email, then you must maintain an open browser window to your web mail account and continually refresh the window to see if there is new email to answer.

Relying upon your web email account for your support inquiries can become very time consuming and inefficient.

The advantages of having the ability to have one email account monitored by a number of people, and having the ability to move some emails to different folders should weigh heavily in your consideration of using web-based email for your sales and support inquiries.

Web-based email had seemed like the perfect solution for the cost-aware business person, but the disadvantage of the troubles of keeping an eye for incoming mail seem to eliminate this as a realistic solution to our problem, doesn't it?

I had argued with myself concerning how to solve this problem for many months. I needed an effective sales and support inquiries system without spending my entire budget to get it. But you know, if you stew over a problem long enough and keep your eye to the horizon, a solution will present itself.

As it turned out, a piece of software I had on my system for quite some time figured into the solution I had been searching for. With the last upgrade of the ePrompter software, I suddenly realized that the final piece of the puzzle was within my reach.

ePrompter is a handy little application that has always permitted us to check multiple email accounts simultaneously and delete messages as we were finished with them. With the last upgrade of ePrompter, the makers enabled us to have the ability to respond to email inquiries also.

With this development, I have handed out copies of the ePrompter to each of my support team members. ePrompter runs in the background and notifies us through an icon in the System Tray how many new messages are present in each of the accounts we monitor. As we answer each email, we either delete it from the server through the ePrompter software, or if we need to store the messages for future reference, we log into the web-based version of the account and move the email in question to the appropriate folders.

To get your copies of the ePrompter software, visit http://www.eprompter.com - this software is free to download and use, and will be absolutely essential to your low-cost (free) sales and support system.

Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com

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