Benefits of Help Desk Software

Help desk software should be used in any organization whether it's a large corporation or a small startup company. Why should my company implement a helpdesk software solution? Some of the benefits of helpdesk software are improved customer service, faster response times and lower information technology costs. Lets outline these three areas in greater detail.

When a user contacts the computer support professional in your organization, what steps are taken? Does it depend on who answered the phone? Do the immediately drop any task and visit your desk? Do they jot your information down on a note pad? Do they attempt to resolve the issue on the phone at great length? What criteria merits the call be moved to another member of the IT staff, or merits a call the software vendor? All these questions can be answered in some way within the use of help desk software. Helpdesk software forces your IT staff to handle help desk calls in a structured manner that can be counted on each time. When a helpdesk call is received, it should be immediately be entered into the help desk software database, even if it is easily answered. At this point there is now a record of the call, and this allows other IT staff to view the contents of the problem and makes it a simple task for other IT staff members to offer solutions. This also prevents the call from being lost in the shuffle if staff is busy when the call is received. Your general staff will have much more confidence that when they place that call to your help desk staff, their call will be handled in a structured method to ensure their satisfaction. If they can continue to work, they will not feel the need to keep calling or checking with IT staff on the progress, or worry that their call will not be answered in a reasonable amount of time. This allows them to focus on their tasks, and not be concerned with the status of their call.

Many help desk software solutions offer a self-help method, allowing the staff members in your company to submit a helpdesk request directly into the help desk system. (granted their computer is functioning enough for this) This feature greatly streamlines the process, and can increase response time for all users. Help desk support staff will not be interrupted by the phone call and have to stop working on another issue to record the call information. In fact, it should be encouraged by the IT staff to submit all request possible with this method. When a request is entered into the system, it allows any available support personnel to respond to the request. It also allows support personnel to diversify calls, so if a calls is shown to be about a particular problem that a staff member has greater expertise with, that staff member will likely be able to solve the problem much quicker. Once each calls is resolved, the solution will then become available for future reference. This is one of the greatest benefits an organization will receive from using a help desk system. This allows newer support staff to be able to answer many questions by simply searching the database for other calls. Also prevent 2 support staff from having to research for the same solution, this benefits in much faster response time for the end user.

Everything mentioned above will contribute to the overall quality of service in your organization, happier staff and faster response time will mean lower costs and higher productivity for your organization.

Free Help Desk Software

Top Questions to Ask Before Buying a Help Desk & Asset Management Software

5 All your hardware components like Printers, PCs etc come under various maintenance contracts with different maintenance vendors. Do you know which batch of PCs are under warranty & for what number of PCs is the warranty about to expire (so that you can plan for an AMC)? Can you split up & tell how much AMC charges do you pay for each hardware component & how much for each vendor? Can you re-calculate the costs if an AMC with a vendor is to be renewed?

4 Typically your company gets hardware parts and accessories from different vendors. Is your purchasing done centrally? Can you get the information of all vendors & the products they offer on a single click? Can you compare prices & other information before placing an order? Can you modify a purchase order (PO), have a revision history & email the vendor the updated PO? Can you track POs till all the items mentioned in a PO arrive?

3 You might have entered into contracts with various vendors. Do you maintain & keep track of all your maintenance & support contracts in one place? How about having soft copies of actual contracts that are available to you through a web browser and is always a single click away?

2 Your company has a variety of hardware like PCs, printers, scanners, OHPs etc and a plethora of software ranging from MS Office to Adobe Photoshop (all of various versions). Are you still using spreadsheets & manually tracking all these assets? Can you tell whether all the software you have comply with licensing? Can you tell how many of these hardware components & software copies are available with you at any instant? Can you tell how much of these are under utilized or not utilized at all?

1 Your employees come up with different service requests ranging from "Not able to print from my PC" to "Cannot send mail". How do you ensure that such requests are taken care of by your support staff, that too efficiently? How do you ensure none of the requests fall through the cracks? Is there a Knowledge Base which can offer self-help for the employees? How do you keep track a high volume of requests?

AdventNet&39;s ServiceDesk Plus offers to solve all the above & has much more to offer. The product is available at a very affordable price starting at $495 (there&39;s a Free Edition too) backed by a company that has set a benchmark for customer care & support. For further information, mail to sales@adventnet.com or visit our website http://www.servicedeskplus.com

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

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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