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Help Desk Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
- » What is the definition of a help desk?
- » What is Help Desk Software?
- » Is it worth investing in Help Desk Software?
- » Before you choose any Help Desk Software
- » What are the key features of Help Desk Software
- » What are the Key Benefits of the Help Desk Software?
- » How to choose the best Help Desk Software
- » Questions to ask a vendor when buying best Help Desk Software
- » What are the Pricing options of Help Desk Software
- » Conclusion
» What is the definition of a help desk?
In a general sense, a help desk is a department within a company responsible for resolving their consumers or prospects, or users’ queries. The term help desk is used more often in the context of an IT company where its users reach out for help to find a solution to their technical issues.
» What is Help Desk Software?
Help Desk Software is an application that connects the customers with the customer care operators for the resolution of customer queries and problems. The software helps businesses to resolve the customer issues and problems by managing the issue tickets from the receipt until the issue has been resolved. It also provides various collaboration tools which help the agents to resolve the issues or problems more quickly and in an efficient manner.
Generally, the help desk is often a part of a bigger umbrella called service desk, which includes asset management and IT service management. Often the help desk is used synonymously to service desk. However, help desk software generally refers to the system which addresses the customer queries.
The goal of the help desk software is to reactively resolve customer issues at the tactical level. Whereas the goal of the service desk is to proactively improve the IT services for an entire organization at a strategic level. Many service desks have a help desk, but the overall goal of the service desk is to take the data-driven approach to improve the business processes and enable continual service improvements.
» Is it worth investing in Help Desk Software?
Customers these days are very demanding. More than 40% of the customers expect that their issues or problems are resolved in less than an hour's time. Also, the competition is too high in the present day. So to retain the customers, the organization has to be on their toes in resolving the customer issues.
In all such scenarios, help desk Software offers a good fitment. They help in recording customer complaints in a systematic way. They provide a platform for easy assignment of complaint tickets to the service engineers, monitor the tickets, measure the aging of the tickets and finally ensure that the tickets are closed.
Customer Service and Help Desk are becoming increasingly popular these days.
» Before you choose any Help Desk Software
Help Desk software comes in different forms - it can be standalone software, a sub-module inside the CRM software, or as a part of Service Desk software. There are plenty of players in the market who offer Help Desk Software.
With many vendors available who can offer affordable Help Desk Software, It is necessary to come up with a good case study followed by a charter to put forth your organizational needs in terms of providing services to your customers and also to monitor individual tickets. Conduct a questionnaire session with the Help Desk Team to understand their pain points in their day to day activities. This would help in listing down the requirement features needed from the new software.
Try to get the requirements from other key stakeholders who will be interested in the outcome of the Help Desk Software. This can be the product owners or the business owners, who need to understand the major issues getting raised from the product. They will be needing a summary of the issues or the problems raised on a daily or a weekly basis. A good dashboard could be a requirement of the management team.
Pay attention towards the training needs of the new software. The team needs to get trained on the new software and its features to make the best use of it. Adapting to the change is always a challenge within the team, and the new software vendor needs to ensure the best training which can convince the team to start using the software.
Pricing will also be one of the key factors while choosing the Help Desk Software. Get the approval for the budget, the company is willing to spend on implementing the Help Desk. Evaluate the Help Desk Software available in the market and calculate the best ROI.
Each company's need for Help Desk will be different. So don't get carried away by other companies' Help Desk Software. Plan, evaluate, and implement the Help Desk Software which is best suited for your company’s needs.
With these lists of requirements and features to look forward to from the new software, try to study the list of software available in the market. Evaluate the pros and cons of each of the software. Make the judgment based on the best fit model for your company’s needs.
» What are the key features of Help Desk Software
The basic features of any Help Desk Software are Contact Channels, Ticketing system, and Reporting & Analytics. All other features are extensions or addons to these basic features. Here are few of the key features of the Help Desk Software:
- POC (POINT OF CONTACT):
This is a feature within Contact Channel or Support Channel. This includes phones, email, Chat. Even Social Media has now become one of the points of contact for Help Desk. These are all the various ways or methods by which the customers contact the support team to raise a ticket for their issues or problem. Some of the Help Desk Software offer support for all the points of contact while few may support limited channels.
- TICKET MANAGEMENT:
This is the core feature of Help Desk Software. This helps to record and organize all the customer complaints into support tickets and track them from the time of receiving the ticket till the closure. Many Help Desk Software offers a portal page that shows the status of all the tickets and to whom the tickets are assigned to. Many systems will have the features to convert the Complaints from the Email directly to a ticket.
- THE KNOWLEDGE BASE:
Many of the customer complaints could be repetitive. The same situation could be faced by other customers as well. In such a situation, it does not make sense to have the call center person to keep repeating the same solution to all other customers. The same time can be utilized to resolve new issues.
The knowledgebase or self-service is one of the key features of Help Desk Software. All the Closed tickets with the resolution will be stored in a format that can be retrieved later. Any repetitive queries will be first searched in this knowledge base. This saves a lot of time and also the resolution time is very fast.
- ESCALATION:
Few Help Desk Software offer Escalation features. In this way, the support person can escalate his/her tickets to the respective Managers when the support person cannot resolve the issue. This will help for faster resolution.
- DASHBOARDS:
The Dashboards are the centralized portal where all the key information about the tickets is available. It will list all the tickets which are newly created, the assignee’s name, high priority tickets, etc. This Dashboard also provides the managers and/or the supervisors with the customizable reports to check the Ticket resolution time, Support person efficiency, any escalation details, etc.
- BUSINESS ANALYTICS:
This can be the main source for Sales Opportunities, Market reviews, and Product performance. Many Help Desks are coming up with Artificial Intelligence (AI) based analytics. This would help the companies to get future predictions for their sales and product growth.
- CSAT (CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEY):
The Help Desk Software comes with the Customer satisfaction survey. This helps to measure customer feedback and incorporate them into future product designs.
- INTEGRATIONS:
Help Desk Software can also provide out of box integration features with Social Media and other popular CRM systems like Oracle, SAP, and others. Social Media integration will help to track the comments about the company or the product and help to get informal customer satisfaction surveys.
» What are the Key Benefits of the Help Desk Software?
Customer retention is one of the key challenges faced by many organizations. It's important to keep the customers happy by ensuring all their issues and problems are addressed at the right time. So it's important to address this organizational issue with reliable software. Help desk software provides the following benefits to an organization in this area.
- THE EFFICIENT WAY OF RESOLVING TICKETS:
Help Desk Software can be used to assign tickets to the Agents with the right skill sets. Also, Tickets can be monitored closely by the managers and supervisors until they are resolved or closed.
- ADDRESS SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS:
Service Level Agreements or SLAs are the agreement between the service provider and the end customer. It has clauses about how the Issues can be classified and within how much time the issue of each category needs to be resolved. Supervisors can use the Workflows in the Help Desk Software to categorize the tickets into different levels and pay special attention to the aging tickets.
- MAINTAIN THE KNOWLEDGEBASE:
Help Desk software provides the functionality to maintain all the issues addressed. This knowledgebase can be used in the future to address the issues more quickly and also more accurately.
- FASTER TICKET RESOLUTION:
Help Desk Software allows the agents to work in a collaborative way. They can interact with each other, and share the knowledge base so that the issues can be resolved much faster.
- MORE CHANNELS:
Many latest Help Desk Software provide features to connect with the customers in online and social media networking. These being on the preferred ways of communication by the customers in recent times, will help in collecting the information and responding to the queries much faster and efficiently.
- DASHBOARDS AND REPORTING:
Many latest Help Desk Software comes with sophisticated reporting tools like Data Visualization. It allows for easy drag and drops features to build your own customized reports.
» How to choose the best Help Desk Software
As a company, you need to evaluate yourself with the way of services offered by you to the customers. This would help in understanding the need for Help Desk Software. Help Desk software comes in three different types.
- BASIC HELP DESK:
These are mainly the SaaS model of Plug-and-play software. These are subscription models and take very little time to get it ready for use. Managing Tickets is one of the key features in such types of Help Desk. They can be easily integrated with other systems to create the tickets. They are very scalable and affordable. They are good for small and medium level businesses.
- ENTERPRISE HELP DESK:
They offer more features compared to the basic models. They come with a complete implementation model and hence take time to implement and start using. Many Enterprise Help Desk comes along with IT asset management, SLA management. They can be customized heavily to match the enterprise’s needs.
- OPEN SOURCE HELP DESK:
These are the free Help Desks with open source code. This would need developers who can alter the code to match the requirement.
» Questions to ask a vendor when buying best Help Desk Software
1. Is the software on-site or cloud-based?
2. How robust are the features of the help desk software?
3. Can the system help me prioritize my crucial management processes for IT services?
4. Does the system include an intuitive dashboard and comprehensive views?
5. Does the solution support mobility?
6. Does the product offer seamless integration with other popular software and third-party applications that I already use?
7. What is the level of customization offered? What are its limitations?
8. How easy is it for us to get going with the system after implementation?
9. What kind of channels does the system contain for extending support?
10. How scalable is your software when it comes to future growth?
11. Can you help us with your existing customer references?
12. Will I get ongoing support? Is included in the pricing structure?
13. Which services classify as routine maintenance?
14. Do you offer a fully-featured trial period of the software?
15. How often do the software upgrades and new releases take place?
16. Does the software offer anytime, on-the-go functionality?
17. Are there any hidden charges?
» What are the Pricing options of Help Desk Software
The Pricing of Help Desk Software depends on various factors. For the SaaS model of Subscription, the pricing depends on the number of agents subscribed and the ticket volume. Also if the more features like knowledge base, analytics, reporting are opted, then the pricing will increase. The Pricing could vary from $5/agent/month to $199/agent/month.
The Pricing for an Enterprise level Help Desk will be much more. There will be a huge initial investment cost and the implementation cost. A huge in-house IT team is also needed for the maintenance of the Database and the application.
» Conclusion
The Business model is now more Customer-centric, and hence retaining the customer base is always the major challenge any company would face. If the customer issues are not handled in a professional way and not resolved at the right time, then there are more chances of losing the customers.
Using the right Help Desk Software to address customer issues is much needed. There is nothing like the Best Help Desk Software. Choosing the right Help Desk software depends on various factors and the company’s needs.
The right Help desk software will help to address all the customer issues and problems in a professional way. No Tickets will be missed, and all the tickets will be monitored till closure. A strong knowledge base over time will help in resolving the tickets faster. The Customer satisfaction level can be measured, and the right actions can be taken to ensure to retain customer loyalty.
Since Service Desk is a wider umbrella under which the Help Desk comes, it is also wise to go with a good Service Desk that can fit the company’s needs.