Saturday, October 3, 2009

Help Desk Software - Managing Your Most Important Assets - Your People (support desk software)

support desk software

By Mike Barone

In any organization where you have a dedicated support staff covering IT issues, you have a valuable asset on hand. It's also an asset that you may not be using as efficiently as you might think. This asset is your help desk team.

Most organizations realize they need help desk software (support desk software) long after they've assigned their help desk personnel, and have established policies. Some organizations, such as small school districts, put technicians in each building at first. This usually results in a technician whose constantly being interrupted by stakeholders who want to know how their project is coming along.

Help desk software will help considerably with this issue. Each trouble ticket gets entered into a central repository, where it can be assigned by type (Mac or PC, printing problems or some other criterion) to an open queue, where workers can take it out.

Hosted help desk software (support desk software) is the latest iteration to this basic idea; the central database of trouble tickets is hosted on a web site (either one that your business runs, or one that you lease through a specific services provider) and this allows anyone with a web browser coming from the right range of IP addresses to look at the problem queue.

Hosted help desk software (support desk software) lets your technicians report in from the field, as they resolve problems. Even better, they provide your end users with a convenient way to look up problem tickets and see what has been done; freeing them from the urge to flag down a tech when they see her walking down the hall.

Many help desk software solutions also provide the ability to set up a knowledge base; this will act as a series of pre-programmed questions that will let some of your end users solve their problems directly without generating a ticket at all. On the other end of the spectrum, help desk software packages make it easy to escalate an issue to the next level up in your support team, from opening help desk calls to second tier and even third tier support.

In addition to this, well managed help desk software (support desk software) will allow the person who submits a ticket to sign up for updates on the status of the job, often times with filters attached, such as when a technical support agent changes it from open to pending, or cites it as being fixed. This greatly improves the overall transparency and accountability in your organization, and improves the customer's knowledge of what's going on.

The generalized utility of help desk software is in measuring how effective your support is. Good software can tell you what your most common categories of support calls are, and can even track which of your employees handles which problems most efficiently.

Some help desk software (support desk software) is also integrated into asset management software, utilities that can canvass your entire network for certain types of software and build up a specific inventory of every asset you own. This can be a great tool when it comes to checking to see if your office is in compliance with software licenses for commercial products.

For more information on Hosted Help Desk Software visit Adminitrack.com. Adminitrack is an authority in Hosted Issue Tracking and Help Desk Software.

support desk software

Friday, October 2, 2009

How Help Desk Software Can Benefit Your Business (support desk software)

support desk software

By D.X. Tang

There is no small organization or large corporate network remaining in business for longer without an adequate customer support service for troubleshooting.

Customer Support Software and Help Desk Software (support desk software) are useful aids to manage your communications with both actual customers and potential clients. This type of software help you centralize email inquiries, live chat sessions, and online issues among other activities.

A typical Help Desk Software package often includes a convenient way to record issues received by phone, as well as those submitted via online support ticket system.

Help Desk Software (support desk software) also contributes to enhance interaction between staff and customers, providing them with top-notch technology that usually comprises knowledge and problem management, workflow, data analysis and reporting of issues submitted each day.

It does not really matter if your business is as small as less than three people working hand in hand, Customer Support Software and Help Desk Software will create the necessary aura of professionalism that your business needs.

Detailed reports and analytics are basic to tackle effectively all those issues handled by your Help Desk Software on a daily basis, but the software itself contributes also to develop teamwork efficiently.

Taking advantage of modern technologies, Help Desk Software (support desk software)enables Staff to Staff live chat, and it can also be configured as add-on package for other compatible Customer Support Software.

When it comes to determine which is the most adequate software for your company, experts recommend evaluating your present technology and consider an upgrade if necessary to make sure your chosen Help Desk Software (support desk software) is compatible with your business system.

There are software packages expressly developed to work under certain native operating systems that run on personal computers, such as Windows, Linux or MacOs.

However, numerous Help Desk Software (support desk software) packages are developed as scripts that run basically over an Internet Server, while others combine both,a server-side Customer Support Software, and a Help Desk Software client running from your PC or used for remote administration.

Furthermore, doing a research on a comparative basis among the different customer support solutions available in the market you will find that many of them are compatible with software that you already use, including Microsoft Outlook, Word, or Excel.

This characteristic allows a seamless integration of new Help Desk Software into traditional software applications you are familiar with, making easier updating contacts, sharing task, events, and bits of information already recorded elsewhere.

Just by adding Customer Support Software or Help Desk Software (support desk software) to your business, you are adding value to your products and services, promoting tacitly trustworthy and customers’ confidence.

While Customer Support Software is focused to provide assistance to your clients whenever they have a trouble or need something to ask for, Help Desk Software is aimed to offer a global solution to manage different aspects of you relationship with clients and staff interaction.

Help Desk Software improves productivity of your business and efficiency of your workers, increasing also customer satisfaction and improving communication and troubleshooting.

There is another fact to keep in mind talking satisfaction of your customers. The Internet has literally diluted geographical frontiers so if your business is online, it's more likely that international customers approach you.

Whether national or worldwide, the implementation of Help Desk Software is an excellent strategy for any business, reducing the need of toll-free hotlines, and saving money in long distance calls between offices, or those calls placed from customers located abroad.

In the other hand, if you are running a conventional telephone support, the installation of Help Desk Software (support desk software) onto your system will lead you to identify those areas requiring more attention or substantial changes to improve performance and boost your sales.

Customer Support Software is also a convenient way to obtain feedback from users of this system. Afterwards, the information obtained can be added to your Help Desk Software database for further analysis and improvement of your business affairs.

Act now and let that your Help Desk Software reveal you the secrets of customer satisfaction contributing to your success.

John Bennet is the owner of PerlDesk, a company that provides customer support software and help desk software. http://www.perldesk.com was launched in November 2001, and has since become a leading product in the help desk field.

support desk software
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