Wednesday, October 28, 2009

How to Buy Help Desk Software - (Support Desk Software)

support desk software

By SDKP

Help desk software (support desk software) is an essential part of help desk employees having the information and resources they need to perform their jobs to the customers' satisfaction. IT help desk software (support desk software) is particularly challenging to choose. Here's how to evaluate help desk software (support desk software).

Instructions

Step 1
Make sure you understand what the help desk personnel need in their software. The customer support software they have determines how well they can help the customer. If necessary, spend a day observing what it is they do for customers. Reading what they do on paper and seeing the actions they perform are two very different things. You may see customer service software applications that will decrease their time spent with each customer while improving the services they could be providing.

Step 2
Choose customer support software (support desk software) that integrates email management into the system. If you have employees who assist customers over the phone, but that may need to communicate with supervisors during their help desk activities, using an email system is usually more efficient than asking a customer to hold and then physically finding a supervisor to consult with. Like physically looking for a supervisor, calling a supervisor that is probably already on the phone is just as impractical. Use employees’ own multitasking skills to speak to customers over the phone while emailing. If your help desk employees assist customers through email, the email management system in their help desk software program must be efficient and highly organized to prevent lost email.

Step 3
Buy customer service software (support desk software) that helps customers to help themselves when they have a problem. This saves your company time and money each time a customer finds the answer to his own question instead of asking your employees. A help desk software (support desk software) program that has built-in customer service information like troubleshooter pages will cut down on the amount of time your employees have to spend with support tickets.

eHow Article: How to Buy Help Desk Software

support desk software

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
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