Help Desk Applications

Help desk applications are certainly not made equal. Anyone who has spent time working for different organizations will have come across different help desk applications, either as a user, a technician or a supervisor. Each type of stakeholder has a specific idea about what efficiency means to them. Your help desk application should be able to provide efficiency improvements for each stakeholder, even though their needs might be very different.

Help Desk Applications from BrightBox Solutions

So what should you be looking for in help desk software, and how does Help Desk Premier help fill those needs?

The end user wants feedback and, ideally, a quick resolution to their problem. If the resolution takes longer than they’d like, they like to know that you haven’t forgotten them. Good help desk software can improve customer service and manage your users’ expectations. As it does, it improves overall efficiency. A quality help desk application will update the customer when their issue changes status, is re-assigned or is closed. You should be able to customize this to avoid bombarding staff with emails, as sending more than necessary will defeat the purpose.

Help Desk Premier provides a powerful knowledge base to provide quick resolutions. When incidents take longer than expected to resolve, the help desk escalation module can keep the requester updated at frequency that suits you both.

The majority of your technician’s time should be spent on solving problems, so the help desk application they use should support this process. The interface needs to be easy to use so it can be operated while the technician is on a call. It should be attractive and customizable so it fits the way the team process calls without awkward workarounds. It should automate some of the technician’s most time-consuming and repetitive tasks, freeing them up for problem solving. The performance of your help desk application is critical, as a slow response time will eliminate any efficiency you may have gained otherwise.

Help Desk Premier is offers extensive customization so you can tailor it to work the way you do. Common, repetitive tasks can be memorized and repeated on a ticket with custom actions.

Any user who feels they are not being supported efficiently by a technician becomes an efficiency drain on the larger team. The user is more likely to open additional tickets, make contact multiple times and show up at your office demanding updates. Some users actually use this tactic to push themselves to the top of your priority list. Efficient help desk applications provide each user with a link to track the progress of their issue. This puts control back in their hands. The user and technician are sharing information without having to spend any additional time on correspondence.

With Help Desk Premier, technicians and requestors can subscribe to a ticket and receive email notifications automatically when something changes. When the ticket status changes or approval from the requester is required, the necessary actions will occur automatically. Complete ticket lifecycle management is handled by Help Desk Premier. But the customer doesn’t need to wait for an email update. They can see the status of their ticket at any time, or add an additional note to it through use of the Customer Self-Service Portal. In addition, if your Active Directory Users forget their passwords, they can reset them on their own with Password Administrator, which comes at a fraction of the cost as most password reset software applications.

In an efficient help desk team, the help desk supervisor or team leader is unlikely to conduct stand-up meetings each morning, so the help desk application needs to harvest analytics and information for them. A good overview of requests, incidents and problems gives the team leader a dashboard view of progress and team performance, and the application should also automate some of the reports they’re required to provide by their senior management team. Help desk applications should also flag SLA and OLA deadlines before they are breached, giving the team time to act and plan ahead at busy times.

In Help Desk Premier, you can memorize specific criteria for a report (e.g. “all high priority tickets that are past their due dates”) and have the report generated and automatically emailed at a frequency you choose. You can create your own custom reports with a tool of your choice, but powerful?help desk reports that are easy to tailor come standard with Help Desk Premier.

Finally, an important item to keep in mind is the blurring line between help desk software and service desk software. One major example is the growing need for Change Management. Many organizations are recognizing the need for carefully planned changes, rather than reactively making changes and hoping for the best. Without proper planning, including assessing the impact, planning the rollout, and having a blackout plan, you risk destabilizing your IT infrastructure and negatively impacting the productivity of your customers.

Help Desk Premier has built-in Change Management, not a workaround, to help your organization achieve this very important objective.

To learn more about Help Desk Premier and how it can improve your IT Support operations, or assist with any type of call tracking or issue tracking, contact us today.