IT Support Software
If you?re looking to purchase IT support software, don?t be tempted to choose a non-specialist tool. If you do, you might create a few headaches for your team and your users. There?s certainly plenty of choice in the IT support software market, but no two products are equal. It?s very important to compare some of the less obvious features to avoid purchasing something that?s not fit for your purpose.
Almost all solutions for the Help Desk or Service Desk will incorporate some form of ticket tracking. A general IT support package would get you half-way to what you need. But if you?re working within ITIL guidelines, you need to ensure you can mark your tickets as Incidents, Requests or Problems.
This is something Help Desk Premier can do: it has a prominent Ticket Type field to allow quick classification as an Incident, Request or Problem. You can link Incidents together into a Problem, which is something other IT Support Software packages do not handle. More basic IT support packages will allow you to log a ticket against an SLA, but they won?t allow you to quickly classify the ticket in an ITIL-compliant way.
Critical Features of IT Support Software
The practical aspect of capturing information in IT support software is also a different process. Although some customer support packages cover the basics well, they are normally more basic.
Impact and Urgency need to be recorded together in IT support software to determine the Priority of the ticket; a basic package will probably only allow you to record Priority as a single factor. The ability to add and customise fields will make it easier for your technical staff to capture pertinent technical details in an organised way.
Change Management is an ITIL concept. General customer service software won?t give you any facility to manage Changes, and it?s a feature which is hard to approximate in a non-specialized support tool.
If you?re using the ITIL framework, you definitely need the ability to assign users to a CAB and track the progress of Changes through the system.
Once you begin setting up automation, you?ll find that you need a series of complex rules in order for the software to automatically fire emails and re-assign tickets to different people. The data you collect must be comprehensive enough to generate useful reports.
The dashboard views you need, and the reports you?re asked to produce by senior management, will almost certainly be unique to your company. Choose a tool which will pull the data from the database without manual intervention so you can produce attractive, comprehensive custom reports on demand.
IT Support Software Conclusion
When you’re looking for the right IT Support Software, it’s important to think ahead of your immediate needs. If you don’t have a formal change management process yet, it’s likely that you will find a need for it in the near future. Other features such as escalation and notification will likely become critical before long if they are not already.
Let Help-Desk-Software show you how Help Desk Premier can serve as a powerful yet easy-to-use IT Support Software Solution. ?Contact Us today for a no obligation personalized demo.