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On The Subject Of Helpdesk Management Software For Your Network Management Tool

Small and large companies alike will benefit from help desk management software. Expense of such types of software account for one of the greatest reasons they are not used.

Network configuration management that comes with an expensive price tag may work great but often remains outside the realms of affordability for small to mid sized companies.

When rendering free options you’ll likely end up saying “why me” as yet again the tool fails to deliver results This trail is also not a good one to proceed down.

Is there hope?

Yes.

That hope is what I am targeting this article towards.

Software like this can normally handle the following type of issues plus many more:

Working more efficiently

Allowing smarter multitasking

One-stop access to technical help

Trouble ticket tracking

Prioritizing related tasks

Project completion due dates

The about to auto assign tasks

If the answer is not found in expensive or free options where is it at?

Free software that delivers the results of their expensive counterparts, what if it were for real?

Help desk software that other people pay for you to use, what if that were a possible concept?

Clicking a download button and taking a test drive of such a product, what if I could really do that?

Enough with the “what if’s”. Allow me to introduce Spice Works. The biggest difference between Spice Works and other similar companies is in their approach to providing services. Simply put, they allow users to access their product for free though the actual product itself is not free at all.

Here’s how it works:

Highly relevant advertising is how Spice Works is able to afford the cost of offering you the product for free. These ads are related to products that are highly desired within the world of technology.

Related Help Desk Management Software Articles

Using ASP Help Desk Software to Improve Your Organization

Executive Summary

The environment of Help Desk and Customer Support is changing rapidly today. Instead of merely responding to a disgruntled caller with a problem, then solving the problem, or worse, taking down the information to find a resolution to the problem, ASP Help Desk Software and Customer Support Centers have to become a resource for the solution instantly, and hopefully be able to offer multiple solutions to the end user so they can either solve the problem on their own, or in best case scenarios, the Help Desk can offer potential solutions before the issue arises.

These “proactive” resources to solving problems have to come with a measureable ROI (return on investment) so that management can actually measure the cost of the Help Desk and apply a line item figure to the weight applied to the overhead of the organization. As well, many times the organization may actually realize additional income/profits as a result of the ASP Help Desk Software offering money-saving ideas to the client which result in larger sales to the organization that it is servicing.

The Balancing Act of the CSO

The environment of Help Desk and Customer Support is in a state of change – change that is driven by the pressures of the market and a change that will make them smart and flexible. Customer Support and Help Desk managers find themselves walking a tightrope to accomplish the transformation from necessary cost center to valuable profit generator.

The Help Desk no longer consists of one person or a few people using the phone to respond to the problems of disgruntled callers. Customers are impatient with a representative who must take down their information and then seek a resolution to the problem and, hopefully, respond with ideas for a resolution. In many cases, the Customer Support department has not grown in numbers, but now those people, with very limited financial and time resources, are asked by management to contribute to company growth, customer loyalty, and company recognition.

This small number of Help Desk representatives must support a large number of customers in a wide variety of countries using an even greater number of languages. To further complicate the situation, companies are now diversified which means they are selling an array of products and/or services which must be supported. As companies continue to struggle to make profits, the budget constraints on every department including Customer Support become more stringent.

The Customer Support Organization (CSO) representatives are often the only emissaries of the company that have personal or frequent contact directly with the customer. Therefore, smart CSOs need to become a resource for instant solutions to a myriad of problems. In today’s environment, it is critical for each company to elevate their service level to their customers as a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Satisfied customers become repeat customers and refer their associates. Happy customers are reflected by the various indicators of customer satisfaction, for which the CSO is accountable.

In order to make the best use of customer contact, smart Help Desk representatives need to utilize a wide variety of tools and communications channels like the internet, e-mail, and an online knowledge base to anticipate and solve customers’ problems. Smart Help Desk reps must take advantage of various methods of gathering customer data for future use. Understanding individual customers and groups of customers aids the CSO in anticipating their needs and problems and that information is then passed to the product management team to improve products.

Having more data on the customer is expected to impact the bottom line of the company as management demands that every department be an agent in growth and profit-building. This database of information is used to offer money-saving ideas, anticipate needs, generate renewals and contracts, and up-sell and cross-sell. As proactive resources are increasingly implemented, companies see a greater return on their investment (ROI).

The Basic Stages of the CSO

The original Help Desk was a Reactive Help Desk . It was a place to phone to ask a question or get a solution to a problem or malfunction. The customer initiated the interaction which was limited to what the people who were working knew about the product. In rare cases, the customer got to talk with a technical person or engineer. If that person could not answer the question, then he wrote down the information and asked someone in another department. Seldom was there a written manual or any repository of questions and answers. With the advent of e-mail, customers e-mailed a question with the hope of getting an answer back within a day or two. The main objective of the reactive Help Desk was to satisfy the customer by resolving the problem in a reasonable amount of time. The efficiency of Help Desk personnel was judged on the number of first-call resolutions and average hold times. These centers were considered overhead with negligible added value.

Most Help Desk s have progressed to Responsive Help Desks. This improved situation takes advantage of past reports from customers to create a common knowledge base to be applied across channels, allowing for better case management. Usually the knowledge base is available for self-service on the company’s web site and allows for users to send and receive e-mail tickets to report problems and get help quickly. Responsive Help Desk s allow for follow-up and feedback which further add to both the customer and product information databases. The objectives are a customer who is happy with his rapid problem resolution and the reduction of per service incident costs. Coincidentally the marketing and product management teams get useful feedback. Responsive Help Desks add value to the company which gives them credibility and resource allocation.

Proactive Help Desks deliver a full complement of Customer Support. By taking advantage of a common knowledge base and a repository of information about individual customers and customer segments, common event histories, and cross-channel Customer Support histories, they are able to anticipate customers’ needs and pre-empt service inquiries. Using a variety of communications channels such as web self-service, e-mail, targeted broadcast e-mail, automated “notify-on-change” mechanisms, and customer satisfaction monitoring systems, the Customer Support organization can better manage customer relationships by anticipating customer needs, pre-empting service inquiries, predicting customer concerns and needs, and identifying and acting upon sales opportunities. The CSO adds revenue, thereby optimizing business growth and profitability, by cross-selling, up-selling, and solidifying renewals and contracts. Because the customer’s expectations are exceeded, he recommends the company to others. CSOs that are able to contribute revenue to the company impact the morale of the company as well as playing a significant role in the growth and profitability of the company. The higher morale within the CSO further enhances the customer’s experience.

Three Basic Stages of Customer Support

ReactiveResponsiveProactive

Ability to help customerAnswer customer complaints and questionsAnswer customer needs, questions, and complaintsAnticipate customer needs, pre-empt service inquiries, predict customer concerns and needs, identify and act upon sales opportunities

Ability to utilize past knowledgeLimited to what people working at the time know, maybe an internal manualCommon knowledge base, common event histories, case managementRich common knowledge base, repository of information about individual customers and customer segments, common event histories, cross-channel Customer Support histories
Ability to utilize channels of communicationPhone, manually reply to e-mailWeb self-service, second generation e-mail response management, common knowledge base, phonePhone, web self-service, e-mail, targeted broadcast e-mail, automated “notify-on-change” mechanisms, customer satisfaction monitoring systems

Main ObjectiveProblem resolutionProblem resolution, happy customer, reduced per service incident costs Exceptional customer satisfaction, lower service costs, revenue growth, deeper customer relationships, positive contribution to P&L
Performance MetricsHold times, first-call resolutionCustomer retention, various feedback mechanismsVarious feedback mechanisms, service level metrics and alerting, business growth through up-sells & cross-sells & renewals, deeper customer relationships

Business ImpactCost center, negligible added valueEfficient, good feedback for marketing and product management teams, usually a cost center with some added valueRevenue growth, a definite profit center working with sales, higher morale and motivation in the CSO, good feedback for marketing team and product management team, significant differentiation from other companies

The Keys to Smart Help Desks

With the right planning and investment, CSOs can become smart — really smart – and take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity to transform themselves from low-morale cost centers to powerful, fully integrated agents of business growth which boost morale as well as profit for the whole company. There are five keys for Help Desk s to become Smart Help Desks.

- Have a clear vision

Managers need to fully comprehend the potential role their CSOs can play in generating revenue and optimizing customer relationships. They must have a strong sense of how customer interaction histories can be leveraged to discover revenue opportunities. Management needs a clear understanding of how to build and equip a Proactive Help Desk .

- Get executive and management support

Creating a Proactive Help Desk demands a paradigm shift that must be embraced from the CEO all the way through the entire company. Executive level support is essential for funding the proactive CSO. With full management support, strong working relationships and seamless business processes can be facilitated between the CSO and other departments such as sales, marketing, and product management.

- Implement new business processes

Because paradigm shifts are necessary, new cross-department processes must be designed and implemented. New customer-opportunity profiles, business rules, and call scripts must be created.

- Install the right technologies

The technical infrastructure of the company needs to be up to date. All communication channels need to interface seamlessly. A customer-driven knowledge base must be available online. This sets the stage for deployment of enabling technologies such as intelligent outbound e-mail communication and real-time opportunity analytics.

- Team with an experienced partner

A reputable, well-established consultant or partner will enable you to avoid making the same mistakes many others have made. This is also the best way to reduce the cost of missteps and ensure optimized Help Desk performance with options such as ASP Help Desk Software.

Conclusion

Today’s market pressure tightrope presents a tremendous opportunity for CSOs and CSO managers. It positions CSOs to play a major role in business success. Rather than being a cost center whose job is to simply prevent customers’ problems from disrupting the business, CSOs can proactively help grow corporate revenues, profitability, and marketshare. Proactive resources for anticipating and solving problems come with a measureable ROI (return on investment). Management can actually measure the cost of the Help Desk and apply a line item figure to the weight applied to the overhead of the organization.

CSOs and Smart Help Desks which are able to implement significant cultural, operational and technological change will aid their companies in growing market share and realizing additional profits. These CSOs and Smart Help Desk s will raise the level of expectation among customers and set their companies apart from their competitors.

by Thom Watson

Help Desk Metrics to Manage the System

Help desk systems have gained a great deal of prominence in recent times owing to the eagerness of companies in providing their customers and workers the best services and additionally escalating client understanding. As businesses and organizations improve along with their customer base, they ought to have effective help desk systems in place to cope with as many inquiries as swiftly and to the customer’s complete fulfillment as probable.

Help Desk Metrics Requirements

Typical help desks only had individuals completing to the consumers  requests which, while provided respectable customer satisfaction levels, could not be effective in dealing with sizeable numbers of inquiries. A difficulty with these systems is that they couldn’t be monitored or accounted for smoothly to grow performance.

To prevail over these limits, software systems were introduced in help desk systems. With this progress, help desk systems have really taken off in magnitude and numbers and is a complete business in itself. With the boom of help desk systems, there has to be high performance levels which means that the managers have to come up with means that can keep track of and watch the operations and accomplishment of them.

To guard the help desk systems in perfect check, several systems and performance metrics have been planned to calculate them. Such accomplishment assessment techniques will help the help desk managers to judge the current performance at a range of levels and in assorted departments of the help desk systems and discover which problems warrant enhancement. The accomplishment of the help desk system will grow and they will also know what problems and concerns their customers broadly face so that they can expand the excellence of the product or service.

Kinds of Measurement Metrics

Such accomplishment tracking needs various inputs to appraise the help desk metrics. One of the things that is needed to be acknowledged is how many questions were received over a precise period of time; such as, day, week, month, etc. If the business is big with multiple departments, you might require to compare the types of received questions from one department to another You might also want to distinguish the importance levels of the received queries. All of the above is completed to look at the reception of each inquiry that is coming in.

Once you sum up the information regarding the reception of the requests, it is time to look at how each was done. These metrics are critical to appraise how well the system handled the queries. These help desk metrics will be associated to the standard time it took to deal with each inquiry. These statistics can then be further broken down by time of day, for each department or help desk employee or what physical location the inquiry came from, the demographics of the requesting parties, and the list goes on. These metrics will also give information on how many calls were answered, were effective such as the requester got his problem solved or received the vital information, how many calls were abandoned, etc. And again, these numbers will also be broken down into the above-mentioned sections.

It will also keep track of active, pending and closed queries. Other things still are recorded, such as the nature of the request itself; such as, for troubleshooting a product, or looking for specific info, etc. The system then documents what solutions it gave to the special or new inquiries so that for impending alike requests it will have the techniques to take care of it.

All of this info will be composed to create various metrics so that the performance levels of the help desk is assessed and work is completed on issues that need improving. All of this is done so that impending requests can be done in an optimal manner.

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