Learn More About Help Desk Software
What is Help Desk Software?
Help desk software is a one-stop point of contact that provides centralized information and support management service to handle a company’s queries submitted externally. It facilitates this through prioritization, categorization, automated routing, service level management, and escalation capabilities.
What Types of Help Desk Software Exist?
There are different ways of categorizing the help desk systems available in the market; for example, by deployment, business size, and customer support function.
Web help desk software
A web-based help desk is hosted on the vendor’s remote server so it can handle a large influx of visitors and provide tech support. You only need a web browser to access this type of help desk, which makes it the easiest and most approachable option for customer support teams.
On-premises help desk software
With on-premises help desks, the company owns and hosts the system and has complete control over the software. When the help desk is hosted on premises, the company is solely responsible for its maintenance and functioning.
Enterprise help desk software
Enterprise help desk software has the standard help desk features and also goes beyond that to address customer queries at faster resolution rates by including features that improve overall company efficiency.
Open-source help desk software
With an open-source help desk, the developers do not need user licenses or permissions to access the source codes. This reduces the dependencies and makes it easier for the developers to modify and enhance the source codes as per need.
What are the Common Features of Help Desk Software?
The following are some core features within help desk software that can help users:
Customer portal: Help desk software offers a customizable, customer-facing interface or customer portal to enter tickets and communicate with representatives.
Automation: Response automation allows for an automatic, standard response to a customer when they first inquire. Other automation features include custom ticket or task reminders to help streamline workflow.
Social media integration: Social integration allows customers and representatives to communicate with each other through social networks. Social integration helps with approachability and gives customers the opportunity to get a question answered quickly.
Ticket tagging: Managers can easily distribute tickets using ticket tags to make it easy for agents to see what tickets are assigned to them.
Live chat support: Live support allows customers to get a quick answer for their inquiry or concern. If their inquiry needs escalation or clarification, it can be routed through to customer service agents.
Templates: Templates are custom, auto-populated response templates that reduce the time taken to respond to a ticket. Templates can reflect the brand of the company and can be adjusted to reflect the specific needs of the customer.
Service level agreement (SLA) management: SLA defines the expected outcome of each customer inquiry. Managers and agents can monitor SLA times to keep track of overdue tickets.
Self-service portal: For customers that don’t have time to wait for an agent’s response, a self-service portal is a way for them to find answers to simple questions quickly in a designated knowledge base, such as a forum or series of articles.
Other features of help desk software: Ticket Collaboration, Email to Case, Attachments/Screencasts, Mobile User Support, Customer and Contact Database, Voice Capabilities.
What are the Benefits of Help Desk Software?
Businesses of all sizes benefit from using help desk software to provide organized customer support. Utilizing a help desk platform makes day-to-day operations for agents and managers easier and more efficient for several reasons:
Ticket management: Customer support managers can easily delegate inquiries to specific agents as they see fit. The ticketing system can be automated by routing it to agents for additional efficiency. All tickets end up in one location that can be viewed by the team and in an agent-specific view. With an overall view, managers can reroute tickets if a certain agent has too large of a task load or based on agent availability. Tickets are routed to the agent who can better assist the customer’s needs. Tiered ticketing allows for certain tickets to get priority above others.
Customer inquiry tracking: Keeping the customer happy is the main goal of any customer service team. Allowing customers to track the progress of their inquiry is beneficial to the happiness of a customer. Tracking helps customer service teams as well. The progress of a ticket provides transparency so management can hold representatives accountable for the timeliness of an issue or inquiry being resolved. Tracking also provides liability internally. Users have the ability to go back and look at old tickets and see how the issue was resolved.
Customer inquiry allocation: Companies without a help desk system often use an email inbox for customer inquiries. This process easily becomes cluttered and difficult for collaboration. Additionally, a major issue with an email solution is that team members are unaware of when a problem is being looked at by another team member. Help desk software helps improve all of these processes by allowing the allocation of tickets to a specific customer service agent as soon as it is submitted. Tickets can be allocated automatically or by a fellow team member. The allocation procedure is typically to send tickets to representatives that hold a specific skill set or handle a unique type of issue. Ultimately, allocation improves productivity for all team members by allowing them to focus on the customer, not the routing process. It also helps customers receive the response they need in a timely manner without the risk of their inquiry being lost in the shuffle.
Reporting: Reporting allows businesses to see things like the number of inquiries coming in, turnaround time, and resolution rate per customer support representative. These metrics provide a business perspective on how its customer support team is performing, which gives team members the ability to correct any issues and generally improve a customer’s experience with the business.
Integration support: Help desk software can be integrated with existing information technology (IT) infrastructure, such as CRM software, social media, and more.
Who Uses Help Desk Software?
Customer service agents: Customer service agents use a help desk to answer product or company-related customer inquiries.
Customer service managers: Customer service managers delegate and monitor ticket resolutions and escalated issues. Managers can also utilize reporting to research team productivity and use metrics to decide if workflow adjustments are necessary.
Software Related to Help Desk Software
Live chat software: Live chat software allows companies to communicate with their website visitors in real time via chat windows. Live chat is a common feature of help desk software.
Service desk software: Service desk software products only focus on IT support, normally within a single company.
Customer self-service software: Customer self-service software provides a platform for end users, prospects, or customers to access information and perform tasks without the need for live chat or customer support representatives.
Social customer service software: Social customer service software allows companies to reach out to customers and users via social media outlets.
Chatbots: Chatbots, which are often called virtual agents or virtual assistants, are used in place of a human to conduct specific tasks or provide information based on written or spoken requests. Customer support tools, such as live chat, help desk, or contact center solutions, may already have chatbots implemented as a first line of defense when dealing with customers.
Challenges with Help Desk Software
Slow response and resolution times: It may be challenging to constantly keep a track of all customer queries and streamline those to relevant teams, as a result of which, SLA may be affected.
Ticket miscommunication: In some cases, the customer’s initial inquiry isn’t always clear and may cause confusion, requiring a follow-up. Additionally, it’s possible for agents to sometimes misunderstand what the customer is truly looking for, which can lead to customer dissatisfaction. If an agent needs clarification from a customer to help answer the inquiry, the ticket can eventually become unresolved if the customer never responds with additional feedback.
Lack of documentation: Lack of proper documentation that highlights clear guidelines or standard operating procedures (SOPs) results in inconsistency in service delivery by help desk service operators, leaving inflammatory reviews on various outlets.
Repetitive and time-consuming tasks: Customers often ask the same questions or raise the same types of incidents, prompting the support team to repeatedly provide the same answers. For example, a fairly common question is, “how do I reset my password?” This question may seem unintimidating, but it’s one of the biggest customer service challenges. For such cases, an FAQ list can be created as a knowledge base for quick reference. This would even help the help desk agents to focus on more critical issues.
How to Buy Help Desk Software?
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Help Desk Software
Whether a company is purchasing a help desk software for the first time or looking for a replacement, the first step is defining a list of requirements the product must meet for the business to be most productive. These requirements will help buyers narrow down the list of products to consider.
First, buyers must evaluate the need for help desk software, and ask the following questions:
- What type of support do their customers expect?
- What experience do they want to offer their customers?
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What experience do they want to offer their support team?
- What can they change about their current customer service?
At this point, it’s also important to list the features that will prove most useful for the teams using the product. For improving customer self service and freeing up team members’ time, the company may require a product that can automate workflows to resolve customer issues without human assistance. Buyers must consider if the product should integrate with any other software their business uses, such as CRM.
