Help Desk Software

Help Desk Software - A Must-have for Customer Service

"How may we help you?" is a question you are quite familiar with if you're in the market for help desk software. This time, it's your help desk that needs help, and you're probably hoping the question can be answered for you instead of asked by you.

You may have found very specific areas where you need help, such as knowing how to reduce calls to your support desk or increase the speed and efficiency of your help desk employees, or just knowing you need overall support in increasing customer satisfaction and improving communications in order to increase revenue for your company. This article should give you a starting point about what help desk software can do for you by providing a little background and assistance in selecting your choices.

One of the most efficient tools, and one that most help desk software providers offer, is a searchable knowledge database. These databases are usually web-based. A searchable knowledge database allows you to develop a database of your customer's most commonly asked questions and solutions to common problems, thereby saving your company money by eliminating the need for "live" customer service assistance, and allowing your customers access to your help desk any time of day or night.

In addition to answering frequently asked questions (commonly called FAQs), most help desk software allows your customers to submit requests for service and check on the status of those requests.

Help desk software should, and usually does, provide templates for request ticket creation, confirmation and submission, and routing tickets for assignment throughout your organization. Reporting is also a key function of help desk software. A good program will provide reports allowing you to know about employee efficiency, external billing and internal costs, as well as user satisfaction.

Depending on your needs, some help desk software can provide you with further customizable enhancements for paging, purchase orders, database integration, cost allocation and more. It really just depends on your company's specific needs.

There are definitely many help desk software options out there, and you should investigate more than one of them before deciding on one to purchase. Most providers of help desk software can provide you with a free sampling of their product, usually in the form of an interface that will work just as a purchased software product would, but for a limited time. You will have the chance to really put the software to work at your company and see if it does the trick for your specific needs.