Improving your Help Desk and Customer Support

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a help desk - understaffing, low popularity, lack of senior management understanding, too many problems, technological changes causing staff mismatches, high backlogs and so on. The most common problem is that of perceived poor service. Research indicates that only a small percentage of help desk service requests are resolved on the first call. As a consequence, customers/staff tend to have a negative image.

When the help desk is accurately and speedily handling all of its calls, the entire business is more productive. This boosts profitability and also promotes customer satisfaction. It is simply not possible to run a help desk efficiently without the use of sophisticated software.

Now before you rush out and buy the first help desk program you come across, here are some features that the software should meet:

• It should be able to handle any number of end users.
• Has the ability to store knowledge about the intricacies of any type of hardware, software or any other product and/or service you may offer.
• The software should be able to distinguish between urgent requests (priority) and other types of requests.
• All questions, whether they be from naive end-users or power-users should be able to be answered from the help desk's knowledge base.
• The help desk software used should be able to make "experts" out of junior level help desk analysts.

Help Desk software with a knowledge base can overcome, that major problem of only a small percentage of calls being solved on the first call, by making all the solutions readily available to even the junior level help desk analysts. This means that a new help desk employee will require less training before solving problems.

Having a priority assigned to each support call, allows support staff to give their attention to important calls first. If necessary, the call can later have it's priority elevated and re-assigned to another staff member. As well as having a priority assigned to it, some other useful functions are - the ability to assign a due date, email notification to both the staff member and the client when the call is assigned, and allows staff to see in an instance, what calls are assigned to them, when they are due and what ones are overdue.

As well as the solving of problems, the software should also be able to record various statistics. Having a audit trail on each work order allows staff, when a call is re-assigned, to see what has already been done and by whom. Also management should want to measure the performance of the help desk. How many calls are coming in? How long are they taking to solve How are support staff performing? What is the average cost of solving a call? These questions and others, should all be able to be answered by the software. As lack of measurement rates highly on the list of problems, so having the ability to generate statistical reports, for all levels via the software is of great benefit. After all, how can you set goals to improve on, without adequate measures in place?

Finding a software program that meets all your requirements may be difficult, but finding one that is customisable allows for change. Assessing your current help desk procedures may find that your processes aren't as good as you thought (a quick way to find out is to ask some of your customers or staff if they were happy with how their last problem was handled). A suggestion is to trial as many packages as you can, after you have made a list of selection criteria and then put a tick or cross beside each item on your list, for each program. Note: You also want to make sure that the program is going to be continually developed, so as to keep up with the latest technologies and help desk trends.

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