Entry Software Corporation

Entry

Service Desk

Which Help Desk Suits Your Business Best?

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With the technological direction, modern business have been moving towards, a push for organization and customer service solutions through software has been made. The most common form of connecting the business to customers and business to itself is through help desk software. The main goal of a help desk is to connect everyone to one central point for various purposes: customer communication, voicing questions comments or concerns etc. Depending on the business, a certain type of help desk is required. Not all software offer the display of information suited for the business such as banks wanting to keep their online access safe for each individual and merchandisers will have forums for frequently asked questions to be answered.

Web Helpdesk Software

Web helpdesk software is the most commonly viewed form of helpdesk. It allows customers to connect with the business or the business to connect with the customer to be able to contact them for inquiry. Customers can discuss their questions or concerns through the designated “customer feedback” section. The business receives and categorizes the question from the customer and is sent to the business’ customer service team to be addressed. Businesses can contact the customer to inquire feedback about their experience with their product or service. An interaction between the two entities can come through email, text message, social media etc.

On-Premises Helpdesk Software

On-premises help desk software is an enclosed system for connecting the business to the customers. By having an enclosed system, the customer and the business have web pages that can only be seen by the parties involved. This is done by having business host internally so the information remains safely within the business. This system is safe but expensive as a computerized system needs to be installed within the business to function. This can be seen in financial-management businesses such as PayPal or various online banking applications. When viewing your account with pin numbers, balances and other account information, you and the business are the only ones with access to this information, thanks to on-premises help desk software!

Enterprise Helpdesk Software

Enterprise help desk software is programs instated to connect all aspects of the business to an easily traversable map. Each employee is also a user of the software; the data they generate or collect is automatically categorized and displayed to other users. This way, the business is able to see the progress of projects, workloads of users and generation analytics and reports, among much more. A software of this type is essential for a large business that needs to smooth communications between their numerous employees. Finally, enterprise help desk software allows the business to scale to any size!

Open-Source Helpdesk Software

These have been around since the beginning of the online connection. Often referenced as “forums”, open-source helpdesk software is an avenue of answering customer questions or concerns through community channel. This means anyone, whether they are connected to the company or a regular Joe, can offer assistance to the customer about their comment. This is an easy and financially efficient way of offering customer support, the tradeoff being suggestions by other customers may be false. However, with the implementation of a rating system, reoccurring concerns will be addressed correctly.

Cloud-Based Helpdesk Software

Cloud-based help desk software allows any user connect anywhere in the world. Whereas in an on-premises help desk software is in-house and is maintained by the business, cloud-based help desks software allow the business to build and run their help desk without maintaining the servers. It is also open for anyone from anywhere to connect and use the help desk as the servers are international.

With all of these different types of help desks, it is important to understand the market your business is in and understand which type will best suit your business best.

Who Needs IT Service Management Software?

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Any organization that wishes to optimize its business technology would benefit from IT service management software.

IT Service Management Software is also commonly known as information technology service management or ITSM. It is software that allows companies to manage service delivery to its customers and staff include hardware and software maintenance, order management, diagnostics, troubleshooting, and other routine operations.

IT service management (ITSM) refers to the entirety of activities – directed by policies, organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures – that are performed by an organization to plan, design, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers. – Wikipedia

Organizations need software as a reliable foundation for their ITSM activities.  Without ITSM software the data for processing, evaluating and reporting would be inaccurate or unavailable.

Key ITSM Processes

These are the key ITSM processes that would perform ineffectively without IT service management software:

Problem Management:  The root causes of any issues and what can you do to prevent them from arising again in the future?

Incident Management: How will you efficiently deal with issues that might arise with the IT services?

Asset Management: Establish and manage information about your IT infrastructure which includes software, hardware, skills, staff, and everything needed to maintain and deliver IT services.

Change Management: Assess and monitor the changes that are significant to the delivery of IT and business improvements.

Release Management: How will you put those changes in effect?

Related Content:
ITSM Readiness Toolkit

The core processes of IT services involve a great deal of data that requires recording and categorization. ITSM software can facilitate these important data captures and facilitates categorization and reporting.

While monitoring tools can automatically collect service management data, most information is contained in service desk tickets from service desk staff or other end users directly entering issues into the ITSM software.

Purchasing an all-in-one solution typically provides more benefit than multiple, stand-alone products to handle disparate processes; i.e. help desk software, project management software, customer portal, asset manager, resource manager.

A single, all-in-one solution has built-in efficiencies, related data and reporting should be easier.

TeamHeadquarters, from Entry Software, helps you manage all work in a unified simple-to-use system. It includes help desk, project management, resource management, scheduling, and asset management.

For a free demo of TeamHeadquarters, click here.

Top Ten Reasons for Helpdesk Management Software

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10. The “crack” that everything falls into is as wide as the Grand Canyon.

You know exactly what I am talking about; the chasm that issues and requests are constantly falling into. If it were not for persistent customers, you would have no help desk at all. New help desk management software would provide you a single location for all requests.

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The Essentials of ITIL® Service Desk

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What are the essentials of an ITIL® implementation project? You could use the ITIL® five-part process as your guide:

  1. Service Strategy
  2. Incident Management
  3. Problem Management
  4. Feedback Management
  5. Change Management

Or, I suggest that you limit your starting project to ITIL® Service Strategy, ITIL® Incident Management, and ITIL® Problem Management.

You can’t get far without an ITIL® Service Strategy. It will provide the team with a framework for decision-making and a foundation for excellent, continually improving service. Read more about this in my ebook – 4 Steps IT Awesome

ITIL® Incident Management. You really must have incident management. It’s a core function of ITIL® and the best way to go about it is to leverage the service book that you put together while developing your ITIL® strategy. I’ve developed some simple steps for this and you can read more on it with my ebook An IT Managers Guide to Implementing ITIL®

ITIL® Problem Management will help you mature. ITIL® talks about problem management as the practice of resolving the root causes of incidents. These c

an be understood through an examination of incidents, feedback from customers and change requests. This whole process is referred to as Problem Management. It’s critical to ITIL® and will really help your organization mature and grow.

ITIL® Feedback Management is great once you’ve got 1, 2 and 3 in place. I’ve worked through surveying and have developed some very sound strategies, questions, and reports that you can download. Here’s a link to my blog post Help Desk Customer Satisfaction Survey Best Practice where you can download the survey questions and reports.

See how TeamHeadquarters can help with your ITIL® strategy

What are the essentials of a good ITIL® project? Well, it all is really essential but unless you have a sound ITIL® Strategy, with effective and usable ITIL® Incident Management and Problem Management processes then all the feedback and change management in the world won’t help you. Focus on items 1 through 3 above, master them and then you can spend your time on 4 and 5.

Good luck – contact us to discuss ITIL® or tell me what you think.

Consolidate IT Work Management Applications | The Argument

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Consolidate applications for IT work management and reduce effort, cost and futz factor to the tune of 300%!

IT organizations are overloaded with apps. This graphics represents a typical sample of an organizations disparate IT work management application layer. Each app likely has its own database. Apps require maintenance and input and a cost to keeping the current.

It gets worse.

  • Multiple installations and databases of apps used in different silos
  • Apps installed by rogue IT staff that need/want them
  • Home grown applications may be installed for each department
  • Project management tools can include spreadsheets, open source applications and Microsoft tools.
  • Add SharePoint or Wiki tools

When does this become unmanageable?

It already is unmanageable. The real question is when does this become impossible?

The exact circumstance that leads to an impossible situation happens when the capability of the team to manage multiple data points breaks at a customer interaction point. In other words the customer, “fell through the crack”. Customer upsets increase and IT satisfaction plummets. Cracks become chasms and change then must occur.

Be certain that at some point in the future the IT organization will shake apart for this reason and that this is what keeps the IT manager awake at night.

What to do? Consolidate applications, eliminate duplication and redundant applications and data, and align your IT efforts with an IT strategy. Easy to say, tough to do; isn’t it? It sure is but this is a guaranteed win and an effort that the IT Manager can either choose to engage with or one that may be chosen for him.

The Benefits of Consolidation

Companies that eliminate, align and consolidate disparate IT management systems, processes and activities:

  • Improve employee work efficency
  • Have fewer resource crunches
  • Simplify your IT operations

Tips for condolidating apps

How can TeamHeadquarters Help?

Consolidate your IT work with TeamHeadquarters. Integrating project management, help desk, time sheets, resource management and more, TeamHeadquarters will streamline your IT work management.

Contact us for more information and help or take a tour of TeamHeadquarters.

The impact of Integrating Service Desk into a Project Management Solution

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There is a significant opportunity to enable the project management processes with more accurate, available, and real-time information when integrating service desk into a single software platform. In this blog post, we’ll review the project management processes as defined by the PMBOK 5th Edition and how the proposed integration can benefit them. It is significant to note that the focus is not to just help the Project Management personnel but, that by improving their access to accurate and real-time information the project management processes themselves will become easier to execute and will be more accurate. Thus, facilitating significant project management improvements.

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