Entry Software Corporation

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helpdesk

Online Help Desk Support

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When customers need answers the online help desk is where they turn for support

Managing your business can be overwhelming at times. Especially when multiple customers are requiring attention simultaneously. You can organize messages, answer customer questions, and provide assistance in a timely manner using the help desk. This provides great customer support and keeps everyone happy!

Advantages of online help desk

Online help desk  software support customers that are expressing the need of technical assistance related to computer systems, hardware, and software. This online support is responsible for assistance in troubleshooting, answering questions and solving any problem users might be experiencing. The software works towards organizing questions and issues that may come up, in a nice organized list; making it much easier to manage and assess problems or questions. This allows the help desk operators to find quick solutions for problems that may be occurring and provide answers to the high frequency of questions directed towards them. Help desk operators can also assess these frequently asked questions and assign them to the correct department for answers. This can help distribute work amongst employees to ensure no individual is overwhelmed with questions or concerns. It is important to assign the right employee who can answer the customers questions effectively, to provide satisfaction.

Oftentimes customers have similar questions or concerns when browsing. Instead of answering each individual, help desk provides an option for immediate response to these users. This helps reduce the demand for answers to frequently asked questions while providing support in a quick and easy way. Customers that have unique questions require more than a quick and easy response. With help desk support these questions are organized and directed to an employee in the specific field the question falls under. This allows for proper analysis with the right person, giving the customer the best answer.

Assigning these tasks and problems to certain employees can help generate an effective workplace. The help desk provides a list of assigned problems that need to be completed. Using the list, managers are able to distribute tasks evenly to enhance efficiency. Employees have access to this organized list where they can browse commonly asked questions and unique questions that need answers. This creates a positive relationship between employees and customers. Help desk support is an important tool for businesses to keep your customers satisfied.

 

5 Problems Your ITSM Strategy Solve

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ITSM Strategy

Many organizations may provide support through various channels such as email, web, and phone. Often, they find it challenging to manage everything and struggle to identify a sound ITSM strategy that solves the problems.

An ITSM strategy is put into place to address these concerns and provide an efficient way to organize issues across those channels, making it simpler to manage, measure, and document those processes.

What are the 5 main issues within a company that a comprehensive ITSM strategy will tackle?

[Read more…] about 5 Problems Your ITSM Strategy Solve

Selecting the Proper Help Desk System for Information Technology IT Departments

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Many organizations struggle with IT support and have difficulty deciding which help desk to select when looking for the software to manage the help desk for their IT department. Organizations have found that they need to improve such things as:

Making Sense of Help Desk and Project Management

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Why would an IT organization need to have a team management solution that brings together a help desk tool and a project management tool into one, integrated environment? To understand this question lets break the IT department into components:

How is work assigned to the IT Department?

Strategies and directives set at director levels trickle down into IT as projects to be executed. These projects, when executed and turned into working components that will somehow help the organization meet the strategies and directives once set.

  1. Managers request changes to applications and network infrastructure. There is an ongoing dialogue between departmental management and the IT group that facilitates change. Changes, large or small will either become projects or short-term tasks.
  2. End-users request help. PC’s break, connectivity of devices needs to occur, new staff is hired, old ones are fired. There are a never-ceasing ebb and flow to the needs of end-users.
  3. Operational, long-term, activities are in place to keep all the equipment and software running in peak condition. These tasks and mini-projects are vital to the organizations’ livelihood and consist of maintenance and regulatory tasks performed routinely.

IT teams are organized in a pyramid of cost and scarcity. The top is the most expensive and least plentiful, the bottom the least expensive and most plentiful. Typical IT organizations consist of level one help desk staff, level two analysts, level three experts, one or two project managers and a number of managers, all silo’d by a pool of expertise.

Help desk staff are typically isolated from the rest of the team as they are dealing with end-user and customer requirements. The level two staff are writing programs and executing operational tasks. Level three teams are working with level 1 and 2 staff to lend their expertise where required.

Level one: most plentiful, least expensive, typically not working on projects or operational activities. Level one requires a help desk solution to manage incoming requests for service and to escalate requests to level two.

Level two: mid-level cost, more plentiful, the project workhorses of the organization and the team where many of the level one issues are escalated into. Require help desk solution to manage escalated calls from level one and require project management solution to manage assigned tasks.

Level three: most expensive, scarcest, tough to get hold of and high importance to the organization because of their subject matter expertise. Require help desk solution to manage escalated requests from levels one and two and project management to manage tasks. Add in a project manager and various management teams with the need to get projects done on time, optimize resources and keep costs down and we now have a daunting job of managing this group.

How can IT create a defensible position within the corporation?

With the truth. To gather the truth you need to have all the time captured on all activities by all staff. This means that the levels one, two and three are capturing their time against help desk requests, project tasks, and routine operational activities. Then, as a management team, the truth of what has occupied the IT team’s time is delivered in standard reports.

Get the proper tools

Providing the tools required to help you learn the truth about your organization:

  1. Help Desk to manage all incoming work from end-user and customer communities;
  2. Project Management to manage all planned activities, tasks and projects, and routine operational activities.
  3. Project Portfolio Management for Project Managers to deliver real-time, concise and accurate information to project sponsors.
  4. Resource Management Reports to optimize and schedule staff.

Learn how to optimize your IT team with TeamHeadquarters.

TIPS

  • Focus on the core competencies of your organization. If you’re an insurance company then your IT team should be focused on how to deliver the services of an insurance company. add-on application like IT Management Software should be outsourced to SaaS
  • Take it slow. When making a change in the IT organization you’ll have the most resistance and least amount of agreement from level three staff. Focus on level 1, they’ll be more compliant.
  • Keep it simple. Complex models breed complexity so, by keeping it simple you’ll be able to do more with less.
  • Flatten your IT group. Take the Kaizen model of IT management and organize your expertise units. This takes you away from an isolated grid of silos towards functional teams that work together to solve issues quickly.

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The Difference Between Help Desk and Service Desk (part 2)

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What is the difference between Service Desk and Help Desk?

In my first posting on this topic, (The Difference Between Help Desk and Service Desk (part 1)), we examined what a Service Desk is. In this post, we’ll review the Help Desk and how it is different than Service Desk. [Read more…] about The Difference Between Help Desk and Service Desk (part 2)