How to choose the right IT Help Desk software for your company.

Choosing the right IT help desk software for your company is a very important decision. Choosing the wrong solution can bring additional problems for you, your employees, frustrated customers and even lose potential sales. It´s important to ensure that whatever solution you choose, it meets your present and future needs.

The basic features you need to look at any help desk solution are: identification and follow-up of the problem, knowledge base, and  communication.

Within the characteristic of “identification and follow-up,” you need to include: the type of information you want to keep within the system about the client with the problem, how do you identify the problem within the help desk system, how you show the different stages of the solution the problem and how you manage the resolution.

Ideally the help desk software allows you to present the information in a way that makes it easier to locate client related issues. It´s important that you can find and open unresolved issues, resolved issues, and be able to see the opening time of an incident of a specific client, and to follow up the information.

The tickets (incidents) of your help desk will probably be stored in specific categories. If your product requires a login and password to use, then you will probably create a category called “Forgot login,” and another called “Forgot password” to accompany these tickets.

Customers’ problems do not remain at the same stage from start to finish. You need a way to identify the stages of the tickets for different issues. Some examples might be “Pending”, “Waiting for Customer Response”, “Resolved” or “Closed.”

An important aspect of problem solving is the ability to get you into your current knowledge base for answers to frequently asked questions by customers, or similar solutions already resolved. Instead of wasting time solving an issue that someone has already solved in your company, you must be able to smartly search for opened and closed tickets in your help desk to find solutions and apply them to your current ticket.

The help desk software should contain a built-in communication tool. With the possibility of using sophisticated tools such as integration with calls via Smartphone or video conferencing, even something as simple as turning the information contained in the help desk e-mail marketing with just one click.

Stay away from help desk solutions that you need to copy information from a ticket and paste into a separate email. Integration with e-mail should be a basic function for any decent software help desk.

A good help desk software must also provide a way to allow one or more professional support team technician to help in finding a solution. There must be some ways for a person to document information on a ticket, and pass the ticket to another person who can help find a better solution.

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