Despite the excellent options currently available in help desk software, there are still companies that use spreadsheets to control tickets and services.
Unbelievable right?! Oops!! Is your company one of those that use spreadsheets? So, you´re in the right place because we´re going to present a comparative to answer a very important question:why should you use a help desk?
You will see that using help desk is the best choice for any business that wants to differentiate itself by the quality of customer service. Let’s go?
Information storage.
The first big difference is on how tickets information should be entered.
With the spreadsheets, the customer should contact your company and then the clerk will have to pick up the information about the request and manually insert it into the spreadsheet.
Meanwhile, with the help desk software, the customer can create a ticket in the system with all the information of his request and if the customer prefers to send an email to his company, a good software can even automatically convert this e-mail on a ticket by entering the data into the system.
So, what do you prefer: your team spending precious time working to enter data in a worksheet, or free to do what really matters, which is to serve and help customers?
Oh, and don’t worry: if you ever need to switch help desk, the exporting data is as easy as inserting it!
Workflow.
A worksheet is merely a record of tickets. The workflow is old-fashioned: the clerk needs to pass on the customer´s request to the corresponding industry, control the deadline for charging a resolution, recording a response, forwarding back to the customer, and more.
Meanwhile, the help desk software allows you to create workflows to be given adequate progress
for each ticket automatically.
Once a customer enters a new ticket in the system, it has a sequence of steps with pre-defined deadlines. Each new step forward, the responsible person receives a notification, to know that must take an action.
Reports.
The analysis of data is indispensable for the management of care; therefore, the possibility of creating reports is a priority.
It is clear that it is possible to create reports with spreadsheets. However, it is much more difficult than with a help desk software, especially if you want to create reports from specific data or across different data.
If you are not an Excel genius, help desk software is sure to be the simplest option for getting complete and detailed reports.
Security of data.
When you choose to work with spreadsheets, you are taking a very high risk because the data in a spreadsheet can be easily lost.
Just a person who has access to it accidentally hit the “Delete” button on the keyboard … and there goes the ticket registration! And you cannot do a thinner access control: either a person can see the whole worksheet, or cannot see anything.
On the other hand, if you adopt help desk software, you can count on greater data protection.
It is not so simple to delete a ticket, which avoids accidents; in addition, there are resources for the access limit, allowing to control who can use the software and what are the permissions of each user.
Reliability.
The worksheet is like a piece of paper – it accepts everything. If the attendant wants to insert a ticket in the worksheet saying that it was created on the 10th, when the customer actually contacted and made the request on the 1st, how will you find out? Probably will not.
However, the information in the help desk software is much more reliable because the system itself generates internal histories that allow you to track everything that has happened during the life cycle of the ticket.
So you can figure out who did what and when. This type of audit enables the manager to identify problems and bad practices in the way the tickets are being conducted – something that would be very difficult to do with a spreadsheet, don’t you think?
Centralization.
If you think that it is possible to control all tickets of your company with a single spreadsheet, here´s a bad news: No, it is not. You will need several different spreadsheets, which is bad, since the lack of centralization makes it very difficult to work with data.
Let´s imagine, for example, that you have chosen to use a spreadsheet for each month. If you want to see a customer´s ticket history, you´ll need to search spreadsheet by spreadsheet for the tickets that he has already opened.
And just imagine how it will be tricky to track the open tickets in the previous months, since you´ll have to be alternate between several spreadsheets! Pure chaos, isn´t it?
That´s why the help desk software wins: all data is centralized in one place. Therefore, it is very easy to locate a specific ticket, track customer histories, and check open tickets, among other tasks.
Additional features.
If none of the above items were enough to convince you, and you still have no answer to our question why use help desk? here is one more good reason to choose the software instead of the worksheet: is that the worksheet is just a worksheet.
Meanwhile, the software brings numerous additional features. Depending on the software you choose, you can count on resources such as sending collective messages to all your customers, controlling staff hours and even implementing a chatbot for service.
You can reduce costs
These are just a few answers to the question why should you choose a help desk? There really is no comparison between a spreadsheet and help desk software, taking into account everything the system can do.
You can even try to defend spreadsheets because (some of them) cost nothing to the company. But in fact, they cost a lot for your team´s productivity, agility, and quality of service.
It´s … the cheap sometimes is expensive! And, in the end, the help desk can even help reduce your business costs.
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