Having help desk software greatly helps businesses in designating tasks to different IT personnel. More often than not, complaints and equipment repairs are forgotten without the aid of a trusty help desk ticketing system. Apart from keeping things organized, using this kind of software in any business can improve the response time in addressing IT problems and customer service issues, which can directly affect employees’ production rate, customer satisfaction rating, and the company’s revenues. However, even when such systems are implemented by businesses, some employees fail to maximize the functions of this software.
Significance of Using Help Desk Today
Some employees and business owners are hesitant to use help desk software, fearing that it would not serve any purpose at the end of the day. However, if you want to create a more organized workflow for your business’ internal IT communication and decrease the amount of time you need to dedicate in manually organizing all of the IT processes, then, you need to at least have simple help desk software to help you.
Apart from addressing internal matters better, using help desk ticketing software plays a crucial role in managing customer service communication. According to an article by Chron, customer service plays a crucial role in any business because this is the only means for customers to reach out to the company. According to the same article, customer service can come in the form of phone calls or emails. As technology develops, more businesses are utilizing the latter. Many business websites nowadays employ the use of LiveChat service to have their customers send in their complaints and concerns faster.
Cost of Using Help Desk Software
Like any business owner, knowing the cost of such software is important to gauge if the company can afford such upgrade and if it could effectively increase the revenue. In most cases, people are scared to use help desk software because they think they can’t afford it. The good news is that the pricing varies according to the number of agents you have.
According to a blog article by Capterra, the pricing range can be divided into three categories, 0–3, 3–10, and 10+ agents. For businesses with 0 to 3 agents, there is a great number of free help desk software that can cater to your needs. However, unlike the paid versions, this kind of software has limited specs. Some helpdesk software that offers free subscriptions includes Spiceworks and Freshdesk.
If you have 3 to 10 agents, you can expect to pay a monthly fee of $2 to $200 per agent, depending on the number of features that you subscribed to. As for businesses with more than 10 agents, you can pay a one-time fee of $1000 to $7000 depending on the users of the software.
To some business owners, the fees stated above might be a little expensive, but if you would consider the convenience of having your communication needs and company workflow organized, then, spending a bit on reliable helpdesk software can definitely save you money for other company expenses.
Usual Issues Why People Don’t Like Using Help Desk Software
Using new software like help desk support software always presents a challenge to both the employees and the business owners. A huge fraction of these people are confused on how to use IT solution. Others on the other hand don’t know that such software even exists in the first place.
In an article, Spiceworks insists that using a help desk ticket software is not that hard, and anyone who has basic IT understanding will manage to use it for their everyday tasks like automating IT maintenance tasks, scheduling IT repairs, and offering faster response to both employees and clients who use the ticketing software.
Another issue is the pricing of the software. While you can choose any open source help desk software available, as mentioned earlier, these have limited features. According to an article written by Finances Online about free help desk software, open source software covers basic function like phone support, email support, and knowledge-based and report templates. Some businesses need other kinds of features like mobile app where you could monitor the processes remotely and premium technical support.
Before selecting the best help desk software for your company, you can refer to Help Desk Software reviews to check on the feedbacks from clients regarding the features included in the packages and the subscription price. This can help you create a good help desk software comparison.
Maximizing the Use of Your Software
Let’s say you already availed help desk software for business because you’re convinced of the many benefits you can get out of it; however, you struggled with keeping your employees to use the software. Here are 3 huge tips you can use to increase the use of your help desk software for ticket management.
Tip 1. Ensuring Immediate Response for Every Ticket Submitted
The whole point of using help desk software for ticket management is to facilitate faster response time for IT repair requests. In a blog article written by Mojo Helpdesk, the writer discussed how employees don’t use the ticketing system because they’re not sure if their requests would even be addressed in a timely manner as compared to personally approaching the IT department for the problem. Make sure that whenever an employee submits a ticket, an IT representative will immediately address the concern. Look into the response time of the IT department and see if you could decrease it for faster transaction and higher employee satisfaction.
The same is true for tickets submitted by customers. We all know how crucial it is to attend to customer’s concerns as soon as possible. In order to entice customers to utilize your LiveChat messengers, make sure to decrease response time as much as possible and provide helpful prompts as well.
By adjusting the response time and providing more helpful prompts, clients and employees are more confident that their messages are being read and that they will get the necessary assistance.
In order to adjust the response time of your tech team, identify the most common problems reported by your employees or clients, so you can create a specific group who can attend to these respective issues. An article by Samanage reports that password reset, broken printer, Adobe reader update, Windows 8 problems, slow internet connection, missing documents, lagging computers, and third party software issues are among the most common employee IT requests in different kinds of businesses.
On the other hand, Return Customer says in an article that waiting too long for a response and experiencing unorganized complaint processing and unresponsive customer service team are the most common general customer service complaints. Specific complaints would depend on the type of service or products that you offer, so it would be best to make your own list of complaints based on the data from the help desk software ticketing system.
Tip 2. Use Incentives
This tip is especially applicable for employees. According to the same blog article from Mojo Helpdesk, employees enjoy having activities that take their minds off their work temporarily. Use the tickets submitted as pieces of a puzzle for a certain competition. You can also bribe your employees to get rewards if they are among the top 5, 10, or 20 tickets submitted for the week or month. You can organize this as an individual contest or a departmental contest to have everyone use the software and promote team work as well.
Tip 3. Impose a Strict Rule in the Office
Rules and policies are the most common tools used by business operators and owners to have an organized workflow. So you might as well implement rules to have everyone fully utilize the help desk software. Have it posted on the reminder board, constantly remind your employees to use it via meetings, assign the team leader to check on everyone’s feedback on the software so you can adjust accordingly as well.
Mojo Helpdesk further suggests that you impose a no ticket, no work done policy to promote the use of the help desk support software. Explain to your employees how this could help you keep track of every business process and how they could benefit from this process as well. If you think they need training on how to use the software, then, allocate a time for an employee training.
Take note of these 3 tips and apply as needed to enjoy the benefits of your chosen help desk software. These tips can help you maximize your help desk support software spending and minimize your spending on other company expenses. Just make sure to select the best help desk software that will cater to your business’ needs.
Need to know more about the different companies you can approach for your task-designating needs? Read our reviews of Help Desk Software. Find out what these companies can offer and how well they perform. These reviews are written by verified customers who have generously shared their insights about their experience with their help desk software.
John Tovar
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