What Is Help Desk Software?

• Help Desk Software Definition

  Help Desk Software Definition

  Help desk software helps streamline and simplify processes to save time and improve efficiency for troubleshooting end-user requests.
• What is help desk software used for?

  What is help desk software used for?

  A help desk software is an advanced IT tool that helps create support tickets and route them to relevant support teams to ensure faster resolution of end-user queries. It enables teams to take quick actions and respond to issues using built-in features. This can result in increased productivity and efficiency. These tools provide easy-to-use and simple dashboards to get an overview of the number of active and pending requests.

  A help desk software offers:

  • Automation: A help desk software automates tasks such as collaboration, communication, query resolution, and escalation. It makes it easier for support teams to assign tickets to the relevant teams to resolve issues quickly. It also triggers alerts and escalations and sends instant notifications to the teams in certain conditions like overdue tickets or in case of emergency. The tool ensures no issues go overlooked.
  • Reporting capabilities: Help desk software enables technical teams to create elaborated and in-depth reports to ensure teams gain useful insights while resolving complex end-user queries. These reports can include specific information relevant to teams, such as ticket load, customer ratings, average turnaround time, and other performance metrics to improve the overall help desk process.
  • Ticket management: The help desk software offers a centralized ticketing system to get an overview of customer queries and requests. This management feature can track and organize tickets, allowing teams to quickly resolve various end-user issues. These tools can make communication easier with end users by offering multiple contact points.
  • Self-service knowledge base: One of the easiest ways to resolve end-user queries is via a self-service knowledge base. A self-service knowledge base includes answers to common end-user queries, an FAQ section, database or technical issues, and forums. End users can refer to these resources to resolve general queries on their own like password reset, login issues, and more. This reduces the workload and helps technicians focus more on technical issues.
• Importance of help desk software

  Importance of help desk software

  With an efficient help desk software, you can categorize, prioritize, manage, and route the status of help desk tickets and issues and improve the overall support service process.

  Three major benefits of having effective help desk software:

  1. Supports internal collaboration: Help desk software is useful for medium to large organizations with multiple internal service providers. It offers simplified asset tracking to discover IT assets and their status, escalation tools to escalate issues to relevant teams, centralized dashboards to enhance internal visibility, and ticket linking to resolve similar tickets quickly.
  2. Ensures end-user satisfaction: IT help desk software ensures end-user satisfaction by offering a transparent user-facing portal, an easy-to-use interface, and quick support. Many employees use a self-serve knowledge base to resolve their queries without needing to contact customer support executives. Help desk solutions support straightforward ticketing templates asking for all the necessary information required to resolve the issue. End users can also view the real-time status of their tickets and get updated regularly. They can connect to customer service agents via web-based chats.
  3. Benefits the business: Help desk software offers significant benefits to a business, such as improved productivity, effective sharing of data, and ad hoc processes. Additionally, most help desk solutions provide enterprise-grade security features to help with compliance and regulations.
• What is the difference between a service desk and help desk?

  What is the difference between a service desk and help desk?

  Service Desk

  A service desk offers strategic and cross-organizational solutions. It focuses on more comprehensive business needs, such as change management and other ITIL practices, rather than solely focusing on tactical break-fix resolution. It manages incidents and service requests and ensures uninterrupted communications with end users. The critical role of the service desk is to assist end users and improve overall IT business operations proactively.

  Service desk software helps simplify service requests for quick resolution of end-user queries and includes a service catalog to streamline workflows. It offers a simple interface to provide an enhanced user experience. Moreover, it utilizes artificial intelligence-powered suggestions to encourage self-service. The role of the service desk is to drive the impact and efficiency of the IT teams, employees, and organizations. It easily integrates with advanced technology and serves as a centralized solution for problems and configuration changes impacting your business.

  Help Desk

  An IT help desk focuses solely on resolving the immediate needs of end users related to technical issues and incidents. The primary role of the IT help desk is to improve support services with quick, accurate, and effective solutions.

  The help desk team uses help desk software to streamline and simplify IT support processes. The tool improves issues such as dropped requests, unattended service requests, and manual escalations. It works by tracking tickets from intake to resolution, providing insights into the status of individual tickets, and directing queries or requests to the right team member, so issues can be handled quickly and efficiently.
• Optimizing a help desk workflow process

  Optimizing a help desk workflow process

  Manual management of a help desk can be difficult and time-consuming. Your support teams struggle to manage increased volumes of tickets with slow responses and problem resolution difficulties. Establishing a workflow within the help desk enables technicians to understand the processes they need to adhere to when supporting users to achieve their targets successfully and can simplify every stage of what could otherwise by long and complex procedures to deliver efficient and effective solutions to end-user requests.

  Optimizing help desk workflow involves specific steps, such as:

  • Organizing help desk tickets: Organizing tickets is one of the most important steps to ensure tickets get resolved and aren’t lost or unattended by allowing support teams to group, search, and report on specific tickets. Other organizational features used in help desk software include:
    • Assigning ticket priority: Support agents can prioritize tickets as high, low, and normal based on the urgency. This helps them sort tickets and resolve end-user queries quickly.
    • Adding labels: Additionally, your team can separate or group similar tickets using labels or categorization. This is helpful when multiple end users have similar queries.
    • Setting ticket status: Lastly, setting ticket status helps your support team members understand the entire lifecycle of individual tickets.
  • Using parent-child relationships: Parent-child relationships help your team understand the dependencies or the hierarchy of related tickets.
  • Adding attachments and notes: With help desk software, you can easily assign tickets to another team member or add notes and attachments. Attaching notes helps other team members understand the previous work done on a ticket, helping bridge an understanding of how to best troubleshoot the issue moving forward.
  • Creating a workflow template: Templates help define the standard progression of a ticket’s lifecycle based on priority or classification. Defining a template helps technicians understand the questions to ask or various steps needed to reach a resolution.
  • Establishing SLAs: Establishing SLAs is important to deliver high-quality services. Hone agreed upon service levels based on ticket categories, priorities, or who the requester is to ensure timely responses and resolutions. With clear business-based targets for service performance, SLAs enable teams to review how their service delivery can be assessed, managed, and improved to continually meet the needs of the organization.