Help desk | | Published October 19, 2018

5 Online Help Desk Software Advantages & Disadvantages

Company growth is a great thing and it puts a buzz in the air that is tough to match. With this increase in revenue and customers, however, often comes a higher volume of help desk tickets. Before you know it, your lone help desk employee is working overtime to keep up. After adding a couple people to truly make your own help desk “team”, you realize that spreadsheets and emails aren’t the way to go.

Instead, what your company needs is an online help desk solution. Why should you make the switch? Here are 5 help desk software advantages and disadvantages…

1) All agents can easily stay on the same page – Often when working with multiple agents, hours are staggered to create a larger help desk coverage window for your customers. With employees spread out and working different hours, it’s easy for communication to get lost or postponed. This means your customers need to wait longer than necessary for an answer (never a good thing). Fortunately, an online help desk solution has multiple ways to improve communication. One way is agents can add private actions to tickets – only visible to your employees – that lets them communicate directly within a ticket but outside of the view of the customer. Another is an internal community where employees can post important information for all team members to view and respond.

2) Tickets no longer get lost or forgotten – When your ticket volume increases, it can be far too easy to focus on the major problems that face your help desk. And honestly, it’s the right thing to do! But, with this mentality, it’s easy for some customer issues to be forgotten or even lost altogether. Needless to say, this isn’t exactly great for keeping your customers happy. With online help desk software, businesses can implement tasks that keep people on their toes to ensure they are doing their part to respond to customer issues. Taking it a step further, businesses can create their service level agreements (SLAs) directly within the help desk solution to ensure they never violate an agreement.  

3) Detailed reporting – One of the major weaknesses of companies without any sort of online help desk solution is their inability to quantify their performance. With this technology, businesses can immediately see which customers are submitting the most tickets and then cross reference this information with their size. This tells a business how “needy” a customer is for the value they add to your business. Help desk reporting can also be leveraged for internal purposes to see exactly how your own agents are performing and which customers each agent prefers to work with.

4) 24/7 support options – An ideal way for a small help desk team to appear larger than they are is to leverage “always on” solutions. A self-service solution is often the easiest to implement because you can frequently use responses to past tickets as a foundation for content. It’s also the most impactful because it enables customers to receive accurate information about your business at all hours of the day. Other solutions like Wikis are also great for small help desk teams as you can send articles to experts in your company and let them contribute as they see fit.

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5) Improved mobility – With smaller teams where a lot is happening all the time, communication is essential. Online help desk solutions have apps for smartphone and tablet devices, making it easy to work on tickets with your team from wherever you are. These apps also have additional features, such as visibility into customer profiles and search functionality so you can find that important ticket on the go.

 

In short, the advantages and benefits of help desk software are all about facilitating growth instead of hindering it. These solutions dramatically improve communication and provide the data you need to be smart about the next steps you take. The phrase “more money, more problems” exists for a reason, but aligning your business with the proper tools needed to handle growth makes the experience much more satisfying and manageable.