SERVICE DESK APPLICATIONS

Many considerations in choosing a CRM/EMR are the same for selecting a service desk application, with a few additional things. The Service Desk uses an issue tracking system, aka trouble ticket, support ticket, request or incident ticket; those are the most popular names.

Ticketing systems allow the support team to track issues from end-to-end. 

The system allows help desk personnel to route issues to the most qualified technician. The routing of the request is transparent to the end user. The appropriate tech then contacts the user to resolve the issue. Each issue in the system may have an urgency value assigned to it, based on the overall importance of that issue. Low or zero urgency issues are minor and should be resolved as time permits. More urgent issues, like the customer experiencing a production issue (external or internal) are higher priority. The ticketing system tracks the submission date, detailed descriptions of the problem being experienced, attempted solutions or work-arounds, and other relevant information. Ticketing systems also track each issue and maintain a history of each change.

Here are some typical service desk functions. 

— Entering request
— Assignment of issues
— Monitoring; time spent on issues
— Reporting – statistical analysis of the number of tickets
— Fulfillment of SLA’s
— Systematic collection of questions/answers
— Assignment of priority of each issue
— Details: attempted solutions
— Track issue history

You want a solution that already has pre-built integrations for CRMs and includes features such as Time Tracking, billing, and Project Management. The ticketing system should offer API technology to integrate with the contact center platform. Automating the ticketing process reduces service level times and errors from data entry and speeds up your tech’s ability to get to the next caller.

Brand the service desk with customized emails. “This ticket submitted by HELP DESK” is just not professional. End users are customers who want to be treated like people, not like ticket numbers. Include your logo, the service desk’s URLs, instructions, and your company’s service slogan. Don’t forget to include your SLA (service level agreement) and results. Significantly, if your team exceeds SLA’s, this is your tool to market your service desk – brag a little!

Make it easy for end users, the implementation team, and the service desk team to use.

Cumbersome and just plain tricky applications are not used to their full capacity. Manual processes and empty data fields don’t solve issues; they create more. Spending the money on an application and using only half of it is wasteful.

Map out your service process and look for areas where automations can increase agent productivity and reduce duplication. Look at what would make this process easier and faster for end users and service desk personnel. Service desk applications like CRMs have more features than you will ever need or use. Remember that empty fields in an application don’t help anyone, so boil it down to what you need. This will make selecting features more productive.

Automated Ticketing Management A SaaS service desk solution should provide all your existing support processes with rule-based triggers, notifications and views.

Multi-Channel Support We know that external customers want multi-channel communications, but so do internal customers. Companies today have users on smartphones, run chat forums, and are located in multiple time zones around the world. Users want to be able to get help fast and efficiently from any channel at any time.

Reporting: All departments want to justify their existence; the service desk is no exception. Is the service desk earning its keep? With reports and advanced analytics to track activity, answering that question has never been simpler.

In many cases, the ticketing system will pass client data back and forth. This is especially true when the Service Desk is supporting external clients. Passwords, addresses, names, and other sensitive information travel to and from agents to helpdesk tech, and you don’t want outsiders to obtain access. Ensure the selected tool can be secured in both the environment and the data transfer. Minimize the potential risk for all parties.