When a company is growing, it has to keep close the customer issues and upkeep its brand image. The number of issues starts swelling, when the team is unable to handle the situations and always end up delaying the resolution of issues, or in the worst case, even forget to solve a case. These situations tend to damper the image of the company and affect the loyalty of the customers.
It is the correct time to shift to an integrated solution which automates and collects all issues at one place and lays out the perfect platform for the customers and technicians to be on the same page and keep track of their problems. Thus, a Helpdesk needs to be in place immediately to curb problems churning out of manual and tedious processes. It does a ton of good for the people within and outside the organisation. The people within the organisation are treated as internal customers and it would be a world of good for the support team to extend their help effectively and efficiently.
But simply putting up a helpdesk system doesn’t just solve the problems. It comes with an array of questions as there are loads of options available in the market. The implementation team has to answer critical questions before finalising a suitable helpdesk solution for its organisation, so they get the maximum benefit out of it, that too, without much glitch.
So we look forward to certain 5 questions which need to be addressed, before going all-in, for a helpdesk system.
What should be the hardware structure?
Feasibility of the helpdesk system depends on the cost attributable to it. In today’s world, cloud solutions are available wherein there is no capital investment, can be upgraded with ease, can be implemented smoothly and have proven scalability. The other option available is on premise. The hardware is maintained within the premises of the company and provides much better data security. Companies looking for cutting their costs can take up the cloud solution initially and then move on to on premise solutions. The latter has too much capital costs involved in it and requires a whole team to manage the same.
The most important aspect of a successful helpdesk system is to provide maximum output to its users, be it, internal users, external customers, management as well as the support teams. The helpdesk system will standardize the way issues have been resolved. Each issue has to be logged and tracked separately into the system and resolution needs to be provided in a timely and effective manner. It also facilitates building up a knowledge base or self-help, with details of issues resolution readily available since history of issues and their resolution are always logged and secured in the system.
As for the technical support team, they follow a structured workflow with automated escalations on non-conformance to standards. Issues are queued up based on priority. So higher priority issues are resolved earlier, being more critical in nature and then followed up by lesser important ones.
For the management, the organisation is more disciplined and follows better principles for service management. With Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place, technical support team has to on their toes to resolve all issues based on priority. Moreover, with escalation matrix, all non conformances can be reported immediately and action can be taken accordingly. This proves beneficial for the entire organisation, as output of all employees increase multiple times and support is available almost 24 hours, 7 days a week. Furthermore, increased ROI can be derived.
Is it dynamic?
With many standard applications, it is important that companies find out whether the package is adjustable to the needs of the company. Too much rigidity might cause the essence to flavour out. The current processes have to be incorporated in to the system and incorporate email templates, web based forms, knowledge centrals etc.
The reports and dashboards needs to be customizable as well and readily available to the users, who can create and customize these reports and dashboards themselves, without reaching out to the admin team every single time. Important reports include response time, resolution rate and turnaround time. Without the help of an automated system, it would be almost impossible to measure the metrics and performances of support team.
Can it be integrated with other softwares?
Integration is of paramount importance, as the implemented or selected software might lose out on the improvisation and innovation of the other products. Various assets and other inventory can be managed through the helpdesk system. Without integration, it would not be possible to correlate these other applications. It must collaborate data seamlessly with network and other application monitoring tools, other intranet portals and asset management systems. Data redundancy can also be reduced with such inter communication between applications. It also ensures smoother flow of information through multi channels and can be rapidly spread across the organisation.
Will the vendor implement properly and support throughout?
Once the pants are tight and it is decided to put up a helpdesk solution, it is time for the management to pull up their socks and decide on the implementation partner. Software providing companies generally outsource the implementation of their products through third party vendors, who have separate experiences and creditworthiness in the market. Whilst the product in itself is best suited for the organisation, the implementation partner plays a vital role in properly putting the best practices. A misjudgement in this area can wreak havoc, with vision of the management fading out and the whole picture of automated service system might get lost.
So the vendors need to be thoroughly evaluated by checking on company’s reputation and past experiences, by having feedback and testimonials through other organisations. Most importantly, one needs to check whether the vendor or the software company, gives support throughout the journey of the implementation till post live support. They should be reachable all the time and respond positively in the hour of need.
