For any company which needs a help desk, the decision of what help desk software to use is major decision. Among the myriad of choices are a plethora of features. Each company claims various benefits and values for each of those features. However, there are at least four features you must compare on each software package: incident management, team organization, e-mail automation, and service level management. This assumes that each package comes with certain other features which are pretty common and standard, but vary in their depth and ability. These help desk software features are integration with existing user accounts, a variety of real-time reporting options, an SQL or similar knowledge base, and full language management and integration with your existing softwares and will be covered in more detail in a future blog entry.

1. Incident Management

Incident management must be seamless and it must contain methods for tracking every incident and understanding what happened when and which was cause and what the effect was. In order for that to happen, the software must register the incidents and must put date and time stamps on each comment, e-mail message, chat dialogue, or any other interaction. It must be simple for the client to log an incident and to follow the progress of that incident’s resolution. Both browsing and searching should be available. The incident should be “assign-able” to a group or person and prioritized in a method that is easily visible. Based on all of this, the software should automatically create incident work orders with trackable time spent by each person on the incident and history of what each person did.

2. Team Organization

Help Desk software should aid in the organization of teams. It should give you the ability to group support personnel in whatever way your company chooses. It should also allow you to assign permissions and accesses to each person according to his needs.

3. E-mail Automation

This seems to be an area that one would expect to see in all help desk software, but may not be as fully operational as you might want. It is fairly common for help desk software to convert incoming emails to incidents, but frequently there is only one email automation mode. A software that allows you to set the level of automation is the ideal. Registration of new users and blocking spam are also critical timesavers.

4. Service Level Management

Most help desk software has notification rules, but the most useful help desk software has customizable notification rules and incident escalations. The more customization that you can do, the more it will become part of the way your company works.

By comparing the functionality of these four features among the various help desk software packages, you will be able to begin to see the differences in how the various packages would work for you. It is important that the ASP Help Desk Software that you implement work in tandem with your processes and ideology and aid you in servicing your clients.