Web Help Desk Software: No Risks and Low Costs Help Desk
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009What is web help desk software?
Web help desk software is nuts and bolts your help desk agents need and the personalized help your clients desire–hosted on the web (Internet). That means the company from whom you get the software actually activates the software and hosts it so that it resides on a web server that your clients and agents can access at any time from any place.
There are over 400 different help desk softwares available. However, not all are web-hosted.
No Risk Help Desk Software
Web help desk software poses very little risk to your company.
- Rapid – one week or less – start-up
- Complete training
- Full supported with call-in or e-mail technical help
- Simple, but flexible and powerful structure
- Free trials are readily available, usually with all the help you need
Several features keep your costs for web help desk software low:
- No start-up costs
- No licensing fees
- No hardware to purchase, have installed, or get updated
- No software to purchase, install, or update
- Many have a “pay-per-seat” plan which is near $20 per seat
Here’s Help to Keep Your Sanity
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
Help Desk assistance for mouse problem
A phone call to a Help Desk
Caller: “Can you tell me how to control my mouse?”
Agent: “Place your hand over the mouse and put your thumb on one side with your index finger on the left button, your middle finger on the right button. Then move the mouse around.”
Caller: “It keeps slipping and the pointer on my screen just flies around.
Computer looking for printer call to help desk
Agent: Do you have it on a slick surface?”
Caller: “No, but I have its dust cover on. Should I take that off?”
Agent: “Yes, I believe the ‘dust cover’ is the plastic bag it was shipped in.”
Finding the printer
Another help desk rep at a computer manufacturer received a call. His computer had said it “couldn’t find the printer.”
The user had tried turning the computer screen to face the printer but his computer still “couldn’t see the printer.”
Cup Holder call to Help Desk
A phone call to a Help Desk
Caller: “Hello, is this Tech Support?”
Tech: “Yes, it is. How may I help you?”
Caller: “The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?”
Tech: “I’m sorry, but did you say cup holder?”
Caller: “Yes, the one attached to the front of my computer.”
Tech: “Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped, it’s because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotional or at a trade show?”
Caller: “It came with my computer. I don’t know anything about a promotional. It is automated. It comes out when you push the button.”
The Tech suddenly understood and had to put the caller on mute because he was laughing so hard. The caller had been using the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder and it had snapped off!
A phone call to a Help Desk
Caller: “Hi. I’m having trouble installing my software.”
Help Desk Call about Getting CDs into Computer
Tech: “What seems to be the problem?”
Caller: “I put in the first CD and that was okay. Then it said to put in the second CD. I had some problems. But when it said to put in the third CD, I could not get it in and get the drawer closed.”
Fortunately, when the tech explained, the caller was able to remove the first two CDs to put the third one in!
It’s Not Just Help Desk Software
Friday, June 26th, 2009
More and more companies are realizing that helping a customer when they have a problem is not enough. Help Desks and Help Desk Software most maximize every customer interaction by using creative and innovative ways of getting, keeping, and growing the company’s customers.
Research has shown that customers value a good experience even more than a good price! What can your company do to give your customers the feeling of a good experience and a good ongoing relationship?
Geoffrey Moore, a marketing expert and author, wrote that “failure to innovate equals failure to differentiate equals failure to garner profits and revenues.” Most company executives would agree . . . and then start looking for product innovations. But innovation must also apply to how, when, and where your company interacts with present and potential customers.
For example, if you can predict a certain customer is a high-growth customer, you can route that person to interact with a highly knowledgeable service rep. Or, if you know a certain customer is a high-value customer who also likes a certain degree of “do it yourself service” (also known as browsing in some industries), you will know not to interfere with that while letting the person know of the availability of a service rep when needed.
What is the payoff for your company? The ROI can be well over 100% in terms of reduction in marketing, lower acquisition and retention costs, and lower costs of equipment and staffing.
Where do you start to get this advantage? Start with data. You already have much data, but you probably don’t use it to help you in predictive ways. Today’s helpdesk software can gather data by the truckload but if you don’t connect the layers of data by applying analytics (add-ons usually available from the help desk software company) to that data, it is valueless. Instead of collecting only the usual name, address, household income, product information, add the layers of behavioral or attitudinal data such as when, where, and with whom an interaction took place ans what was communicated. In many cases these pieces of data are not recorded because they don’t fit the categories or spaces of a spreadsheet, but today’s help desk software and CRM software can accommodate this information.
By understanding the underlying behavior and attitude, you can predict which questions from potential customers will lead to a purchase decision. You can also predict which questions you ask in return will be most helpful in moving them along in their decision process. This helps them feel that you understand them and truly want to help them.
Identifying which factors contribute to the defection of high-value customers will allow your company to act long before a win-back offer is needed. This is critical for keeping customers and growing customers. Taking it a step further, you can grow many customers by using your predictive analytics to anticipate their needs and ask relevant questions or make timely offers.
Instead of using your help desk and help desk software to be reactive in solving problems, start thinking of ways to use it to be proactive and predictive to help you get and grow customers.
How Does Your Customer Support Software Measure Up?
Friday, June 19th, 2009I recently read that 42% of company executives say that their support operation budgets have been decreased in the past year while 38% say theirs have stayed the same. However, 78% said that their support call load has remained the same or increased. When you need to do more with fewer (or at least no increase in) people and a decrease in funding, where do you turn?
Any way that a customer can help himself makes him happy quicker. Enter the knowledge base that the customer can access. Just make sure that each solution and question has enough tags on it that it can easily be found. Self-service knowledge bases are the second most-offered support channel. Two-thirds of all companies offering customer support now have customer-accessible knowledge bases.
Web based tools offer flexibility and worldwide usability in diagnosing and fixing all types of problems. They greatly increase customer satisfaction because the problem is diagnosed and fixed all in one contact.
Social media and online forums are newer sources of help and support for customers. A company-sponsored forum is a better option that letting customers vent on other platforms. In this way the company representatives can become involved and can not only solve the problems but also find ways to prevent them in the future. Frequently these satisfied customers go to other social media and sing the praises of the company instead of slamming the company. [Don't be surprised at the way Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn will change the way companies do business and support their customers in the next few months. I signed up to follow several companies on Twitter today and have had a number of companies sign up to follow me in the last two weeks.]
If your company has service reps who answer phones, see how these numbers compare to yours:
* 35% of all companies with phone-based service reps had have a customer service rep threatened by an angry customer.
* 37% of phone reps take 5 to 15 seconds to answer; 20% take less than 5 seconds.
* About 25% of companies say their callers experience no hold time; 46% say their hold time is less than 1 minute; and 2% say their callers wait more than 5 minutes to talk to a rep. [Do you feel like you only call companies in the 2%?]
* 32% of companies claim an average call abandonment rate of less than 1% and 43% claim an average call abandonment rate of 1% to 5%.
Whether the customer solves the problem himself or the technician or customer service rep solves the problem, most of today’s problems take some type of tools other than the telephone for a true resolution. Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty join ease and quickness of solution as factors in using more web based customer support software. Most of these softwares include a wide array of tools and widgets for helping with a variety of problems – everything from screen-sharing to chat to remote diagnostics. Companies see a reduction in cost per solution and a reduction in the cost of IT staff. They also do not purchase in-house customer support software when they pay for only what they are using in a web based package.
This adds up to great savings to the company. And it equals greater customer satisfaction and quicker problem resolutions with less cost in time and money. In the process, customer services reps are more satisfied with their jobs and stay longer, costing the company less in turnover and training. This is a win-win-win!
Statistics taken from 2009 Service & Support Metrics Survey by SupportIndustry.com
Up Thoughts on Incident Tickets in Down Times
Monday, June 15th, 2009In this ‘down’ economic time, we need some ‘up’ thoughts. Funny that a movie called ‘Up’ would make its debut now! Anyway, incident or trouble tickets are not going to go “Up, Up and Away.” Therefore, we need to realize they are our friends and not our enemies.
When a customer files an incident ticket, it is a great thing for our company because it allows us to glean all types of information about that customer – name, address, e-mail, what they purchased, how they feel, what their income is, etc. How else would we get those pieces of information? We probably would not. So this is very positive.
An incident is not necessarily “trouble” – although it often is a problem, question, or complaint. Sometimes it is just a request for more information such as a user manual or how to do something that was not in the user manual (or they couldn’t read in the small print of the manual).
Once we get information from customers via an incident ticket, we can use that information to help them (and others like them) and better understand our markets. This will prepare us to emerge strong and focused as the economy turns around.
It is important to take advantage of all the information we have gathered now. Pull it back up, analyze it, figure out what people want and need, and then gear up to supply it.
This should make American companies much more customer-centric and better able to actually help people and supply products and services that are wanted and needed in the years to come. Now that’s an ‘up’ thought in a ‘down’ time.
Memorial Day: Remembering our Veterans – The Originators of Customer Service
Monday, May 25th, 2009Today is officially Memorial Day and I can’t think of a more fitting way to remember our veterans than that of thanking them for leading the way in true customer service. We often think of their service to their country, but what does that really mean? What is ‘their country’? It is the people of their country – their families and friends and those they didn’t know that lived at the time they served and it is all of those peoples’ descendants. In a sense we are the customers they served! Now that is the ultimate in customer service! We salute you, veterans!
This makes me think that they really understood customer service and customer relationships. Going back to World War II, we know that many of those who served left family businesses or community businesses. Those businesses often served people who lived within a few miles – people who personally knew everyone who worked for that business. They saw each other at the grocery store, the hardware store, and the gas station as well as at church and the restaurant. If someone was dissatisfied with service at one business or another, the whole community knew about it. Talk about satisfied customers!
Perhaps that’s why the saying ‘the customer is always right’ became a mantra in the world of small business. It was the only way to satisfy the customer, retain loyal customers, and advance your business.
Our ancestors would be appalled to think that we now have ‘call centers’ for customer service. And they certainly would not understand the standard recording: “Thank you for calling. We’re sorry, but all lines are currently busy. Your call is important to us. Please hold, and our next available representative will be with you shortly.” To them, someone would personally answer each and every call (which were few and far between) and assist the caller right then.
What if those same ancestors had not answered the call to defend our country and our freedoms immediately – leaving homes and families to serve overseas as long as it took to get the job done? What if they had said, “I’m sorry but I’m busy putting together my life plan/going to college/marrying my sweetheart/helping my dad in his business, but I’ll see what I can do to help out as soon as I’m not so busy.” I hate to think where we would be or how different our lives would be.
Their customer service was immediate and effective. They clearly understood the problem and they acted to effectively solve it as quickly as possible. That is the essence of customer service.
They knew the expectations of their customers and they proved reliable in meeting those expectations. Fixing the problems in the US – or living their lives right now – simply weren’t as important as fixing the problems threatening the US – and their futures. I wonder if seeing customer service in this way would help us focus our corporate attention better. I know it would make our companies customer-centric.
If we thought that having any business next week depended on how we solve our customer’s problems today, would we be more attentive? What would we say differently? How much harder would we try to do the right thing right now?
Did our parents and grandparents see the cost of equipping and sending the soldiers to fight for our freedoms as a cost too great to bear? No, they saw it as a necessary investment. Which says something about how we should see the technology investments we make to support our customer service call centers. If we do not give our agents and managers the right equipment to handle the call volume and find answers quickly, they have a right to be dissatisfied. The right technology improves both efficiency and effectiveness.
The examples our parents and grandparents set for us really deserve our spending the day contemplating. And, yes, they should make us also contemplate how we can re-form our customer service to truly serve our customers which will in turn make our companies stronger for a longer period of time.
The New Role of IT in Business
Saturday, April 25th, 2009In the past several years, IT-led teams have found numerous new ways to streamline business processes in order to improve operating efficiency and reduce costs. Now corporate leaders are expounding a new role for IT: enabling revenue generation for the business.
Through the use of the right performance metrics, IT capabilities can be structured to support both revenue generation and cost reduction. A flexible structure called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will be the basis.
What does this mean and how can it happen? There are five primary areas in which IT will become indispensable.
- Customer Relationships
- Technology will enhance the customer experience
- Technology will boost the number of dollars spent by customers
- Customer Knowledge
- Technology will enable the company to understand who their customers are
- Technology will track the needs and desires of the potential customers
- Product Development
- Technology will improve product development by decreasing time spent
- Technology will aid in the origination of new product or service ideas
- Product and Service Sales
- Technology will facilitate the launch of new products and services
- Technology will become part of the means of advertising and selling through new channels
- Partner Development
- Technology will help identify possible partnerships to enhance products or services or the delivery of products or services
- Technology will be the means of enabling those partnerships
Many companies are still structured with an IT team as totally separate from other teams such as the product development team or sales team. In the future, successful and growing companies will integrate IT staff within each business unit. And company executives will need to work closely with the IT team if revenue generation and cost cutting are to occur.
One of the biggest changes in the IT team in the future will be in the personnel. Many company executives feel it is important to have senior IT managers who have both business and IT experience. Further, they want the majority of their IT employees to have previous experience in business functions as well as IT. In turn, this could elevate the CIO to a Board position.
IT success will be measured most frequently by looking at its contribution to revenue growth. However, in today’s changing markets, another major test of IT’s success will have to do with its ability to help the company become agile in adapting to changing needs. And, as always, in order to realize profits, or greater profits, the company must measure its IT’s success through cost reduction.
Choosing IT Help Desk Software – Least Expensive vs. Most Effective
Saturday, April 18th, 2009Choosing the correct IT Help Desk Software for your company is more than choosing the least expensive IT Help Desk Software. It is even more than balancing the value of the software with its cost. In fact, obtaining the right IT Help Desk Software is a function of aligning the business objectives with the IT investment and implementation. The idea is to implement software that assists the organization in obtaining optimum performance as measured by business outcomes.
Help Desk excellence for a company focused on customer relationships means that the IT Help Desk Software must be able to partner with each unit of the company in order to deliver value and help to customers. While the customer feels it is only the help desk personnel with whom they interact, there must be a means for Help Desk agents to interact with people in all areas of the company to truly solve the issues presented by the customers.
There are lots of good Help Desk software packages available. However, finding one that fits your company’s model and goals is more important than finding one that is inexpensive. The software must fit with the staffing. It must enable the staff to field and answer the customers’ issues in the most efficient yet complete method.
Because Help Desks serve a variety of functions from one company to another and even within large corporations, the Help Desk software must have capabilities that support the functions for which it will be used. In most cases the software will support a live help desk staffed by agents who give answers and advice in real time. A well-indexed knowledge base is a key to quick and efficient support of a live help desk. In many instances there will be an expectation that the customer or other personnel within the company will access the software to attempt to answer questions or solve problems on their own, so there must be an easily understood interface.
If the main function of the IT software for your Help Desk is to generate a help ticket for a technician, the categories and questions on the help ticket must be coordinated among technicians, IT support personnel, and customers. Simply asking standard questions of name, address, and problem encountered often does not give the technician enough information. In many instances, the wrong type of technician could be sent to the customer’s location or the technician would take the wrong parts or tools. Choosing the correct questions and the best software entails in-depth discussions with technicians and former customers to better understand what kinds of questions should be asked and what type of information is critical to a good outcome for the customer.
If the IT Help Desk Software cannot be customized for your company’s needs, it probably will only serve their needs for a short time and you will be looking for new software within five years as your products and your customers evolve. Inexpensive, out-of-the-box software will serve your needs initially, but cannot be changed in the little ways you will need every few months or the bigger ways you will need in a couple of years. Therefore, effective IT Help Desk Software is far more valuable that inexpensive IT Help Desk Software.
Choosing the Best Help Desk Software
Sunday, April 12th, 2009In many of the trade shows and international conferences that I have attended, I am often asked, “What in your opinion is the best IT Help Desk Software?”
My response is always, “The best for whom, or what?” I am also often asked, “What features do I look for in the perfect IT Help Desk Software?”
Again, my response is the same.
First you have to evaluate what you are trying to accomplish. An IT Help Desk for a Fortune 500 company with 10,000 employees and a large IT department is obviously entirely different than one for an IT Help Desk that serves 150 end user customers, and a help desk of 10 agents. Those same agents most likely are also looking after the needs of 25-50 employees within the same company.
Instead of looking for IT Help Desk Software that does “everything” you could ever imagine, evaluate your needs and utilize something that fits you more appropriately. Of course, you have to consider that you’ll want something that you can grow with, but like most CRM Software packages that have evolved over the years, you will probably only use 50-60% of whatever you acquire.
Great customer service is rarely rewarded, but bad customer service pays a huge price. A great IT Help Desk should be a part of the marketing department of any great company. After all, great customer service leads to future customers (and retains the current ones).
Consider the following:
You want a package that allows you to easily:
1. Customize to your company (and customer’s) needs
2. Look up customer’s information and see current and past tickets.
3. Communicate with fellow employees as well as clients.
Also ask the following type questions during the evaluation process:
1. Was the staff attentive and easy to reach during the evaluation process?
2. Has the company in question been producing software for several years?
3. How much automation is available to assist your Help Desk Agents?
4. Is there a knowledge base or history available to allow new users to shorten their learning curve?
A great IT Help Desk is like a CAT Scan. It is supposed to find and correct problems before they get worse.
It can also create good will within any organization to feed information to other team members so that they can head off problems before they arise, or allow the members to repair problems that have taken place.
Also make sure the system has a rules engine that can automatically initiate a Customer Satisfaction Analysis Survey.
Great IT Help Desk Software contains a way to carry out Customer Satisfaction Surveys. That result can then assess the client’s perception of how well your services meet their needs. It can measure the processes and methods to give management feedback on how well you are doing as a trusted IT vendor.
Last but not least, after you have created a feature and performance matrix of your needs, test the application in a real environment for at least 30 days to insure it meets your needs.
Optimize Your IT Solutions
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009IT (Information Technology) can serve as a catalyst for business transformation. An IT system can enable employees, customers, and partners to work together to consistently deliver customer value. It should support business processes and information needs.
However, the IT system must be flexible so that it can quickly respond to changing customer needs and business challenges. This type of IT system must be designed so that various pieces can be changed without changing the overall feel and experience of interfacing with the IT. The customers, employees and partners must always feel that the interface is enhanced or simpler – or even intuitive – rather than more complex and frustrating.
This means constantly evaluation and upgrading all or part of your IT system. Because changing the entire IT system is very costly and time consuming and because there often is no single IT system that aligns perfectly with the processes and goals of a company, more and more companies are looking to implement pieces and parts of various systems. While this sounds like a good idea, it often turns into a nightmare. The various pieces and parts have differing platforms, differing interfaces, and no way to interface with each other. It may even be that the companies that sold and installed these various pieces promised they would ‘work together.’ But now you are not sure what was meant by that.
Let’s look at a common example: a customer orders a product. The order desk software logs all kinds of information about the customer. The product is shipped.
A few weeks later, the same customer calls to ask a question about operating the product. The help desk person, however, has no access to the order desk information – or the online order information – and must ask the customer much of the same information as well as critical information about the product in order to determine which product engineer should handle the call. (The customer finds this frustrating and wasteful of his time.)
The call is then transferred to the product engineer who must ask many of the same questions again because he cannot access the information from the order desk software or the help desk software. He may then have to log onto a separate computer or computer system to access information about the product to answer the question.
Is this the experience you want your customers to have? How many hours should they waste giving their name and address over and over, waiting on ‘hold’ and then repeating their explanation and question?
Yet it is difficult to build an IT system that works seamlessly from one part of the company to another, that interfaces flawlessly with the other pieces. Only when you start looking at modular IT systems can you begin to build this type of performance.
Modular IT systems allow your company to constantly evolve to respond to changing needs. They provide upgrades to your existing system. They allow you to have the savings of only changing the part that needs changing at the time it needs changing – and in the way it needs changing. If purchased to do so, they work from the same platform and interface with each other seamlessly. This gives you lower IT costs while optimizing all aspects of your IT system.