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Choosing the Right Help Desk Software

Things to consider when evaluating a Help Desk Software solution for your business and products.

Choosing the right Help Desk Software is a very important decision. Choosing the wrong solution can lead to additional problems for you and your staff, frustrated customers, and even loss of potential sales. You want to make sure whatever solution you choose meets your current and future needs.

The primary features you're going to want to look for in any helpdesk solution are issue identification and tracking, solution searching, communications, and collaboration.

Issue tracking includes what kind of information you keep about the customer with the problem, how you identify the problem within the helpdesk system, how you denote problem solution stages and how you manage the resolution.

Ideally, your Help Desk Software will allow you to keep information about the customer in such a way that you can easily search for issues related to a specific customer. You can find any open/unresolved issues for a customer, resolved issues, how long each issue has been open, etc. simply by how the Help Desk Software tracks this information.

Your helpdesk tickets will likely fall into specific categories. If you're product requires a username and password (such as a web-based solution might offer), then you may wish to create one category labeled "Lost Usernames" and another labeled "Lost Passwords" to track these.

Issues don't remain in one stage from start to finish. You need a way to identify issue ticket stages. An issue may be "Pending Research", "Contacted Customer Awaiting Reply", "Resolved", or "Closed."

An important aspect of issue resolution is the ability for you to search your current solution-base for answers to commonly-asked or already solved similar solutions. Rather than wasting time solving an issue someone else at your company has already solved, you need to be able to intelligently search the current open and closed tickets in your Help Desk Software's ticket archives to find solved issues and apply them to the current ticket.

Your Help Desk Software solution should contain integrated communication tools. Such tools can be as fancy as an integrated phone or even video conferencing system for customer contact to something as simple as emailing a message at the click of a button.

Steer clear of any helpdesk solution that requires you to copy information from the ticket and paste it into a separate email. Email integration should be fairly basic for any decent Help Desk Software.

A good helpdesk solution also needs to provide a means for one or more support professionals to collaborate on solutions. There should be some means for one person to document information in an issue and pass the ticket or a reference to the ticket along to another person for assistance and insight.

When evaluating a Help Desk Software solution for your business, you should make sure the Help Desk Software provides for your minimum helpdesk needs. Primary considerations should be issue identification and tracking, the ability to store and search for solutions within the helpdesk system's data store, means of communicating with your customers, and how well the helpdesk solution allows your support professionals to work together.