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Time-critical Help Desk issues

Help Desk Software dealing with time-critical issues.

When a customer calls into your company for product support, they are generally in need of an immediate solution. Sometimes, even, their very jobs are on the line. If they're using your product to provide key services for their own business, they may be losing money by not being able to use your product as expected.

You need to insure you have the proper mechanisms in place to provide time-critical support for your customers. Your Help Desk Software needs to handle time-critical issue resolution as well.

One good way of managing time-critical issues is to assign a severity or priority to each issue. Different organizations use different methodologies, but in general a "Severity A" or "Priority 1" issue would be an issue with the highest level of attention and most critical. You'd then have a tier of lower severities for issues that may still be time critical but not as intensely so as the highest priority issues.

Your Help Desk solution needs to be able to handle issues with various priorities. You also need to establish policies relating to each criticality category. For example, a "Priority 1" issue may mean that the support professional (or even software or hardware engineer) will work on that issue exclusively until it's resolved. However, these staff members will still work a "normal" day, go home at their regular time, come back in the next day and continue working on the issue.

You may choose, based on your customer's needs and the importance of your product to their doing business, to make a "Priority 1" issue even more important. For example, in such a situation, both your support professionals and the customer party will work on the issue round-the-clock, 24x7, until the issue is resolved.

Your Help Desk Software needs to be able to allow you to manage these situations. You will want to document the processes undertaken to solve critical issues. For one, you don't want different support staff members trying the same solutions over and over. If one professional hands over the critical issue to another professional then that new issue owner needs to be able to see what has already been tried.

Likewise, you need to be able to track time-to-resolution for your own staffing and planning purposes. If you find that you're unable to resolve high priority issues in a timely fashion, then maybe you need to reconsider your staff structure and deal with staffing accordingly. A good Help Desk solution will provide you with the means of viewing these statistics and allow you to plan for a more robust product support service and faster resolution times.

Time to resolution is a critical factor in customer support satisfaction. Ensuring your Help Desk solution allows you to properly manage and report on crucial issues will go a long way to providing exceptional customer service.