Automate customer service and support processes

When your company communicates with your clients and customers the process can involve many different people within both organizations and using a variety of different methods. To ensure that your company can provide the best customer support experience possible, the utilization of online service desk software should be considered.

Typical service desk software will allow you to track and organize collaboration with its current and prospective customers. The software allows your agents to store information about customers and their requests then can be accessed over the web by staff in different departments within your organization.

Scopedesk is designed to help streamline customer service and support. It’s an accessible, fast way for customers to get helpful support based on their individual questions and concerns. The objective is to provide a robust and easy-to-use web help desk application that helps organizations automate their customer service and support processes to deliver consistent, reliable and superior service to both internal and external customers.

Scopedesk can provide users with access to tutorials on frequently asked questions. With this feature, you can make customer service self-serve, while providing customers with the information they need to troubleshoot technical issues. As a business owner, you can reduce costs because you'll spend less time having your customer service team take on the same technical questions. With each new change or release in your product, service or internal procedures, update your archives to ensure your online help desk software contains the most recent information.

Help Desk Planning and Deploying

To set up a help desk and customer support system that reflects your service and support structure, you need a good understanding of that structure and help desk processes.

Information Recording and Tracking

• What information do you want to record and track for each issue and help desk ticket?
• Do you manage and co-ordinate issues and requests into a ticket queues? HelpDeskSAAS allows you to define multiple ticket queues and record issues into queues based on different criteria.
• How do you categorize issues?
• Do you want to provide different views of the issue data?

For example, do you want a summary view optimized for fast logging issues and categorizing problems, and a detailed view for recording things such as how the issue was resolved?

Workflow and business rules

• What is your help desk process?
• Can you represent the path of an issue through the process as a sequence of steps, or decisions, such as New, Working, Waiting, and Solved?
• Who should have permission to make each decision? Who will be responsible for carrying out each step in the process?
• Do you need e-mail notifications to enforce ownership and accountability when ticket are submitted or solved and who needs to be alerted? What kind of data notification message should contain?

Roles and responsibilities

• What are the different roles and responsibilities of your help desk staff (such as help desk analysts and group leaders)?
• Can you divide customers and their users into groups?
• Do different groups have different requirements for the system? Do you need to restrict access to the system based on specific preferences of your clients and their clients?

For example, you probably want to give them only limited access to the system so they can submit new ticket and track their status. Help desk staff, on the other hand, will require greater access to the system.

Customer support systems for beginners

Effective online customer support and service has become a strategic business imperative. Whether a company is in manufacturing or in services, what is increasingly making a competitive difference is the customer support and service that is built into and around the product, rather than just the quality of the product.

There is no small organization or large corporate network remaining in business for longer without an adequate customer support service. Many firms have realized, as their marketplaces have become more global and service oriented, that customer support is critical to their competitiveness.

Customer support software and help desk software are useful aids to manage communications with both actual customers and potential clients. A typical help desk software package often includes a convenient way to record issues received by phone and by email, as well as those submitted via support ticket system.

Help desk software also contributes to enhance interaction between staff and customers that usually comprises knowledge and problem management, workflow, and data analysis. Detailed reports and analytic are basic to tackle effectively all those issues handled by the help desk software on a daily basis, but the software itself contributes also to develop teamwork efficiently.

Doing a research on a comparative basis among the different web-based customer support solutions available in the market will find that many of them are compatible with the traditional office software that is already in use, including Microsoft Outlook, Word, or Excel. This characteristic allows a seamless integration of new help desk software into traditional software applications, making easier updating contacts, sharing task, events, and bits of information already recorded elsewhere.

Just by adding customer support software or online help desk software to business, is adding value to the products and services, promoting tacitly trustworthy and customers' confidence. Web-based help desk software improves productivity of the business and efficiency of workers, increasing also customer satisfaction and improving communication and troubleshooting. The Internet has literally deleted geographical frontiers.

The implementation of online help desk software is an excellent strategy for any business, reducing the need of toll-free hotlines, and saving money in long distance calls between offices, or those calls placed from customers located abroad.

Online customer support software is also a convenient way to obtain feedback from customers. Afterwards, the information obtained can be added to the help desk software database for further analysis and improvement of your business affairs.

Support tickets classification

In most service desk systems, support ticket classification exists primarily to classify tickets and issues in order to provide initial support. Initial support means proper analysis, evaluation and assignment.The issues behind the actual classification itself may experience problems in a typical help desk workflow. Typical classification schemes are often too complicated, or there are too many classifications that when you make your report, none of them are significant. Eventually, the number one categorization becomes "other," and the classification actually drops.

Help desk needs a scheme that works, and the first question that needs to be answered is: what you are really trying to accomplish with the classification and how do you plan to use this data?

Many help desk organizations use a simple Category / Type classification. The problem here and in any other classification is that technical staff do not perform classification and initial support, but relatively non-technical service desk agents and contact persons.

The initial classification does not need to establish root case or predict technical resolutions but rather to enable initial support. Support ticket classification and categorization necessarily becomes more refined as the ticket progresses and more is learned via the investigation or diagnosis activities.

When a ticket is initially recorded, the best that the analyst can typically do is to identify the service. In a further ticket processing, there should be an additional classification tag where the root cause can be documented and subsequently recorded and reported.

Using this approach, Scopedesk - Help Desk Software-as-a-Service has established a support ticket Tags feature, which allow to record classification for initial support, as well as additional classification that determine the root cause. Both classification tags can be added to support ticket in any ticket state, and can be used for help desk reporting purposes.

HelpDeskSAAS Released Version 3.0 With New Design

What's New in the HelpDeskSAAS?

New features for chart & report creation, enhanced knowledgebase article editing, four different layout design schemes, and much more.

On May 01, 2011, HelpDeskSAAS introduced Release 3 of its product line. Help Desk SAAS Software Version 3.0 provides important updates for chart and report creation, numerous data mapping enhancements, new features for knowledge base editing, almost totally new layout design, support for the latest versions of major browsers, much more!

You can access the new release using your current login credentials and learn more about HelpDeskSAAS. Visit the HelpDeskSAAS signup page to register for free 15 day Premium plan trial.