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Help Desk Software for Better Customer-support Service

admin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 12:58:15 +0000

Help Desk Software for Better Customer-support Service

If you are the owner of one or more websites, you know how important it is to keep in touch with your visitors and quickly respond their questions. If you have an electronic commerce business, you are surely very careful with your clients’ needs and try to satisfy their demands in a very short time. In order to keep your customers satisfied, you need a professional and efficient customer support service, to keep track of your client’s requests and solve them in due time.

The first step is to have adequate software. You need good help desk software that manages your clients’ demands, comments and questions. The second step is to have a well-trained staff that knows how to use web based help desk software efficiently, to generate immediate response to the customers’ problems. You may wonder how web based help desk software works or how it could help your business become more profitable.

Customers are becoming more and more demanding and it is not enough to thank them in a message for their interest. You need to prove them that you have fully understood their problem, thought about it carefully and are now able to provide them with detailed suggestions for solving it. Help desk software enables customers to create tickets through an online form or email, in order to help you keep track of the history of a request: when it was created and when it was answered. There are also other facilities, such as automatic e-mail notification (which means that all operators receive notice when a new customer inquiry arrives), a searchable base and reports analyzer (to help the operators offer direct solutions to raised issues).

With the help of new help desk software, you will be able to react in due time to your customers’ problems and give them immediate feedback. Customers will surely appreciate your concern and professionalism. You can now organize your customer support and avoid embarrassing situations, such as the one in which two members of the team have answered the same client, concerning the same problem. This situation is unpleasant because it makes the company look unprofessional.

Web based help desk software circumvents such situations by requiring the operators to claim an ownership over a ticket before answering a client. You will be able to see every e-mail’s message history, including the operator responsible for it and the current state of the message (responded or not). Other important information such as the client’s name, reason of inquiry and date will appear displayed when talking to a client, so that it is easier for an operator to solve the problem.

If you have seen the advantages that help desk software can offer you and you would like to try it, we offer you an affordable and reliable version of web based help desk software. You must not forget that a close connection with the clients is the key to successful businesses. The more you know about your clients’ needs and the complaints that they have the better you will know what to offer them.

When you have a problem, you expect it to meet its solution as quickly as possible. Is this right? Your clients surely feel the same way. Of course, it would be better to encounter no problems at all, but nobody can ask the impossible. However, a prompt and efficacious response from your company will make a very favorable impression among the customers. This is where the utility of help desk software makes its point. If you have an electronic commerce business, you probably get every day many inquiries from your customers, asking for information, or complaining about something. To maintain a good image of your company, it is important to answer these inquiries promptly and efficiently.

Z-Index Technologies Pvt. Ltd.| Hardware and Software Support

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:10:01 +0000

Hardware & Software Support

Level 1 and Level 2 help desk engineers State of the art contact center technology infrastructure Multi-channel delivery capabilities that include voice, e-mail, chat Chat Capability with live collaboration & Remote assistance –

Managed Desktop Services (MDS) is a predictable, cost-contained approach to fully managing your complex desktop support requirements without costly IT personnel or infrastructure investments. MDS provides remote problem resolution to your end users via our corporate service desk, diagnostic triage in situations that require it, and onsite support and repair to users in your or your customers’ corporate, remote, and home office environments as needed.

Our Managed Desktop Service approach is an opportunity to provide a total business solution for your small to medium size business customers. Managed Desktop Service (MDS) provides comprehensive support to businesses that do not have or cannot afford an IT department. As a total package or as components, resellers and outsourcers to augment direct sales revenue may sell MDS.

Managed Desktop Service (MDS) provides comprehensive support to businesses that do not have or cannot afford an IT department. Our MDS capability will help you cost effectively maximize the availability and performance of selected third-party equipment and assist in deployments of new or refreshed IT resources – to reduce your capital and infrastructure costs, and simplify your business processes.

If you want above mentioned kind of services please contact us at,

A/104, Hari Krishna Dham CHS., Pleasant Park, Mira – Bhayandar Road, Mira Road (E), Mumbai 401107, Maharashtra, India. info@z-index.in/service@z-index.inwww.z-index.in

Z-Index Technologies Ltd.| Hardware / Software Support

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:12:27 +0000

Z-Index Technologies Pvt. Ltd.| Hardware and Software Support|Support|Hardware

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:02:51 +0000

Z-Index Technologies Pvt. Ltd.| Hardware and Software Support|Hardware|Web Development

admin — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:03:11 +0000

Service Management Software – The Challenges

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:06:56 +0000

One of the challenges in implementing ITIL in established organisations is that they already have processes and procedures in place for the business. A new company or division of a company however is in a position to determine the services required from IT, agree service levels with the business and then implement them.
Even though some established organisations have Service Level Agreements in place, ITIL can give suggestions and guidelines to enhance the service provided.
Many organisations have processes in place – many of these having evolved from verbal to paper to system based agreements.
Often implementing a service management software system can be the opportunity to review those processes and put improvements in place based on ITIL. Sometimes it may be as simple as sticking with the process that is working and automating parts of it.
If you are coming from a paper-based system, one of the huge advantages you get immediately from putting in a service desk software tool is that you will get some level of automation. How quickly you can implement and make process gains depends on how easily configured the system is. You need to be able to change rules and change work flows easily depending on feedback from the business.
A flexible system is far easier to automate. The key to good management of a help desk solution is to be able to choose your processes and workflows that are repetitive, automate them and free up your resources for more skilled work. Successful automation allows you to restructure your resources so that you can place lower skilled resources on the front line that pass issues that cannot be resolved quickly to more skilled people.
The first challenge is to define what services you will provide. This is the same whether it is an internal business unit or external customers. Understanding what is needed to provide that service then naturally flows. For example, how many resources are needed? If there are problems or the service needs to be changed, how will I respond?
Once services are defined, service level agreements (SLA) must be established and these set expectations. For many customers, the SLA is often “yesterday or as soon as possible”. The challenge for IT is in understanding all the parts needed to provide that service. What is often overlooked is the flow on agreements that must be in place. You need to understand who are your partners and suppliers that are involved in the service chain and how will they meet your requirements before agreeing to any SLA with the business.
Agreeing service levels without knowing all the facts to deliver a service is a recipe for failure, but unfortunately this is all too common.
For example, if you are providing an email service, supported by an email server. In the event of server failure, your agreement with your supplier is to fix or replace within 24 hours. However, if your customer needs their email back within 1 hour, there is a high likelihood that you will be 23 hours outside of your SLA. In this case, other resources must be considered, such as a backup email server. With the additional server, the cost to provide your email service must increase – based on your customer requirement. The decision then is placed back on your customer with the facts of providing the service. Traditionally, your customers might have had the view that “it just needs to be working” and disregard the cost to deliver the service.
This puts the focus and onus back onto the business: “if I want this, then I have to pay this much for it”. Traditionally, business/customers say “but this should just happen, I’m the customer and it just needs to work”. But they’re not looking at how much they are paying for that service. ITIL best practice highlights the need to get the facts before making any commitments.
Communication between IT and your customers is vital. Merely looking at the business / IT interfaces without going back through the components of the service chain is not good practice. Today, as businesses evolve and more stringent needs are required, process reviews are taking place and agreements renegotiated with customers.

Service Management Software E3 Benefits To Mapping Your Business Processes

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:26:09 +0000

Service Management Software ? 3 Benefits To Mapping Your Business Processes

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:12:50 +0000

Implementing a service management software tool, getting the facts over time primarily will give you an excellent ITIL service desk implementation. Tracking and resolving incidents is one of the major goals of a service desk software solution. However, what you measure, the way you measure, the reports you create and how you interpret the results can bring you help desk best practice.

The first priority is to map out your business processes from an incident being reported – where it goes to, who it goes to, what do they do and then the various paths that are taken depending on the incident and what happens after that. The companies with best practices have a lot of up to date documentation available whereas others without the documentation still know what to do with an incident once it is logged. However, does this make the best use of the available information? Are there other opportunities to get more value from the investment made in people and technology?

It is very possible that well thought out business processes will help develop staff measurement indicators, create real time, in depth dashboard reporting that give the immediate facts and help make business decisions and respond to critical situations with clear escalation procedures.

Staff MeasurementPerformance measurement is fundamental to getting best practice. Often, incident resolution is achieved quickly, but with the help of many of your staff. How do you measure the value each staff member contributes? For example, if you were running statistics on closure rates, the person who opens and closes the incident might get all the closure rates, but the resolution might have actually come from other people. You need to look at how the system is tracking who has worked on what and which piece of data you’re going to report on. Knowing this gives you a much clearer way of understanding how well your staff are performing.

Dashboard ReportingDashboard reporting is a growing trend as companies want to understand in real time how they are progressing against their performance benchmarks. Today’s systems allow you to develop graphs and drill down to see what are the underlying records immediately. Dashboards can be made available to service staff, call centre managers and business unit management. For example, a graph can show the currently logged, active or waiting incidents. Everyone in the service value chain can quickly make decisions based on live data, although the view can be different depending on responsibilities.

This capability is very important because the team leader will want to see their team’s current workload and they might have to adjust that workload for each person. People on the front line might have a different view as well, depending on your process. You may have a closed loop process where an incident comes into a customer service representative person, is resolved by many, but comes back to same representative to deal with the customer. The customer service rep needs to see whether service levels may be breached and will have a graph or an alert so that escalation procedures need to be invoked, priorities changed.

Escalation ProceduresPart of managing your service levels is to have escalation procedures in place. Many service desk software systems have these in built and customer service staff and management follow these procedures based on alerts. These alerts are different for various organisation levels. For example, your dashboard should give you the first idea of the progress of incident resolution. However, if a service level may be breached, a customer service representative might be alerted, if it continues an automatic notification goes to customer service management and then possibly to the business.

Often, a customer service representative waits for the customer to provide additional information to resolve an incident. For example, if a screen shot of an error has been requested and the customer does not respond, then having the ability to “stop the clock” until the information is received gives a more correct indication of how quickly the incident is being resolved. It also allows service desk staff to escalate to the business when the required information has not been given.

To get the best return on your service management software, mapping your business processes so that they are well defined and understood will give you the best chance of achieving best practice. While customer satisfaction with fast and accurate incident resolution is the goal, your business processes will help you better define staff measurement, dashboard reporting for great customer communication and escalation procedures to deal with potential service level breaches quickly and decisively.

Service Management Software ? Defining Your Service Levels

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:04:49 +0000

To effectively implement service management software and ITIL service desk, communication between IT and its customers is vital. Merely looking at the business / IT interfaces without going back through the components of the service chain (agreements with Suppliers and other departments that support the services) is not good practice. Today, as businesses evolve and more stringent needs are required, process reviews are taking place and agreements renegotiated with customers.

Defining services to be delivered is the first step to successfully implementing your ITIL service desk.

Large outsourcing managed services companies are very good at defining their services, the time and cost involved. They run it as a business. IT departments often don’t see themselves as a business, just as another part of the company. This is especially true in small to medium size companies.

Setting up IT as a cost centre often changes attitudes and brings focus to defining requirements and meet objectives. However, an IT department often has more leeway with fewer penalties involved. Outsourced managed services with fee paying clients, must get it right. Often financial penalties are a key driver.

A help desk service level agreement (SLA) between the business and the service desk software provider sets the framework by which incidents and support requests are resolved. Today, with the quality of the service management software tools available, there is a good opportunity to define and track SLAs. Due to “out of the box” tools most organisations will have some form of SLA with their customers.

Organisations that are new to measurement will begin with basic “soft” targets to develop a baseline. It is quite common that IT will not publish these targets to the business until they understand what is required to meet the SLAs. It does depend on the maturity of the reporting and processes within IT. Neither IT nor the business will know if the SLAs can be met until reports have been run over a period of time. Over the course of 6 months to a year, with good tracking data, more realistic measurements can be put in place. It does provide a basis for constructive discussion based on facts between the business and IT.

This in fact is a good strategy whether you are an IT cost centre or IT with targets to meet. To agree with the business on SLAs will be difficult if you have not measured previously. If you are a cost centre and have not been measuring your incidents and problem resolution you have no basis on what you can actually provide. This can only be proven through actual measurement results so that action can be taken. For example, it can also be an opportunity for IT to justify additional resources or up skill current resources with the right knowledge to meet the business requirements.

Negotiations between business and IT need real facts. It is of little value for the business to complain about IT not meeting SLAs if the business is not paying enough for resources. Tracking the issues that have been or are being dealt with and how long it is taking to resolve is a basic starting point.

Implementing a service management software tool, getting the facts over time will enable you to implement ITIL service desk and help desk best practice.

Improving Productivity: Sharing Desks, Offices, Conference Rooms, and Parking Spaces

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 21:16:51 +0000

Hot desking or office hoteling as most people may call it is a way of transforming individual workspace into shared workspace so that optimum utilization of resources is achieved. The corporate scenario is pretty grim these days. With the shadow of recession looming over their heads, most companies are looking for ways to trim their operating costs. One way that has proved effective is the use of service desk software.

They are facing new desk hot challenges everyday that threaten to tamper not just their profit margins but also the quality of life of their employees at both work and at home. Real estate prices are climbing steadily especially in prime areas like California and New York. As real estate costs continue to cripple small and big companies alike, everyone is now resorting to hot desking. So, what exactly does the hot desk software do and how can it help you?

The concept of hot desking can be described as a way of using a fixed set of desks or cubicles in a way that greater number of workers can use it. These workers would include those who come to the office from time to time but do not require a fixed space everyday. These workers also do not have any fixed timings for visiting office and come as often as required. Hot desk software allows these workers and everyone working in that company to book the required desks ahead of time.

After all, ‘the show up and hope that you get an empty desk’ approach cannot work all the time. Clearly, hot desk software is the answer to this perpetual tussle for finding work desk. Using a web based help desk ensures that everyone gets the desired desk as and when required. However, desk booking is not the only thing that the hot desk software does for you. It allows you to book conference rooms and parking spaces with equal ease – all at the click of a mouse!

The hot desk software not only provides quick access to these spaces, but also allows you to forecast how much space you would require if you had to increase a workforce due to increasing projects and clients or following an acquisition. These helpdesk software also enables you to reduce your company’s carbon footprint and thus minimizes the environmental impact.

Hot desk software allows users to log in through a touch screen or the Internet and view the facilities and floor plans that you are permitted to use. You can book a space immediately if it’s empty or place a request for it so that it is assigned to you the moment it becomes free. So, leverage the power of hot desk software to make office space planning a hassle free ordeal.