Today’s generation thrives on the assimilation of computer technology largely because it makes people’s lives easier, providing a pathway for fast and efficient work. Every facet of life seems to be affected by technology’s rapid ascension. Thus, it is no surprise that technology completely changed the nature of consumerism.

One important aspect of people as consumers is the way they react to a certain product or service. Almost any big company knows that consumer opinion and client concerns are paramount considerations and should be taken with utmost consideration. In this regard, customer support is the foundation of each company’s success.

This is where helpdesk hotlines and forums take the spotlight. They help companies gather what are called ‘tickets’ which are sent by people who used their product or services that contain specific concerns or feedback.

For a person with experience in this field, the job proves to be laborious and challenging. The job actually includes taking note of personal details of the person with concerns and listening to them for up to hours each day. Often times, these tickets come so frequently that may become disorganized and hard to manage. For upcoming companies who are new to this consumer angle, it can be extremely tedious and may result in aggravation that could have been prevented.

Thanks to computer technology, the big burden of customer support can be moderated. Help desk software takes a huge chunk off the helpdesk managers and employees stressful workload because of its integrated design. Help desk or service desk software works to automate the service management and support function of business establishments. There is a number of service and support solutions available that offer rich and robust functionality for optimizing the help desk management process.

This automated system can provide professional wonders to companies, especially in terms of the ever important customer service. Here are the major reasons why companies should reap the benefits of having help desk software:

Tickets are Organized and Accessible

Help desk software’s primary role in customer support is to make tickets organized and accessible. Since tickets actually come frequently, the tendency of manual customer support systems is to be disorganized. Especially with the number of tickets coming every day, this can be tiresome to manually handle. Help desk software enables customer support agents to receive, process, and respond to service requests through specialized channels which are intended to assist with this huge task.

Good help desk software makes the conversations of customers in forums easily accessible for documentation and management.

Everything related to a ticket should be shown on a single page: the entire conversation, attachments, internal communications and other activity. With this, a customer support agent should no longer need to dig through their support mailbox trying to find a past email. Employees can submit issues easily and get their tech issues fixed faster, allowing everyone to spend more time on other important matters. IT professionals waste less time on unnecessary manual processes, freeing up valuable time for more significant jobs to be done.

Help desk systems also allow customer support agents to more easily categorize and rank issues according to their severity or importance. Giving these agents capabilities to prioritize issues can provide a better pathway for efficient working.  This is one major feature of good help desk software, aptly called Category and Tags. In this feature, one can look at the daily work of an agent. This allows an agent to handle multiple similar issues in a single trip from the office, making better use of their time.

The simple analogy is that the easier it is to access these tickets, the faster the customer agents can reply. The faster these agents can reply, the more productive the customer support department is. For big businesses, this is integral to maintain their level of efficiency. Similarly, it is important for up and coming businesses as it can definitely help them in their development process – to know what they can improve on and what they can innovate in their product or services.

Customizable Features

At a basic level, a help desk ticket includes a title and description of each issue. For more detailed information and better categorization, a company can actually generate custom fields such as addresses and contact information to integrate for better categorizing and tagging. However, helpdesk software can actually have many more features integrated into its system. These added features can be accessed for generally reasonable prices.

Two-way email integration is another amazing add-on one can have in a help desk system. Two-way communication is when one person is the sender and they transmit a message to another person, who is the receiver. When the receiver gets the message, they send back a response, acknowledging the message was received.

Two-way communication is essential in the business world. Messages are transmitted between employers, employees, customers, and other stakeholders, and feedback is required to be certain that the message was actually received and understood.

File attachments can also be a part of the system. This is a feature where a customer can add documents of specific file formats to their emails so that customer support agents can have a better look at their concerns. These may take the form of photos, PDF files, and text files.

A powerful ticket search and knowledge base similarly help in major ways for help desk software. This is for better organization and access to the many tickets that come in a minute by minute. A ticket search helps an agent find a previous email that may not have been resolved, or resolved tickets that may be a reference to a current concern.

Mobile integrations are also part of the added features of these systems. Today’s modern help desk management solutions are built with accessibility and mobility in mind, taking advantage of more sophisticated and secure web and mobile technologies. Mobile ticketing apps are designed to track tickets and reply to concerns sent via phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. This is perfect for customer service managers who are on the go.

Efficient Job Appropriations through Reports

A powerful advantage of help desk software is that it provides metrics, charts, and graphs that customer support managers can use to track down employee performance, as well as team performance. Metrics like average time spent resolving tickets and a total number of resolved tickets at a given period can help managers run detailed reports to discover trends. For example, if a manager finds a certain agent is excellent at a specific task, a manager is more inclined to give all related tickets to this agent for maximum efficiency and production.

Managers can also check the reports gathered from the system to see the trends. For example, if many tickets which are submitted are concerned with the defect of a specific part of a product; the manager can direct these concerns to the higher ups so that proper action can be taken to fix the issue. This can ultimately improve the landscape of production and competence within the company.

The best help desk software can analyze tickets and automatically assign issues based on specific criteria. A manager can set the parameters based on the reports that were retrieved, equipping the software to determine which agent a certain ticket should be directed to.