Friday, 21 October 2011

Iphone Mobile Help Desk App - ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

ServiceDesk Plus is now available on the iPhone. It's a simple to use app which helps the service desk staff work even on the move.



With request management going mobile, the tickets can be viewed, created and handled instantly from anywhere...

Get the App for free http://www.servicedeskplus.com/iphone

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

3 Ways to Improve Customer Service with Help Desk Software

By Donna Gunter

When you start your online business, you have very few customer service issues. Those that do emerge can usually be handled fairly easily via email or a phone call, and you'll probably resolve most of these yourself. However, as your business grows and you begin to develop products and programs, the number of customer service issues increases, as well. You then begin to look for a way to delegate this task, but if you don't have procedures outlined for how you have handled these issues in the past, it becomes difficult to train your team on carrying out these procedures. And, without a system, it becomes difficult for you as the business owner to ensure that your team is handling these issues in the way you want them handled.

That's when a system set up using help desk software comes in handy. When you set up this software for use in your business, you are also prompted to document your procedures, your text for email responses, and create a list of common customer service questions and how to answer them.
Here are 3 ways that help desk software can help you improve your customer service:

1. Creates trackable tickets. Your help desk software should require the customer to create a ticket that is attached to her customer service issue. Rather than relying on email, at any point your customer can log into the ticket system, track the progress of her ticket, read the response to her ticket, and post a reply if needed. Now you have a documented, trackable record of all of your customer service issues, as your customer service staff's replies are embedded in this system, as well.

2. Lets customers help themselves. Once you have answered customer service issues over a period of time, you'll notice a number of questions are asked repeatedly. You can gather these questions and your responses to them and create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) portion of your ticket system so that customers can get the answers to commonly asked questions right away from your FAQ database.

3. Permits timely response to customer service issues. Your time is valuable. When business really picks up and your time is at a premium, it no longer makes sense for you to be handling your customer service issues. Your overwhelming to-do list may mean this issue slips between the cracks and is unintentionally ignored. Instead, delegate this task to a team member and provide the appropriate training. Help desk software permits you to log in and check on the reported customer service issues and ensure that they are being handled appropriately, as both the customer and staff requests and responses should be logged in this system. In this way, you can easily track any mistakes made and make corrections right away. Your team member's timely response makes your customers feel heard and supported.

Perhaps help desk software is overkill for you at the moment. However, as your business grows, you'll come to appreciate it as a valuable asset that helps you better serve your customers.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/3-ways-to-improve-customer-service-with-help-desk-software-3391422.html

About the Author

Introvert Marketing Coach Donna Gunter helps professional service businesses stop the client chase and create online businesses that drive clients to them. Want to learn specific Internet marketing strategies that can be automated to help get more clients online? Discover how to automate your marketing in this free teleclass replay, Stop Obsessing About Your Online Marketing and Automate It at http://www.EasyMarketingAutomation.com

IT Service Level Agreement

This demo shows how quality service can be delivered at the right time with Service Level Agreement using ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.

Monday, 17 October 2011

Customer Service Software - 11 Tips to Get What You Really Need

By Joe Boye

Nowadays, no one understands a good, comprehensive customer service without a supporting software platform. A good Customer Service Software will allow you to address efficiently your customer issues, by registering them, assigning them automatically to the right resources, tracking their evolution until resolution, obtaining relevant metrics and creating easily a knowledge base to record known solutions to recurring issues.

If you have spent some time investigating your options in the Internet, you will by now be aware that there are plenty of alternatives to choose from, everyone of them stressing their own strengths. As the features they provide are many and their relative importance may not be completely clear to you, here is a list of the things you should really focus on when making a purchase decision:

1. The Customer Service Software you select has to be compatible with your existing IT infrastructure (computers OS, browser, e-mail technology...).

2. The solution has to be adaptable to your (presumably evolving) needs.

3. It has to be scalable, mainly if you intend to grow or if it is difficult for you to anticipate the demand.

4. If the Customer Service Software is going to be accessed directly by customers (for issues reporting, for example), check that it provides a user-friendly interface and is easy to learn and use. Otherwise, there will be resistance to its adoption and it will hamper your plans for implementation.

5. In the case mentioned above, make sure also that the Customer Service Software provides configurable filtering options that avoid one customer seeing other customer's issues with your product or service. You do not want unimportant issues reported as critical by others or issues that finally are not such, to unnecessarily change the perception of your customer about the product or service.

6. If you plan to get a free Customer Service Software solution because you prefer to give it a try and then decide if you go for the premium option, you have to take into account that you will be investing effort in installation, training, database building, historical records... you will be locked into this particular Customer Service Software and the vendor pricing schemas. Think of this and check also the conditions and cost of an upgrade. The next point may add another difficulty if you decide to change the software platform after your first try.

7. You will also be locked into a particular vendor if you choose a solution that is based on a proprietary standard. A solution that works with Open Standards is much more easy to migrate to another one if you eventually decide to change your Customer Service Software.

8. Make sure your provider offers training to the help desk staff and check which kind of technical support and maintenance it is providing once you have your software installed and running. The support should include upgrades, security patches, new training, etc...

9. Some providers offer hosting in their own machines and they may even run themselves some, if not all, help desk operations. This may save you time and money in the long term, especially if you need to build a help desk department from scratch and you prefer focussing in your core abilities.

10. If ITIL is a must for you now or you guess it may be sometime in the medium term, make sure that the solution you get is ITIL compliant.

11. When you finally reduce your list to one or two final candidates for your Customer Service Software, ask for a live demo, or even, if possible, download a free version and use it for some days to have a better understanding of its features, performance, ease of use, etc.

There are important advantages to selecting a good Customer Service Software, some of them you may not have think of yet. Check them in the Top 10 Advantages of Help Desk Applications [http://www.helpdesksolutionsallabout.com/p/help-desk-applications-10-key.html].

For more interesting details and tips about help desk solutions, their most common features, types, advantages, good practices and other resources visit our site Help Desk Solutions [http://www.helpdesksolutionsallabout.com]

Article Source: Customer Service Software - 11 Tips to Get What You Really Need

A Day in the Life of Kate - Asset Management using ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

A interesting video depicting the typical day of an Asset Manager. Kate, the Asset manager uses ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to manage her IT assets seamlessly. Know more about ServiceDesk Plus at www.servicedeskplus.com

Friday, 14 October 2011

Self Service Portal and its Benefits

Nowadays, IT customers become more demanding and expecting quick resolution of issues and frequent updation in products. To reduce the service desk pressure and to keep the help desk up and running 24x7, self service portal need to be implemented to make the users deal with incidents without the assistance of service desk.

Through web based self service portal, users can log in their requests, track the progress of their logged tickets and search solutions from the knowledge base, all without contacting the help desk team. You can even provide a personalized portal to the users allowing them to enter their personal information, chang the display language and the date and time format.

Advantages of Self service portal :
  • Provide enhanced user experience by making your help desk available to your end users 24x7.
  • Minimize the load of technicians and improve your productivity.
  • Users can find solutions directly from the knowledge base, without any help from the service desk.
  • Allow the users to submit and track the status of the requests by themself.
  • Human error is greatly reduced through web based self service portal.
  • Identify frequently used solutions and eliminate the root cause thereby increasing end user productivity.
  • Avoid repetitive tasks and improve deployment in more challenging tasks.

A Tale of Two Realities: IT Managers, What's Keeping You from Adopting New Technologies?

Author: ManageEngine

I had a lot of fun talking to Michael Dortch recently. For those of you who don\'t know Michael, he\'s a charismatic IT analyst who has a great perspective on IT and who likes to share it. The man\'s one of the toptweeting IT analysts and has written extensively about IT infrastructure, collaboration, and cloud computing — all of which are right up our alley at Zoho and ManageEngine.

So Michael came toPleasanton, and we talked about what is on the minds of IT managers today. Feeling Dickensian, we agreed that it is both the best of times and the worst of times for IT managers. A lot of exciting technology is making its way into business, and some of those technologies — mobile tech like smartphones and tablets, and social tech like Twitter and Facebook — are game changers. Some have introduced dramatically improved levels of productivity; others have changed entire business models.

That\'s the best-of-times view.

The worst-of-times view takes in these same game-changing technologies but looks at them from the perspective of IT professionals struggling to deal with them. How do we incorporate them into our infrastructure? How do we manage them for the enterprise? How can we make the most of them ourselves to deliver IT services more effectively and play a larger role in the delivery of value to the business and our customers?

Sure,CIO\'s are all talking about using technology to grow their businesses, improve service delivery, align more effectively with business units, become more agile, establish a common language between IT and business groups, and so on. Wow, sounds good, right? But now, turn your gaze away from the big screen. Pay attention to your colleagues behind the curtain — the ones in charge of keeping the server lights green and the networks up and running. 'It sounds nice,' they mutter, 'but it\'s not going to happen at the pace that it should.'

Why not? Well, as most industry analysts indicate and discussions with IT professionals validate, it comes down to budget and hours in the day. Most analysts say that 60-85 percent of IT budget dollars are spent on 'keeping what they have working and making what they have work together.' Not surprisingly, IT professionals spend about the same percentage of their time on the management and maintenance of existing technologies and projects — leaving virtually no time to execute the forward-thinking vision of the CIO.

Michael and I reached the conclusion that until IT organizations can get their arms around the technology they already have and until they can drive down the maintenance costs, the cool new stuff will take a backseat. It\'s a bit of a catch-22, sadly: The new technologies may very well contribute to greater productivity and lower costs but only if the IT organization can find time to explore them, envision and test new business and service delivery models, and then deploy those technologies — which, of course, they can\'t do until they can free up some time.

It would be great to get a larger population of IT professionals to weigh in on this topic. Let us know: Are you able to adopt new technologies fast enough? And if not, why not?

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/a-tale-of-two-realities-it-managers-whats-keeping-you-from-adopting-new-technologies-5244072.html

About the Author

ManageEngine is the leading provider of cost-effective enterprise IT management software and the only one making the 90-10 promise — to provide 90 percent of the capabilities offered by the Big 4 at just 10 percent of the price. The ManageEngine suite offers enterprise IT management solutions including Network Management, HelpDesk ITIL, Bandwidth Monitoring, Application Management, Desktop Management, Security Management, Password Management, Active Directory reporting, and a Managed Services (MSP) platform. ManageEngine products are easy to install, setup and use, and offer extensive support, consultation and training. More than 50,000 organizations in 200 countries, from different verticals, industries and sizes use ManageEngine to take care of their IT management needs cost effectively. ManageEngine is a division of ZOHO Corporation. For more information on ManageEngine, please visit www.manageengine.com.

ManageEngine is a trademark of ZOHO Corporation. All other brand names and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Thursday, 13 October 2011

Cynergy Software Overview

Here is the overview video of cynergy software.

Help Desk Software Review - Zendesk

Here is the review of help desk software, Zendesk.

Screenshot of the page :



From the service provider,

"Web-based help desk software with an elegant support ticket system  and a self-service customer support platform. Agile, smart and convenient."

Pros : 
  • Easy and intuitive interface with self service support.
  • Customizable interface makes it easy to insert your own logos and branding
  • Zendesk has included widgets which allows you to integrate data from outside the help desk. 
  • Iphone mobile application
Cons :
  • $95 a month for 5 agents (there are plans for 1 and 2 users as well)  with additional charges for more than five “agents,” even on premium-level accounts.

Wednesday, 12 October 2011

How to Choose Your Helpdesk Software

By Alex C Johnson

How you choose your helpdesk software will have an important impact on your customer satisfaction and profits. Because it is where you have all the contact with your customers and can turn them into raving fans.

You know how many various helpdesk software and services are out there, so you want to discover which one is the best for your business style and needs.

Here are some of the most common types of helpdesk software...


Web based helpdesk software
Help desk software vs. services
Open source helpdesk software
And more...


So as you see, before you choose a certain service, it's important to first choose the type of helpdesk you want your company to use.

Would you like it as a hosted software on the provider's servers that you can access from anywhere? Or do you prefer it to be hosted in-house on your own computers, which you can only access from inside your office?

Are you looking for a free helpdesk service to save money, or you don't mind paying a bit for a more reliable, more advanced solution to help your customers better?

The good news is, there some professional   free helpdesk software solutions available that you can use to get the same power you'd get using most of the paid services out there.

You can find out a lot about the quality of their services easily by checking out people's reviews of each helpdesk company.

You can save yourself a lot of time this way by going with the best solution right from the start, avoiding trial and error which would cost you many customers.

By using a remote software, you can access your customer issues anytime and anywhere to easily get to their needs as soon as possible.

Would you like to discover more about the best helpdesk software solutions and how to choose the  best service to help your customer better and increase your sales?

Then check out this free helpful guide on [http://www.helpdesk-software-free-tips.com]free helpdesk software to get your own professional helpdesk in just 7 minutes.

Article Source: How to Choose Your Helpdesk Software

Help Desk Software HESK

This is a brief video introduction to HESK help desk software highlighting main help desk software features and work flow.



Monday, 10 October 2011

Help Desk Software - SysAid Intro Video

Watch this animated 3-minutes Help Desk Software intro clip by SysAid!

This 3-scenes clip is an overview of the Help Desk Software experience, from both the end-user and IT administrator point of view.

Friday, 7 October 2011

Help Desk Software For Your Website


By John Horsch 

If you are offering products and services online, it will greatly help if you get to monitor the movement of sales, as well as the activity and responses of your clients. Using this type of information is greatly useful if you want to improve your business. You will discover that considering their problems and concerns will optimize your system as well as the way you do business. Here are some tips on how you can stay visible and helpful through your site.

You Can Get It for Free

There are actually plenty of help desk software that can readily be downloaded and installed into your system. These come for free, with several focusing on helping individuals customize and improve their web sites. You only need to have the system requirements to effectively upload the program. You can set up and configure a ticket-based support system or help desk for your web site to cater to your clients more effectively.

Your customers can now submit support tickets and your employees get to have a functional web-based interface to manage help desk tickets and reply to various concerns. Expect several features such as unlimited categories, unlimited personalized accounts for your employees, file attachments, canned responses, easy-to-use web interface, easy-to-translate languages, custom fields in the submit ticket form, effective ticket search capabilities, email notification of new replies and tickets and many more.

You can also customize the appearance of the help desk, editing the style, header and footer. The test can be stored in a single language file so you can translate the script, requiring you to edit only a single file. The software also comes with an install script that is responsible for the database setup so your help desk stays operational with little work. The program should be compatible with the different operating systems.

Why Your Web Site Needs It

Useful help desk software is a web-based application that is created purely to create solutions for browers. A lot of other tools began as client-server applications, with little focus on the web. However, the new approach emphasizes a powerful cross-platform format wherein you can track progress and keep in touch with your customers for full support. A reliable product also comes with a 1-year guarantee, wherein you get unlimited product support via phone or email, maintenance agreements and updates.

How Your Site Can Benefit

In a web help desk, knowledge base functionality is often built in so you can manage the creation of a database that is both expansive and searchable. Common requests with corresponding resolutions will easily be available to clients, administrators and technicians even if they browse independently. You can attach one or more files as well to every FAQ so that the knowledge base continues to grow.

Technicians and clients can benefit more by updating their knowledge constantly through email alerts and other web-based notifications. New tickets and ticket updates can immediately be emailed to the proper clients. Technicians and administrators can be alerted once jobs are still incomplete, unassigned or left unattended over a certain period of time.

You can be sure that client's concerns online are answered to very well. Scheduled tasks and other assignments are also very unlikely to be missed because of the iCalendar integration. You get full ticket information for every calendar entry.

John Horsch writes premium high quality articles ranging from Internet Marketing to Gardening. Each is researched and edited with the greatest degree of professionalism. John has been writing articles for Internet consumption since 2001. Get More Quality Articles Here: [http://johnhorsch.com]

Article Source:  Help Desk Software For Your Website

Help Desk Software Customers Talk - Creative Collage Video

Here is an interesting collage video. Have a look at it and share your comments