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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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