The Service Desk Management Software is an integrated system of software applications that make the service desk management easy and convenient. It allows a user to track, manage and report on all the aspects of the service desk in an organization. The software comes with features that help an organization in providing excellent customer support services, thereby boosting its corporate image.
In this post, we review the aspects of Service Desk Management Software, service desk and project management software, What should I automate for service desk, and How do I manage my service desk?
Service Desk Management Software
If you’re in charge of helping customers, you’ve probably spent countless hours wondering how to get better results. You want to be sure that your agents have the right information when they need it, but it’s not always easy to get the right data or provide the best tools for your team.
We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Our service desk software makes it easy for managers and agents alike to deliver great customer experiences every time—without wasting time searching through mountains of support requests or struggling with outdated tools.
Get your service desk under control.
Getting started with a service desk management system is easy. Simply sign up for a free trial, where you can take all the time you need to explore the software and try it out for yourself. If you’re ready to move forward with a purchase, we have flexible pricing plans that start at just $49 per month, with no setup fees or long-term contracts required (and if your business grows, we have enterprise options as well).
Once you’ve implemented our software into your workflow and integrated it into your team’s existing processes, here are some of the benefits that you’ll see:
- Service desks will be easier to manage overall—in fact, they’ll take less time than ever before. With clear rules on how requests should be handled—like escalation policies or response times—you won’t have any guesswork when it comes to managing customer communication channels like email or chat platforms. This saves both support staff members and customers loads of stress over whether their request was received correctly or not!
- You’ll also get better insight into what’s working best within each department by analyzing data collected from customers’ interactions with different agents across different channels (e-mail vs live chat). This helps everyone stay informed about how well certain systems work together—for instance: maybe one agent handles most incoming queries in an efficient way while another isn’t quite so skilled yet; or perhaps there are areas where training would benefit their performance level even further still!
Empower your team to move faster.
With a platform that’s easy to learn, you can empower your team to move faster and make every interaction count. With a simple drag-and-drop interface and no coding required, it’s easy for anyone to build workflows and processes that fit their unique needs.
The intuitive interface means even new users will be up to speed quickly. And with access from anywhere, agents can complete tasks on the go—so they never have to wait until the next day or week when they get back in the office.
Deliver the most relevant help whenever agents need it.
Deliver the most relevant help whenever agents need it.
Use AI to deliver the most relevant information to your customers.
Receive a constant stream of feedback from your agents and customers.
The feedback you get from your customers and agents is the most valuable thing you can have when it comes to Service Desk Management. This information tells you what’s working, what isn’t and how you can improve the customer experience.
There are a number of ways that feedback can be collected and analyzed:
- Use online forms so customers can submit their own requests for help or leave comments about their experience. Customers won’t take the time to call in a request if they don’t think it will be answered quickly or properly, so make sure that your ticketing system is easy to use and gets responses quickly (within 24 hours).
- Ask your customers questions when they first sign up for support—things like how satisfied they were with their last interaction with the company—and then ask them again at regular intervals throughout their relationship with the business. This way, you’ll get real-time data about whether those first impressions are changing over time.
Make every interaction count.
Make every interaction count.
Make sure every interaction is a good one, because it’s the first impression and first impression counts!
Ensure your agents have the information they need along with the best tools to do their jobs. Get up to speed quickly with self-service support that doesn’t require a steep learning curve; this will help save your team time and money in training resources while improving customer satisfaction at the same time.
Make sure your agents have the information they need along with the best tools to do their jobs.
To make sure your agents have the information they need along with the best tools to do their jobs, you need to provide adequate training and support. Make sure your agents know how to use your new tool as well as how it can help them in their roles. For example, if you’re implementing an ABM solution for service desk management, train your agents on how to use the software first before rolling it out so that they are familiar with its features when it’s time for implementation. This will ensure that everyone understands how everything works together and won’t be confused or overwhelmed by any changes that occur during testing or deployment.
Get up to speed quickly with self-service support that doesn’t require a steep learning curve.
Self-service support is a great way to help customers solve their own problems, but it’s not a replacement for agents.
To take advantage of self-service support, you’ll need to make sure your users are trained and ready to answer questions from customers. But if you’re already providing email or chat support, adding a self-service solution shouldn’t be too difficult.
The benefits of self-service support include:
You can count on us to get you what you need when you need it.
You can count on us to get you what you need when you need it. We are a service desk software company that can deliver the most relevant help whenever agents need it, making sure they have the information they need along with the best tools to do their jobs. Our service desk management software is designed with your people in mind, so when your team needs something, we’re there for them.
service desk and project management software
How to Improve Your Help Desk and Project Management Performance?
Providing exceptional customer service is no longer enough in today’s competitive business environment. Your clients will simply take their business elsewhere if they are not satisfied with your services. Therefore, your company must implement a strategy to improve the help desk and project management performance, thus delivering top-notch service levels at all times.
Even if your help desk and project management are running smoothly, there are still areas that you can improve to enhance customer experience. You will benefit from these tips if you want to improve the performance of your help desk and project management.
5 Tips to Help You Improve Help Desk and Project Management Performance
Different types of help desk and project management systems are ideal for various businesses. However, all these systems aim at delivering professional customer support. These tips will help you take your system’s performance from good to great.
1. Provide a Self-Service Portal to Assist Customers and Agents
The best way of improving your help desk is by providing a self-service portal. When you offer a self-service portal, you kill two birds with one stone:
A self-service portal will ultimately resolve issues by cutting down unnecessary and repetitive tasks.
2. Training and Assigning Roles to the Support Agent
A help desk and project management system, just like any other system, need people to work effectively. However, if your support agents are not adequately trained, they might not fully utilize and explore the system’s capability, rendering it less effective.
Once you have implemented your help desk system, you must train your staff. Ensure that each support agent understands how the system works. Please don’t leave your agents guessing around, as this could demotivate and frustrate them.
Additionally, assign roles to each team member. Assigning roles will make the agents more accountable and responsible. Further, develop an approach that will motivate your support team. A reward and punishment approach could work best in such a situation.
Rewarding exceptional team members will create motivation among the team. Additionally, each team member will understand that they will be held accountable.
3. Integrating the System with Other Business Processes
The help desk and project management system will not work in isolation. It would help if you integrated the help desk with other systems already at work in the organization. Additionally, all communication channels need to be integrated into the help desk system.
Customer support agents should work with other departments within the organization seamlessly. The integration will enable your agents to find information quickly and resolve customer issues promptly.
4. Customizing Help Desk and Project Management to Reflect the Businesses Brand
Both customers and agents need to feel like they are part of the company when using the help desk and project management system. The system must reflect the brand of the business to achieve this.
Customize the dashboard, color schemes, and presentation of the data to match the company’s brand. Customers and agents using the platform will feel that they are actually interacting with the right company.
Your brand has a visual appeal that is reflected by specific colors and images. Your customers will resonate with these colors and images. Therefore, it is critical that the color and images also appear on your help desk system.
No help desk and project management system is successful without collaboration. You should be able to reach your help desk supplier easily in case you need support or assistance. Your customers should be able to contact you at any time for support. Likewise, you should be able to reach your help desk support anytime you need assistance.
The help desk system will play a vital role in assisting your clients. However, business partners and consultants should be able to get information through the system. Advanced help desk systems can also be valuable tools in disseminating information to various groups, such as potential customers, shareholders, government agencies, and prospective investors.
Your help desk and project management system is the pulse of your business. If you want to improve your system’s efficiency, you need to utilize it and make it work for you entirely. The right employees and system providers will play a crucial role in improving your help desk and project management system.
What should I automate for service desk
When you are a small startup, manually tracking the work of your small customer service team is still doable. But, what happens when your team grows and hundreds of customers come running in with their problems?
Managing your service desk software manually is not only cumbersome and time-consuming but can also bring human errors into the process.
That’s exactly where automation can help your team achieve more with less.
To automate your service desk, you do not need to make heavy investments in AI or supercomputers. In some cases, it is as simple as making a few changes in the settings and you are good to go.
Read this blog to discover service desk automation ideas that will help you blow your competition out of the water and offer automated support without losing the personal touch.
What Is Service Desk Automation?
Service desk systems were designed to reduce human efforts and help businesses reach their top goal of customer service excellence.
But sadly, you will still hear many customer service agents say- “We are still caught up amidst a long queue of tickets. Just navigating through the portal consumes so much of our time.”
Businesses have adopted service desks but are yet to make the most of its automation capabilities. There is simply no point in using technology but not to its full advantage.
Service desk automation simply means fine-tuning your ticketing process to avoid repetitive manual tasks. An automated service desk software gives customer service agents the platform to resolve customer issues with minimum effort. They can send and receive automated notifications, assign and escalate tickets, share automated survey emails, and a lot more.
What Are the Benefits of Service Desk Automation?
Automating your service desk allows you to make your support process well-streamlined, requiring minimal human involvement. Here are 4 benefits that clearly highlight the power of an automated service desk:
Customer service teams are regularly judged by how quickly they respond to issues. With an automated workflow, your agents can quickly resolve issues and devote their time to complex tasks that demand immediate attention.
Manual processes are known for their errors, for instance, setting the wrong priority for a ticket. On the other hand, automated workflows improve the speed and accuracy of various service desk processes by eliminating human errors and inconsistencies
When the resolution takes time, customers want to be kept informed at each and every stage. With automated notifications and alerts, you can easily keep customers informed about the progress of their ticket.
Service desk automation ensures that processes and workflows are executed in the same way every time. This eventually leads to a consistent and delightful user experience.
10 Service Desk Automation Ideas for Better & Faster Performance
Now it’s time to explore the top automation strategies that will help you rise above mundane processes and free your employees to focus on more value-producing activities.
1. Automated Ticket Routing
Does your business have a hard time manually assigning tickets among agents? Are your support agents assigned tickets that should have been assigned to someone else?
Well, if all these situations seem like a normal day at work, you must go for an automated service desk. With automated ticket routing, support tickets are assigned to relevant agents who are most capable to handle them.
Automated ticket assignment ensures that every single support ticket is in safe hands.
For instance, technical support issues are assigned to agents who have the technical expertise and know-how to manage them. Or, billing or returns related tickets are assigned to agents who have relevant knowledge about return policies and procedures.
Most service desks use the round robin ticket assignment feature to automatically assign tickets to available agents. This ensures that tickets are evenly distributed and do not get piled up with a single customer service agent.
2. Enable Email Forwarding
As a business, you might have multiple customer-facing email accounts such as (support@, info@, contact@). Now, in order to merge all these email inboxes in a single dashboard, you need the right service desk software.
No matter if you use email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or Office 365 for your business, you can set up email forwarding to your service or help desk inbox.
With the help of email forwarding, all your customer support emails will be automatically redirected/forwarded to your help desk inbox. Once you have all your support requests under a single platform, your customer service representatives will be able to easily prioritize urgent support tickets, add tags or labels, and ensure not a single ticket remains unresolved.
3. Automated Alerts & Notifications
To automate support and offer seamless customer service, you need to keep your agents as well as customers well notified.
What is the purpose of notifications in a service desk?
Notifications are predefined automated alerts, messages, or responses sent to the customers and staff members when a certain condition is met. These notifications can be sent in the form of emails or text messages and enable users to track the progress of a ticket.
An automated help desk software provides multiple conditions under which you can send and receive email notifications. Here are some popular types of notifications:
4. Escalate Incidents
Every customer wants to get their issues resolved at the first contact by a single agent. However, given the complexities of some issues, it isn’t always possible. Your agents need to escalate tickets to higher reps when they don’t have the required expertise, knowledge, or authority to handle a customer issue by themselves.
Now, manual ticket escalation can create more problems than it solves.
Your agents might not know the steps they need to take to escalate an issue, or whom they should escalate the issue in the first place.
Therefore, it is imperative to have an automated process that escalates major support incidents to the right people. You can create ticket escalation rules that will automatically escalate tickets to the appropriate members in your operational hierarchy.
For instance, if a customer has requested a refund, it can be automatically escalated to the customer service manager who has the authority to initiate refunds.
5. Leverage a Knowledge Base
Creating a self-service knowledge base is one of the best service desk automation ideas. The knowledge base acts as a centralized hub for creating, storing, and sharing relevant information with customers.
According to a Microsoft study, around 77% of customers have used a self-service portal to resolve their issues.
A knowledge base can boost your customer service process in the following ways:
To further improve the customer experience, you can optimize your knowledge base for keywords. This will help users easily search for self-help articles or FAQs related to their issues. Moreover, automatically recommending help articles based on their search history will go a long way in enhancing the self-service experience.
6. Use Canned Responses for Faster Replies
Drafting a fresh response for similar customer requests can be a productivity killer. To save your valuable time, an automated service desk allows you to create thousands of canned responses.
But what are canned responses?
Canned responses are predefined messages that are used by customer service agents to respond to similar customer issues. Your agents can type the responses once, save them, and reuse them to offer swift assistance to customers.
Modern help desks come with pre-created canned responses that you can edit as per your convenience and requirement. Agents can add a title to each canned response, choose the inbox, and search for particular canned responses through the search box.
7. Automated Updates & Backups
Are you constantly worried about the security of your ticketing system? How do you ensure you are using the latest version? Well, again, automation holds the right answer.
Web-based or online help desk systems are known for their automated security updates. This means that you do not need to look for security updates online or worry about buying an updated version of the software.
Security and software updates are automatically installed without any downtime. With regular security updates, your business can rest easy knowing that your valuable data is always protected.
Moreover, crucial data in the form of customer communications, customer information, ticket history, shared responses, and others are automatically backed up on the cloud in a periodic manner.
8. Emails for Ticket Rating
Sharing automated emails for ticket rating is one of the best automation ideas for service desk.
What exactly are ‘ticket rating emails’?
As the name suggests, ‘ticket rating emails’ are shared with customers to rate the service they have received. Such emails are automatically shared with customers once a ticket has been marked as ‘closed’ or ‘resolved’.
Here are some top benefits of Ticket Rating:
Moreover, users can draft the email message, and specify the time period after which the survey will be sent to customers. You can also check out some customer service email templates for the super responses.
9. Measure Performance With Automated Reports
Manually measuring the performance of your team can lead to unavoidable errors, biases, and improper analysis. With help desk automation, you can gather the right metrics and get a holistic view of your team’s performance.
Users can choose to receive automated reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to track progress and improve performance.
You can receive insightful reports on key aspects such as:
With the right service desk tools, managers can automatically receive in-depth reports on their email address. While agents can get a quick snapshot of their performance from their dashboard.
10. Get In-depth Customer Feedback With Automated Surveys
We already discussed how sharing automated emails for ticket rating can help you measure your service quality. But, in the long run, is that enough?
Sometimes you need to capture in-depth customer feedback to further improve your process.
Many help desks such as ProProfs Help Desk have an in-built survey maker that gives you the option to design, create, and share surveys with customers. To automate this process, you can choose the date and time of your survey.
While the possibility of sharing surveys are endless, most businesses use two popular types of surveys- CSAT and NPS.
A CSAT survey can be used to measure how happy customers are with your customer service process, or with your company. Such surveys can help you in understanding user pain points and in building long-term relationships.
NPS surveys use a single question to measure the likelihood of customers recommending your business, product, or service to their friends and family. NPS surveys use a 0-10 rating scale and help you gauge customer loyalty.
Ready to Achieve More with an Automated Help Desk?
If your business is not exploring automation possibilities for your help desk, you might be missing out on a super productive team and a happy customer base.
Service desk automation creates a win-win situation for everyone. It helps you improve the quality of your service, avoid manual tasks, eliminate errors, and the best of all- offer seamless and consistent support experiences. Follow these 10 service desk automation strategies and speed up your issue-resolution process.
How do I manage my service desk?
The ITIL definition of a service desk (service operation) is a single point of contact (SPOC) between the service provider and the users. TechTarget similarly defines a service desk as a communications center that provides a single point of contact between a company and its customers, employees and business partners. It enables end users to easily interact with the IT department of the organization.
What Does a Service Desk Do?
Primarily an IT function, a service desk manages tickets, incidents and service requests, as well as user communication. Service desk professionals rely on various IT service management (ITSM) tools to get their work done. Modern service desks are more proactive and flexible and can respond to a variety of operational circumstances. They are process-oriented and aim to address everything within the organization’s IT policies and guidelines.
Help Desk vs. Service Desk
While help desk and service desk functionalities may sound similar, there are some significant differences between the two.
A help desk provides technical support to end users, troubleshoots customer and user issues, and/or guides them through specific tasks and actions.
A service desk looks at business needs rather than focusing solely on addressing user needs and takes the broader business context into account. It focuses on improving the efficiency and performance of IT technicians, meeting service-level agreements and shaping the way IT professionals deliver their services to both internal employees and to customers.
In most organizations, the help desk is a component of the service desk, and is concerned only with end-user issues, requests and user satisfaction.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Service Desk?
Service desk professionals have various responsibilities such as:
Modern service desks also provide advanced capabilities such as:
A service desk, when integrated with other IT management tools, helps provide seamless execution of IT operations in an organization.
Service Desk and Professional Services Automation (PSA)
Most managed service providers (MSPs) use a professional services automation (PSA) tool to run their business efficiently. A PSA tools is a software solution that provides a suite of functions such as service desk, project management, billing and finance, and customer relationship management (CRM). A key function of any PSA tool is the service desk, since this is where all clients’ IT issues and requests are managed. For MSPs, the billing, quoting and CRM functions are also critical.