Internet Marketing Customer Support

What to look for in helpdesk software?

Before delving deep into the technical mumbo-jumbo of help desk software, let's focus once more on the PURPOSE of setting up a help desk.

Your help desk software has a purpose - to provide top class customer support. And by doing that, to build your brand, grow your business, generate referrals and attract business partners.

A great help desk will let your business project a professional image.

It will allow you to run the customer support part of your business effectively and efficiently.

And your help desk will end up making you money, not becoming a cost center.

Features To Seek In Your Help Desk

Centralization: Your help desk should allow you to centralize your customer support interactions. By providing you flexibility to accomodate many of your products and even businesses/membership sites, and letting you house them under the same roof, you can make it convenient and quick for yourself (or your customer support staff) to answer queries and deal with problems from one common location.

Categories: If you run support for multiple products or services on a centralized help desk, you want to be able to categorize data for each so that there is no overlap or confusion.

Automation: Your help desk should let you set up 'Frequently Asked Questions' areas or a 'Knowledge-base' that customers can search themselves to find answers to commonly asked questions. It should also allow you to save templated responses to use instantly while answering questions that are frequently repeated.

Ticket Creation & Monitoring: Your help desk should allow customers seeking help to quickly and easily create a support ticket on the help desk system. They should also receive acknowledgement of their submission, and be provided a way to check up on any replies your support staff may post to their ticket.

Ideally, a help desk software that integrates email is desirable because a quick reminder will bring customers back to the support site to check for responses.

Multi-User Functionality: Your help desk should permit addition of staff members with varying levels of access to features that empower them to carry out tasks assigned to them. That way, you can have people running the help desk for you, while limiting the risk of accidents or malicious activity.

Easy Installation: Tech support is often available for most help desk solutions, but I've always liked software or scripts that install quickly and easily - as they tend to be more stable in the long run.

Configurability: A certain degree of customization and configurability can give your help desk a look-and-feel that matches that of your business website. The seamless user experience projects a more professional image and helps build your brand.

While these features (and their benefits) must be weighed when making your choice of help desk software solutions, there are other things to be considered too.

How to evaluate and then buy help desk software?