What is a help desk used for? A help desk is a tool that helps businesses organize client interactions so that they can reply and serve consumers more quickly and effectively. Help desks include tools that provide context and insight into customer experiences. They also have tools that allow you to benchmark your support team's performance, ensuring that they are truly efficient in supporting and assisting consumers.
When asked to weigh in on the essential features of help desk software, PeerSpot users pointed to customizable workflow automation, escalation mechanisms, and an internal system for creating tickets for issues that end users are dealing with. Other features like templates, scripts, and decision trees were also useful, along with notifications, reporting, and scheduling. A knowledge base is an important aspect of help desk software for end users to utilize, and mobile applications that afford users the ability to raise tickets on the go are also of great value. These same applications enable the end users to receive, address, and answer these tickets mobilely as well.
A help desk is not a CRM. They might seem similar, but they are two completely different tools that aim to achieve fundamentally different things.
Here are some ways in which they differ:
Many companies first use a CRM system and then proceed to use a dedicated help desk system. The reason why they do this is growth. At some point, businesses need more than just one tool to handle all the tickets, the customer data, and the incoming support requests.
The biggest difference between service desks and help desks is that service desks have broader operations than help desks, while acting as a singular contact point between a service provider and its users.
Help desks are used primarily for tactical purposes, resolving immediate technical issues and incidents. The definitive goal of the help desk is to provide resolutions for user requests as efficiently as possible. Service desks offer more than this.
Help desk automation is a software platform that allows help desk agents to deal with a range of end-user contacts all at once, whether they are incidents, requests for assistance or information, or complaints. This means that multiple calls (or other forms of contact, such as emails) regarding the same issue or demand are logged as tickets, connected together, and assigned to the same person or team.
All concerns are ticketed and monitored by the help desk software, ensuring that tickets are never left ignored (which would result in delays and service level breaches), forgotten, or lost.
Help desk automation software aids with prioritization, categorization, automated routing, service level management, and escalation.
An ITSM system is an IT service management system. This system comprises all of the processes and activities involved in IT teams managing the delivery of IT services to customers. This includes designing, developing, delivering, and maintaining IT services. At the heart of an ITSM system is the premise that IT should be supplied as a service.
ITSM (IT service management) is the practice, or professional discipline, of managing IT operations as a service, whereas an ITIL (information technology infrastructure library) is a set of best practices that provide guidance for ITSM.
Here are some of the key benefits to using help desk software:
The main features to look for in help desk software include: