If you are considering setting up a help desk for your customers or internal staff, there are many things to take into consideration before you choose a product. As a small business, it’s likely that you will have specific needs and requirements when it comes to your resources. In this article, we’ll explore how you can determine whether a piece of help desk software meets those criteria.
What is Your Budget?
You should first consider how much the software in question is likely to help you when compared with the amount it is going to cost. Is the expense worth it? Generally, resources of this kind can help to reduce the administrative workload on a busy company and ensure that smooth and effective resolutions are quickly achieved – meaning happy and impressed clients and an increased likelihood of return custom. It’s up to you to determine the ROI in a scenario of this kind and use this information to work out a sensible budget for the company.
How Complex Should It Be?
Many types of help desk software contain a multitude of resources and the capacity to handle multiple matters and many channels at once. As a smaller organization, you may not need all those bells and whistles – and therefore should not be paying for them. It’s a good idea to make a clear list of requirements before you start shopping around. At the very least, you’ll probably need either an easy to use public-facing interface or one for internal use (or both), clear means of communication with the relevant service providers via that portal and good help desk ticketing solutions to ensure that each issue can be easily tracked. Any additional elements should be carefully chosen and well-tailored to your business.
Will It Be Externally or Internally Managed?
If your team is small, those in charge of customer relations may need a little support to keep control of their workload – which is why outsourcing your help desk may be helpful. However, you don’t want to be paying too much for a service you don’t really need. You may find that your enquiries are so few and far between that you can add their management to the responsibilities of a single member of staff. Therefore, you’ll only need a simple piece of software that can be used by that person.
How Will You Safely Keep Track of Enquiries?
The importance of data protection cannot be stressed enough – and, with their small budgets and minimalist management systems, small businesses are among the most at risk of receiving crippling fines for failure to comply – often as the result of a simple oversight. Because of this, the resource you choose should include highly efficient and secure help desk ticketing solutions. With ticketing software, it is a tool that helps you to keep a clear record of the cases that your service team are working on.
It is a very valuable resource, enabling those who have interacted with a particular case to add notes detailing the solutions attempted. However, many data laws state that information collected by a business about its customers should only be retained for the amount of time required for that data to be used for its originally intended purpose. That data should be kept highly secure and only accessible to relevant parties. For this reason, you should make sure that any ticketing system like those found here are connected with the help desk software you are considering adheres perfectly with data legislation before you make your decision.
