A Must Have Help Desk Software
February 5th, 2010 |
HESK has proven to be an incredibly easy to use and efficient help desk software package. Not to mention, it’s got a great price - free! It is very user-friendly, both for customers and staff (it took us a very short time to get used to it). One of the best features, in my opinion, is the knowledgebase. Before using this system, we would receive so many requests that could have easily been avoided with the use of a simple FAQ sheet, or a little research on the customer’s end. I won’t lie and say that we don’t still get these (if you work in customer service, you understand!), but they have been significantly reduced, as it allows us to place answers to simple questions right in front of the customer who needs them. Customers can also rate and review articles within the knowledgebase and staff then has the opportunity to respond to these insights. While it took some work on the front end, though not very much time at all, it has come back to us tenfold in terms of eliminating unnecessary requests from the get-go while also avoiding irritation on the customer-side as they are able to get an immediate answer.
Speaking of having immediate answers, the “canned response” feature has been greatly received by me and my co-workers. It is so convenient to have them readily available and all stored neatly in one place. In addition to being a great time saver, this feature even gives you the option to create “advanced” canned responses which allow for variables such as the customer’s name, their question, etc., allowing even a canned response to retain a level of customization.
Another great feature is the sort options. Aside from automatically categorizing requests and sending them to the proper staff members, HESK also marks all tickets as “new,” “awaiting reply,” “replied,” or “resolved.” This makes it easy to find requests that still need to be attended to. Also, being that all tickets come through one main system, there are no longer emails that somehow get lost in the webosphere. All emails are stored in the system and easily accessible for future reference, which has been a huge help. And for those tickets that seem lost in space, it’s never too hard to track them down, as you can search the system by either tracking ID, customer name, date the ticket was submitted, or the subject. Thank goodness, because even with an organized system, we all know that human error can never be eliminated, but thanks to HESK, the impact of these has been significantly reduced.
I could go on an on, but I will close by saying that for the money…oh wait, for NO money, compared to the hundreds of dollars my company could have spent on similar systems, we couldn’t ask for more. HESK has reduced our number of unnecessary inquiries, increased our efficiency in responding to existing inquiries, and helped clean up our once messy database of archived messages. We’ll be sticking with this system for a long time to come. They also offer a remotely hosted help desk for those of us who don’t like setting up web software.
