It doesn’t matter if your company is currently run out of your parent’s basement or if you’re a 500+ man operation. If you’re considering a help desk solution, you need to ensure it has these 11 features:
Most tickets you’ll receive will be about similar, if not identical, topics. Rather than typing out a response each time, you can reply with a copy and paste response. This will save your team valuable time and help to complete more tickets.
This undervalued feature allows teams to keep information centralized. If done right, it gives team members the ability to pick up where others left off. This is a must-have feature due to its ability to provide team members with all the information they need.
Tagging is a small but powerful feature that provides you with more detailed data and keeps tickets organized. Most help desks contain tagging as a feature, but you will want to filter your tickets as well.
Look for how easy it is to tag and filter, then understand how filtering is handled. This will seem small now, but during everyday use, the difference is significant.
Automation will be more important in the future, but even now the feature offers a huge opportunity to increase service team efficiency. With automation, you can perform tasks like assigning tickets automatically. For example, subjects containing the word “invoice” can be tagged as billing and assigned to your billing person.
If your help desk has a mobile app, it can be a lifesaver. A mobile app will allow you to handle critical tickets anywhere at any time. This will present much better service to your customers, and will pay off when they become loyal followers and brand advocates.
A word of advice: make sure you get some hands-on time with their app during the trial period, as not all apps are created equal!
At its core, a help desk is a ticketing solution. So you'd be tempted to think that they're all excellent at tracking and managing tickets. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Help desks can become so focused on the other features that they forget to improve ticket management!
You’ll want to ensure that the help desk you choose presents tickets in an easily digestible way, shows enough details, and allows you to reassign and escalate tickets without hassle.
Many help desks contain this feature, and with good reason. Knowledge bases help to reduce your ticket load and offer better service to customers.
Just because a help desk offers a knowledge base, doesn’t mean you’re in the clear! You need to ensure that it’s easy to create and update articles, and that the knowledge base is easy for your customers to navigate.
Keeping track of a customer’s past requests will help you both to identify trends, like who your problem customers are. You’ll also be able to identify repeated questions.
A user-friendly interface helps both your team and your customers. It can create a better experience for customers and increase your team's efficiency.
A good help desk portal needs to be user-friendly for your customers, and shouldn’t need any training to use. On your end, it should be easy to view details, work with tickets, and be pleasant to spend a large amount of time in as your team will likely spend most of their time using the software!
We touched on this above, but you should be able to implement your help desk within a month. (That means running at full capacity.) If it looks like it will take you longer than a month you shouldn’t be considering that help desk. Remember, you'll need to train your staff and your customers on using the new system.
Your help desk should also have easy to follow documentation including how-to's, features, and troubleshooting.
You don’t hear about this much, and it’s not a real feature, but we included it because it's so important. Without stability, your help desk can cause more problems than it fixes! Most help desks won’t crash outright, but there can be small bugs which affect performance. If you’re demoing a software, be on the lookout for these kinds of bugs.
So tell us, which help desk features are most important to your business?