It Help Desk Software For Effective Service Request Management

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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A help desk is “a single point of contact for users to receive help on computer issues.” Setting up an IT help desk function is very important in today’s highly competitive and volatile business environment since a minor malfunction can affect business continuity leading to the loss of an enterprise’s hard earned reputation. Those enterprises that fail to put up an effective help desk solution are found to endure increased costs due to staff turnover, work disruption, and lost business. Help desks are highly essential since it not only helps to fix problems but also prevents problems from happening.

Today employees face issues that are minute errors to major failures. Some of these can be fixed by the employees themselves but some issues require technical expertise to fix it. Hence, enterprises must deploy IT help desk software for effective service request management. The following are some of the features of best of breed IT help desk software.

* Requests submitted by customers are managed through a simple process that involves two ...
... service teams – Service Desk and Level One Support. This pre-defined process can be enhanced (customizable) as per business needs and objectives of service request management workflow of the service provider.

* Multiple IT service requests can be linked to an Incident, and in that case, the closure of all these requests strictly depends on the closure of linked Incidents.

* Helps to define, implement, enforce, and automate Helpdesk processes

* Enables multiple Helpdesk people to play multiple roles for multiple conditions

* Supports multiple Helpdesk processes, and allows the implementation of various workflows even within a single Helpdesk interface

* Allows multiple parallel tasks assigned to various persons that are all related to the same Helpdesk ticket

* Allows implementation of process changes in hours rather than weeks

* Built-in computation capability makes Service Level Agreement (SLA) calculations easy and automatic.

* Allows creation of various graphical and textual metrics which are calculated in real time to show up-to-the-minute performance of the Helpdesk organization

* Integration with corporate websites or email systems facilitates ‘self-help’, which includes submission of a ticket from a website or converting a ticket from an email as well as a real- time status update as the ticket moves through the Helpdesk process. Self-help reduces calls and emails from end users.

* Seamlessly integrates helpdesk and all the other components of IT Service Management, including Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, and CMDB

Issues can be minor or major, trivial or critical but if there are no technical experts to handle it then it can cost an enterprise a lot. Hence, setting up an effective IT help desk function should be the top priority of any enterprise.

Read more about- agile methodology, software development lifecycle