One of the backbones of IT is help desk, in fact most people use the two terms interchangeably when referring to IT. So is crucial to setup a help desk system that works, otherwise the reputation of IT will be at the same level of your shoes. In this post I will discuss the most economic way to setup a help desk system that works, you only need to invest time. Read on.
Let’s analyze the process of help desk to make sure the software we pick fits our needs on the help desk system we want to build. The cycle usually follows this:
1. User has a question or problem and needs to contact IT; she/he logs a trouble ticket on the Help desk contact page.
2. Help Desk Technician receives and review the ticket, assigns a priority level and start working on the solution.
3. Technician finds the solution and contact the user to troubleshoot or schedule a time to fix the problem.
Our goal is to facilitate the process above as much as we can. The communication between users and technician should be efficient and reliable. Now let’s look at the software we have available for the task.
If you are planning to setup a Help Desk system for small business SysAid Help desk Software and asset management from Ilient can be your best option. SysAid is free for up to 100 users and computers, and it has the features to facilitate the help desk process cycle we discussed above, and many more extra features. Let’s look at SysAid features according to the things we need:
Web based contact form for users. The user logs in to the web help desk interface to log his/her trouble ticket.
Technician or help desk manager receives the work order and assigns it to a technician or to himself and set a time stamp and priority level. SysAid can automatic this process by prioritizing work orders by problems or people. It also can escalate work orders automatically to the next level technician if the first technician does not respond to the problem within its allotted time.
The technician reply to the user once he/she has found to the solution to the problem. In SysAid you have multiple options to do this. You can contact the user by e-mail by using the contact form within the technician dashboard, or by using Network Messages etc. another great feature about SysAid is the ability to troubleshoot the user computer remotely. There is not need to install any software in the end computer manually; all is done within the technician dashboard using a remote software installer.
SysAid also has the ability to track hardware and software on end computers, so you can keep an up to date inventory of the equipment being used on your company. You can also run reports of the equipment using filters like; computer model, age, windows versions etc.
In the next post on this series I will review an open source Help Desk Software with no limitations and completely free. Stay tune.
Within our company we use the Web Help Desk Software for customer service.
Over two years we tested different help desk solutions including a ton of free ones and even some of the very expensive one’s trial demos.
But finally we stopped at the Web Help Desk.
It was the best combination of easy to install, rich feature set and reasonable price.
If you have any questions about this tool – feel free to ask, I have a lot of experience using it.
Paul