Service Desk Software is a tool for organizing service processes in a company, e.g. a help desk / customer support. The process-oriented approach that underlies the construction of such a system allows you to serve all requests, including those from internal employees or services, from partners, customers or suppliers. Most importantly, with the tools available in the system, you can build automation of any multilevel processes of the company, capturing various internal and external services, counting interaction not only with customers and employees, but also with machines or robots. Such a system originally has many built-in objects, rules for their interaction and management, means of exchanging information with process participants, analysis tools and much more.
For newcomers to this field, it is not always immediately clear what help one or another function of the system can provide in everyday work. Das ist vergleichbar mit dem Kauf eines neuen Autos mit Top-Ausstattung. Supposedly, there are plenty of helpful options, but what they are actually good for becomes certain only after you have driven a few hundred kilometers with the car.
Let me explain the opportunities of the Service Desk system by using simple analogies and describing the basic concepts.
A uniform procedure for processing requests (tickets) in the service desk presents the process, which in turn consists of the statuses assigned to each ticket at different stages of processing, as well as a set of conditions and rules for transition from status to status. At the same time, a procedure is specified for each status, rules are defined, which are understandable for all parties involved. For the service providers, there is no doubt about which ticket they currently have to work on or who is the person responsible for a specific task. There is clarity about deadlines and communication channels with the customer if the latter needs to specify details. The customer, for his part, knows the processing status of his case and can respond at any time if necessary.
In addition, the display of all work processes in a single window of the tool prevents annoying duplications in the workflow: You never have to write down on notepads who needs to be called and when, by which date a report should be available, which colleague needs to be called in for advice in case of a complicated question, etc. Everything works according to a preset logic with fixed rules. Moreover, nothing gets lost because all workflows and processes are defined in the system.
Everything that influences the processing of a request must and will be noted in such a system.
Omnichannel support would be controllable. Any number of inbound channels (mail, IP telephony, social networks, instant messenger, online chat, mobile app) would be able to be connected without smears in support quality, and incoming information would be merged into a single stream. Accordingly, outgoing information would be automatically sent through the channel tied to a particular subscriber.
It bundles all services available in the company via the described automation system. Each service is a separate process. It remembers not only the sequence of actions, the composition of participants or performers, but also many other attributes, including resource costs and expenses for the execution of each request.
Requests may be assigned various attributes such as urgency, priority, etc.. This is comparable to benchmarks in sports. Every employee knows at any time in which time spans he should operate in order to become the "champion in support" and make the customer happy.
Since the processing workflow is determined in advance and all stages in the service flow are determined, the sorting and routing is handled by the tool. The requests "fly" on autopilot, so to speak, but do not deliver any mix-ups. If the system's autopilot does make a mistake, there's always the opportunity to take control into your own hands.
You can add different conditions for sending notifications. You specify to whom and when notifications about important changes, scheduled tasks or other events should be sent by the tool. Employees are not burdened with tasks that the tool knows better how to handle.
It is difficult to cover all possible applications of this tool in terms of service processes, but I will mention the simplest one, and that is the categorization of requests. It is clear that specialization of employees is the key to efficiency, but proper distribution of requests into categories and thus into specialist groups, which is the power of AI, saves significant resources and improves service quality.
Information about all serviced objects and subjects goes into the database contained in each service desk. For example, the characteristics of all computers that are serviced, as well as the topology of a computer network. Based on this information, you will be able to quickly determine the cause of the problem, select the appropriate replacement for the device or module, and restore functionality without delay.
The knowledge base contains working documents of all kinds. Such a knowledge base tool is not just a warehouse for individual documents, but a catalog with a clear structure, easy navigation and intelligent search in materials. Everything can be stored here: Rules, sample answers and sample comments to common customer inquiries, instructions, FAQ or "best practices".
As digitization advances, customers' self-sufficiency in resolving concerns increases in parallel. By setting up a self-service portal in the service desk, you provide customers with a convenient channel with usable functions for interactions with the support service. Customers become capable of ...
In addition, the portal's capabilities help reduce the workload of service units. For example, with the help of information from the reference works in the knowledge base, users are able to solve some of the queries themselves, without having to call in the support services.
The Service Desk offers the ability to provide everything you need for multi-faceted analytics. Among others:
The statistics show how efficiently and with what quality the team completes their tasks. The reports are not only a tool for "observation" or control.
In addition, it is of course important for the company to know how quickly its employees solve their orders. But much more important is the ability to interpret the information received correctly in order to understand where everything is running smoothly and where processes are inefficient and changes should be made.
For example, if an IT employee's number of unfinished tasks increases with each passing day, what does that tell us? Is he overwhelmed with getting things done? Has he received more requests lately? Is there perhaps some training missing? Or is the handling process not set up efficiently? The reasons change significantly from incident to incident. Good reporting and analysis will achieve the answers.
As a result, the tool provides numbers and lets you take advantage of them by ...
In this list only a part of the functions of such system is enumerated. It is the core around which your support solution can be built.
To gain the maximum benefit from the service desk's functions, it is important to:
