| Planning to buy a Help Desk Software? Read the | | | | contribute to a significant cost saving for the |
| following before you choose one. Comprehensive Help | | | | organisation. |
| Desk Functionality | | | | Purchasing |
| A good Help Desk product can dramatically rise the | | | | Your IT department is constantly in need of spendable |
| productivity of the Help Desk Personnel (which in turn | | | | Hardware (floppies, CDs, printer ribbons, printers, PCs |
| will rise the organisation's productivity as a whole). | | | | etc) and software. All these needs will be typically |
| Users or customers should be able to submit their | | | | taken care by a separate Purchase Department. |
| requests by mail, phone or through the web interface | | | | Seamless tracking between the two departments is |
| provided by the product. These requests gathered | | | | an essentiality which will result in getting the required |
| centrally can then be attended to by Support Reps or | | | | needs on schedule & their optimal use. Also, see |
| Help Desk personnel (who have already been | | | | whether the product you choose lets you mail the |
| automatically notified about the request). Adding | | | | Purchase Orders to Vendors & track them too. |
| memos/notes to the requests & viewing the history of | | | | Contracts (AMCs) Management |
| Requests can help too. | | | | Most hardware components in an IT organisation |
| Buildable Knowledge Base (KB) | | | | come under some Annual Maintenance Plan. The |
| Even before a complaint is registered, Users can be | | | | product you choose should allow you to create & |
| made to search a prebuilt KB which will result in time | | | | maintain various AMCs with the various vendors. If the |
| savings for the Help Desk Personnel. The Support | | | | product reminds you days before a contract ends |
| Reps can also use the KB for finding a solution. Thus | | | | (say, through an auto-generated email), it will be an |
| the KB can result in increasing the first call resolutions. | | | | added advantage. |
| The Support Reps and Users alike should be able to | | | | Out-of-the-box |
| add on to, edit & delete from the existing KB. Having a | | | | The Help Desk product installation should go on like a |
| private KB accesable only to the Help Desk staff will | | | | breeze. Moreover, it should be put into operation with nil |
| help in segregating certain solutions. | | | | to minimum initial configuration & all the features should |
| IT Asset Managenment | | | | be inbuilt with no extra development effort. |
| What is considered here as an organisation's IT | | | | User friendly UI |
| Assets are typical hardware components like PCs, | | | | The product you are looking at should have a very |
| Printers, Scanners etc & Licensed Software like MS | | | | user friendly client interface as it'll be used by all |
| Office, Adobe Photoshop etc. The product should | | | | employees in your organisation. The UI should be |
| allow these IT assets to be well tracked & their | | | | simple & at the same time offer easy-to-use features. |
| records to be maintained - from their purchase till | | | | If the product is web enabled, it'll make things much |
| end-of-life. It should also allow easy software license | | | | more easier - any user can login from anywhere using |
| tracking by which you will come to know of how | | | | just a browser. |
| which software is under or over utilized. This will | | | | |