Your company’s help desk is the place either your customers or your staff call to get help with a problem. Help desks can range from one person answering a phone in smaller com panies to, in larger companies, a group of topic experts (IT, Human Resources, and Facilities for example) using specialist software to help track and analyse problems. The latest help desk software is internet-based, and can improve help desk productivity dramatically.

Whether you’re running an employee or customer support centre, the quality of support you deliver has a direct impact on the effectiveness and profitability of your organisation. Externally focused support centers engender customer satisfaction - and providing superior support is often the key differentiator in today’s market. Internally directed support operations optimise service delivery and costs and get staff and equipment back into production without unnecessary delay.

So how is help desk software being used? Health care providers Southern Cross are a good example of a medium to large New Zealand business with a diverse technology infrastructure. The company has 950 PCs and 150 printers operating in 26 different sites around the country. Just keeping track of all this equipment is difficult enough, let alone managing internal support phone calls and emails and dispatching maintenance technicians. In 2001 the company made the decision to amalgamate its two support centers into one, and installed FrontRange Solution’s HEAT (represented in New Zealand by Olympic Software).

The return on investment was immediate says IS services manager Nicole Hughes. “Eighty percent of our support calls come via email,” she says. “Before HEAT what happened was someone would email with a problem, but wouldn’t include critical information like user names or passwords. So we’d waste considerable time having to call them up and ask for all the details manually. Whereas now with HEAT, they log into a special support call browser screen that prompts them with compulsory questions so they can’t submit an incomplete call and we get the information we need right from the start.” This is a typical example of how smarter support center software applications can improve overall productivity.

Another example? Envisage Support Centre (from Envisage systems) has been installed at Task Technologies (a software provider to the retail oil industry providing point of sale, back office and head office communications systems to Caltex and BP stations). With hundreds of Caltex and BP facilities around the country, Task Technologies had a great deal of equipment to monitor. “Envisage gives us features we didn’t have before,” says Task director Barry Dow. “Including asset management of all our IT equipment by serial number. We’re now able to do proper asset management at any gas station and track this all the way through the organisation.”

The Envisage help desk also creates a knowledge database on ways to analyse and resolve recurring problems. This information is then used by Task to determine the reliability of various products, and what areas of staff training may need to be addressed – in essence, Envisage is enabling Task to work smarter.

Up until the mid-90s help desks primarily handled inbound and outbound phone interactions. With the advent of the internet and email, however, help desks today are managing numerous contact channels including web, voice, email and even live chat. With the new channels, comes the opportunity for customers to self-serve.

An example? When Air New Zealand realised many calls to its customer service team, and email traffic generated via its web site, related to repetitive issues, they selected RightNow’s hosted eService software to enable their customers to self serve. After entering Q&A responses for the 200 most common questions into their database, Air New Zealand hoped to decrease the number of email inquiries.

They were successful. “Since the RightNow implementation,” says Air New Zealand’s Yvonne Lim, “email inquiries relating to the frequent -flyer program are down by 56%. This result was attributable to RightNow as our customers began to find the answers themselves on our site using the self-learning knowledge base. On average, emails across our service centres have reduced by 55%.”

So it’s clear smarter help desk software solutions are increasing efficiency and lowering business operating costs. Read on for a list of leading local vendors.

Click here to view 2004 Help Desk Buyers Guide

January 2004

Click here to view 2004 Help Desk Buyers Guide