7 Key Tips for Choosing the Best IT Service Desk Software

A Global IT Experience Benchmark study found that 80% of employees perceived their lost productivity caused by 12.6% of tickets. Therefore, it is paramount to have profound IT service desk software.

These are essentially delayed tickets from the service hub that have either been on hold because of communication gaps like the service desk still waiting to hear more about the issue from the end user, reassignment of complicated tickets, or lack of priority for ticket resolution by the IT service desk so that they can meet their team goals.

As the above statistic highlights, the help desk software can either make your customers happy and satisfied through better incident management or unhappy and dissatisfied by not addressing the rise in ticket volume.

Therefore, it is clear that the IT help desk is crucial in leading your organization’s profit or loss situation.

By choosing the right IT service desk software, you can automate and streamline your ticketing system and the team members while ensuring continued success for your organization with loyal customers as your backing.

What is an IT Service Desk Software?

An IT service desk software program is a computer program that acts as a single point of contact between the IT service provider and the end users. It is a superset of the standard help desk, focused on delivering service to the end users.

This means that an IT service desk will help handle software licensing and third-party contracts related to IT service management. It will also handle incidents, service requests, and communication with users. Additionally, they will plan service upgrades with better task management.

Thus, for all IT organizations, the service desk is one of the most important operations that regularly needs management. This ensures that all the promised services are available for your organization and enhancing the team performance.

Steps to Identify What Kind of IT Service Desk Software You Need?

Numerous service and help desk vendors in the market today offer free trials. Each offers different solutions to meet different business needs. It can be difficult to help scout the most exceptional service provider among this vast range of options.

However, knowing the four most common types of IT service desk will help you narrow down your options and select the best to address your business’s complex issues.

Open-Source Service Desk

An open-source service or help desk has source code that your developers can access. This means your developers can modify or enhance the tool to meet the business’s needs.

They can even build the tool over time as the need arises or changes. To do so, it can add features, fix bugs, improve its user interface, and even strengthen its security features.

However, your internal team of IT professionals might take months to configure this software and cash on its automation capabilities.

If they face any issues, the vendor will unlikely give you reliable support in issue resolution. Additionally, the security of your data and knowledge base integration will always be questionable.

Web-Based Service Desk

A web-based service desk is a cloud-based tool hosted on your vendor’s servers. To access this tool, you can choose monthly or annual subscriptions instead of making one-time payments.

This IT service desk tends to be more convenient because your business will not have to worry about data backup, security, or maintenance and will have valuable insights for better decision-making. All of this will be handled by your vendor, easing your workload and responsibilities.

However, you must rely on your vendor to resolve the issue during technical glitches. While this is one of the best practices, businesses must understand that these software have high scalability; they come with limited customization options, only in the most advanced versions.

On-Premise Service Desk

To use an on-premise service desk, you must buy the software license and pay the one-time setup fees, which is a considerable investment. You must install the software on your server and manage its data backup, security, and maintenance.

While this software tends to be more expensive and requires more effort from your side, its main benefit is that you will have complete control over the privacy of your information.

However, you will need an in-house IT team to constantly maintain your software and recover data in case of power outages and hardware failures.

Enterprise Service Desk

Enterprise service desks are best suited for large enterprises with huge support teams that do routine tasks and need advanced features. This software offers features like IT asset management, multi-brand support, change management, machine learning, and enterprise reporting.

Considering the range of their features, these software tend to be more expensive than similar software but with fewer features.

While this software can be the one-stop solution for your customers and employees, due to its large number of features, it tends to be more complex to use. This means that you will need to hire well-trained and technically sound operators.

Important Factors That Will Define the Selection of IT Service Desk Software

There are some key factors that you must keep in mind when choosing the right IT service desk software. These are:

Start by Creating a Customer Service Strategy

Creating a customer service strategy is one of the most important factors in helping you select the right IT service desk for your business.

In this strategy, you will decide what great customer service means for your business. It can either be a 5-star rating that your customer gives to your customer service agent or a large number of repeat customers.

Based on your decision, you will also need to establish customer service standards that will be followed consistently by all your departments.

Understand the Employee Expectations

Your employees ‘ expectations are another factor determining your IT service desk software choice. As a business owner, you ensure your employees have a stress-free life.

You can improve their working lives by choosing service desk software that helps them save time, like using generative AI while improving their productivity and operational efficiency.

Before finalizing IT service desk software, you must talk with your IT support team managers and representatives about the impact of the right tool on their working abilities such as bettering customer experience and service delivery.

Consider the Key Features of an IT Service Desk Software

To choose the most suitable IT service desk software according to the needs of the business, consider the key features required to fulfill your business needs. These include:

• Knowledge Base: Your software should allow you to create an internal knowledge base from scratch. You can also add FAQs, video tutorials, articles, or other relevant materials to help your customers solve their issues independently. This will reduce the number of support tickets that you receive.
• Live Chat: This is a critical feature your service desk must have. With it, you can give real-time support to your customers and employees, maximize sales opportunities, and even improve customer satisfaction.
• Issue Tracking: This is one of those primary features that will let you convert every customer request or issue into a ticket. You can then track the ticket throughout its lifecycle, and your agents can monitor their progress through a dashboard.
• Internal Collaboration: There is a high chance that you will need the help of more than one individual or department to resolve a ticket. Your IT service desk must support internal collaboration features like private notes, parent-child ticketing or even have a shared inbox so that everyone is on the same page during the task. This will help your agents work together and resolve tickets faster.
• Reports and Analytics: You must get insights into how well your support team is performing and where they can improve. Your service desk must offer you all the data to track key performance metrics like customer satisfaction, ticket backlog, and first response time. This will also help your managers monitor their team’s performance.

Scalability Is the Key

Your IT service desk software must be scalable to handle the requirements of your growing business and, thus, a large volume of customers. A scalable service desk will support your business’s growth and future-proof it.

This means you will be able to manage customer communications better while letting your teams collaborate efficiently and without losing any customer requests or issues. It will also save you from the hassle of getting new software and learning it due to your business’s expansion.

How to Choose the Right IT Service Desk Software?

When choosing IT service desk software, you must consider several things. These will help you ensure that your service desk meets the business’s needs, ensures customer satisfaction, and achieves all objectives.

The 7 things to consider before selecting an IT service desk software are:

1. Multi-Channel Compatibility

Your service desk must have multi-channel compatibility. This is important because businesses have become more distributed, with their clients spread across a vast area. Additionally, the clients tend to be on the move frequently.

Thus, if you want to keep your customers satisfied and loyal to your business, you must ensure that they can interact with your service desk through multiple mediums, including emails, web, mobile, and custom apps.

This ease and convenience of access will impress your customers and keep them connected to your business.

2. Process Modelling and Codeless Configuration

The IT service desk software you choose accurately must reflect your customer support teams’ operational processes.

The software should help you track and resolve customer support tickets.

Additionally, the software should be easy to customize and implement without relying on endless coding. This will help you reduce your customization costs and resources.

3. Ease of Use

Before you choose a service desk tool for your business, you must assess its user-friendliness and the learning curve involved.

User-friendly IT service desk software is easy to navigate, can be accessed from anywhere and anytime, and integrates seamlessly with existing systems.

You must also ensure that the software is user-friendly for tech experts and customers or users who will use it to add tickets or requests.

This will lead to a positive customer experience that will help you strengthen the goodwill of your business.

Complex software will become a barrier for your customers and end users, stopping you from achieving the purpose of this software and resulting in negative customer feedback.

4. Data and Reporting

You would not be able to improve the performance of your IT support teams without data-based insights.

Thus, your IT service desk software must have powerful data and reporting features. It should also allow you to measure the relevant customer support metrics.

With these insights, you can identify where your IT service management team’s efficiency has fallen short, how well they achieved their goals, and how you can improve their performance.

5. Cost Effectiveness

You must assess the cost-effectiveness of your service desk software. Even if it is advertised as a free helpdesk tool, chances are that it is part of a freemium model.

In this model, you can use the basic version for free, but you will need to pay to use the premium features.

The best service desk software is one that fits your budget while also giving you all the essential features and capabilities so that you can boost your team’s performance and help them quickly fix customer problems.

6. Enhancing Productivity

The service desk tool you choose must support and enhance your team’s productivity. This means that it should be able to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, giving your team time for other tasks that require their attention and saving them from burnout.

This is why tools with free plans are usually not used; they are slow and challenging to use, requiring your team to put in more time and energy to get the job done. This will also hurt their job satisfaction and even make them look for better opportunities.

Additionally, it will result in slow response times, leading to customer dissatisfaction and them shifting to your competitors.

7. Impact of Customer Reviews

Lastly, before finalizing a service desk to help you manage support requests, look into the customer reviews left for that product.

These reviews will help you discover how other teams use the product to meet their business objectives, potential problems you might face in using it, and whether the product works as advertised.

While reviewing these reviews, pay special attention to customers from the same industry as you or whose customer support teams are the same size as yours.

How Can Motadata’s IT Service Desk Software Be Your Able Ally?

Motadata’s IT service desk software can be your ally because it is AI-enabled and built on DFIT (Deep Learning Framework for IT Operations). This ensures that it can easily change along with businesses, people, processes, and technology.

With its flexible practices and intelligent automation, your internal teams will be able to resolve customer issues, while also reducing escalations easily.

Some of its key features that make this possible are:

• Lifecycle management of service requests with integrated ITIL-aligned modules like incident, problem, change, knowledge, and release management.
• An NLP-powered virtual agent for addressing common customer issues through automated, personalized responses or by giving access to the relevant knowledge base.
• Reducing workloads on your technicians by using triggers for intelligent assignments.
• Improve your SLA management by getting notified during an SLA breach and prioritizing these tickets.
• Support the multi-channel adoption of the service desk, where customers can choose between multiple options, such as emails, self-service portals, chatbots, and WhatsApp.

Motadata’s system is user-friendly and intuitive, significantly reducing the learning curve. It is also easily scalable and customizable, making it a long-term solution for your business.

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