Customers want efficient, seamless, and personalized assistance from service providers. To accommodate multiple customers and their demands, more providers are using intelligent help desk software tools like Atlassian’s Jira Service Management Help Desk. A help desk software tool can be best described as a nerve center for managing customer inquiries and supporting requests. It streamlines and centralizes customer service operations. This tool can also facilitate ticket management, ensure automation, and help end-users resolve issues themselves.

Average cost of help desk software tools
This figure can vary depending on several market- and manufacturer-related factors, but the average cost of enterprise help desk services ranges between $3,200 and $7,200 per month. These costs fluctuate depending on a host of factors, such as required support levels, monthly ticket numbers, and time coverage.

There are several options available on the market. High-end tools, such as Atlassian Jira’s service desk, are priced reasonably and offer all the features that top businesses expect from their help desk software programs.

Uses of help desk software tools
Help desk tools such as Jira’s help desk software can seamlessly run a company’s client relations and grievance redressal operations and perform other tasks.

Structuring IT help desk
All companies can hire IT technicians, but structuring the IT help desk can be challenging, given the various tasks involved in the process. A tool such as Atlassian’s help desk software helps organize help desks into multiple levels or tiers. Each tier has specific tasks and responsibilities. For example, in a 3-tier help desk, tier 0 can be a self-service portal, while tiers 1, 2, and 3 can have IT engineers and other technicians, with knowledge and skill levels gradually increasing with each tier. Each customer query or grievance is assigned a ticket number. Depending on the complexity of the problem, tickets are issued and sent directly to the appropriate tier for resolution. Creating a hierarchy is one of the biggest necessities of any help desk in an organization. By managing it so quickly, such tools save companies a lot of time and money and enable IT technicians to focus on their core objectives.

Queuing and assigning requests
Generally, help desk tickets are arranged on a priority basis, with higher-priority tasks, i.e., more urgent or grave issues, eating into an IT team’s productive time. Once the software is installed and set up to handle ticket assignments and queuing, most of the work is automated based on the kind of consumer query or grievance. The tool manages ticket queueing on a first-come, first-served basis using automated assignment models like load balancing and round-robin.

Empowering end users with self-service
Not all tasks require technicians and hours to get done. Companies’ end users often encounter repetitive and basic issues they can resolve. Doing so takes some of the burden off an organization’s IT help desk team. Companies can use their help desk software tool to create a self-service portal to provide information, instructions, and solutions so that users can resolve and find answers to basic queries themselves. A service can be attached to such a portal. This catalog can help customers easily view and choose the services they need. Apart from empowering customers, such portals are also used as a platform on which organization-wide announcements for issues regarding planned maintenance and servers being down can be made.

Conducting end-user surveys
Companies must assess the performance of help desk technicians and employees to judge critical success factors, such as the viability of help desk structures and how seamless a process is. This is also where the help desk software comes in, as it can enable companies to gather feedback from customers. This way, technicians can be assessed based on their speed and responsiveness to ticket resolution. Additionally, the technology in place can be evaluated by its ease and lag-free use. The processes and IT help desk hierarchy can be evaluated by checking how easily tickets are submitted, how the tickets reach the technicians, and how the customer query is resolved. The software tools that automate help desk-related work can send surveys to end users to empower them and let them evaluate the quality of the help desk service they received.

Factors to consider when buying help desk software tools
Software tools for help desk streamlining are expensive. This is why companies would want their tools to cover several bases.

Support capabilities
Companies need to know if a tool offers support capabilities from the service provider’s end. One example of service support from the software tool manufacturer is whether it offers support across multiple channels, such as emails and live chats.

Ease of integration
Organizations today use tools such as enterprise resource management and content management systems to manage their data and resources effectively. A help desk software tool must seamlessly integrate into enterprise-wide software frameworks and programs.

Scalability of tool
As an organization grows, so does the size of its IT help desk. Accordingly, companies must buy software tools with adequate scalability to keep up with this growth.

Popular help desk software tools in the market

• Jira Service Management Help Desk
• Zoho Desk
• HappyFox
• HaloITSM
• Freshdesk
• Vivantio
• Freshservice
• InvGate Service Desk