What is Help Desk Software

Managing your help desk is more than just making sure requests get answered. To provide the best service it’s important to have access to real time reporting and request monitoring. Your help desk management software needs to support your efforts by making reporting fast and easy with efficient filtering to allow for various views into your help desk operations. By providing these capabilities in a user friendly manner, HelpSpot stays out of your way and let’s you focus on the data instead of the software.

Dashboard

Being able to see what’s happening with your help desk at all times is critical in effectively managing your customer service efforts. The HelpSpot administrator dashboard provides an excellent high-level, real-time look at your help desk. Let’s go through the key features of the dashboard:

  • Dynamically generated graphs provide an easy to interrupt, visual view of requests in the system today and over the past week.
  • The request ticker shows the last 10 requests in the system, when they came in, who they’re assigned to, and count of active requests assigned to that staff member. You can even mouse over the request to see the request details.
  • The latest forum topics let you keep tabs on activity in your self service portal.
  • UserScape support is always just a click away via the HelpSpot support box.

Reporting

Many help desk management software tools leave reporting as an exercise for the customer by forcing the use of SQL querying tools or Excel ODBC connections to run reports. Even then you often have to do all the leg work of figuring out the tables and trying to find the relevant information.

This is not the case in HelpSpot. Reporting capabilities have been tightly integrated from the very start, making it extremely flexible and powerful feature within HelpSpot. You can run reports against any data held within a request, even custom fields.  Some of the reports which can be generated include:

  • Peak hour of the day, day of the week, month of the year for requests
  • Speed to resolution for staff and overall
  • Staff workload
  • Requests by unique customer
  • Speed to resolution by categories, reporting tags, and status

Request Filtering

Sometimes you need to track requests at an even more granular level. Not just reporting on them, but you need to see the actual requests themselves, filtered and organized by specific criteria. HelpSpot provides this capability with powerful request filters. Using filters you can create views of requests based on dozens of different criteria.  Here’s just a few examples of how filters can be used in managing your help desk:

  • Show all requests assigned to a specific staffer
  • Show requests within and older than selected time periods
  • Match requests based on a full text search of request history content
  • List requests from certain customers or email domains, ex: *@userscape.com