Help Desk Tracking Software

Summary: Help desk tracking software helps you keep your finger on the pulse of your business. Tracking software gives you a way to monitor customer tickets and identify trends at the helpdesk.

Help desk tracking software approaches customer service in a number of different ways. Each offers a variety of services, pluggins and options – and that list continues to grow. Live phone operators, detailed knowledgebases, email, forums, chat and remote support all offer customers and potential customers a long list of resources to find answers. In addition to the information help desk tracking software can offer users, it also generates powerful data and the ability to track tickets from origination through resolution. Help desk tracking can be the difference between an effective system and one that wastes your company’s money.

But more than just serving customers, help desk ticketing is also the best way to take the “vital statistics” on your products or servcices. A helpdesk ticket offers a tool for reporting on technical issues, cyber threats and attacks, data usage, analytics and to-do lists.

My good friend Brian worked in purchasing for a mid-sized tire manufacturer. In addition to purchasing supplies required to make tires, he also managed the vendors for all of their printing and label needs. Each tire off the line had a series of labels attached to display the tire’s attributes and warnings.

Brian had been trying to use one of his large paper supplier’s web sites to order materials with a fair amount of frustration for some time. The suppliers help desk tools were so poorly designed; Brian would often wait until his sales rep stopped in for a call to place orders. He would manually print out the order and pass the paperwork to the rep to have someone on his end manually enter the information.

Finally, the supplier launched a new site complete with a more robust purchasing software package but the same help desk tracking and software they had used previously. Pleased at first, Brian no longer required the rep to make calls as often. And apparently, this is how most of the customers felt. Customer orders flooded the new site until it couldn’t keep up with the number of orders it was processing. The site crashed. Help desk tickets grew and grew but due to a lack of data and reporting from the company’s help desk software, the problems were going unnoticed by the company.

It wasn’t until the number of orders plummeted with defecting customers did the company realize the problem with their help desk tracking software. Eventually, they were able to see the help desk reports and realized that they had let millions of dollars worth of orders sit unprocessed because of a bug in the new site. To make matters worse, their customers had been complaining through the help desk for two months and getting no response because no one at the paper company was monitoring the errors.

The paper company had made a large investment in their new site, but skimped when it came to their help desk tracking software and bandwidth. The tracking software turned in to a black hole as customers logged complaints of errors and missed orders.

Obviously, there were many things that contributed to this issue. Poor IT management was ultimately to blame. They didn’t monitor the data being driven by the tracking software which left them oblivious to problems they could have addressed early and alleviated a great financial loss.

Eventually, new tracking software, along with additional server upgrades to the company’s commerce site was the fix for IT. And customer relationship building eventually was the fix for marketing and sales.