Featured Partners: Project Management Software
If there’s something strange in your neighborhood? If there’s something weird and it doesn’t look good? If you’re seeing things running through your head? An invisible man sleeping in your bed? Who you gonna call? … What if you need to reset your password, the printer doesn’t work, you can’t update adobe reader, you can’t access the network or your computer freezes? Who are you gonna call? Ghostbusters?! No! Thanks, Ray Parker, but no you gonna call the help desk.
As you may already know, and I hope that you know, the help desk is a critical part of customer service. These are the superheroes that fix the problems for your customers who are probably extremely frustrated. Resolving your customer’s issues, ASAP, greatly increases customer satisfaction, which, in turn, positively impacts future sales. To put it another way, having an excellent help desk service impacts the life of your company. Typically reached via a toll-free phone number, help desk support is now using the web to support customers via chat tools and social networks.
Usually, companies starting out using a single-tier customer support system: a single point of contact to handle queries or solve problems. However, as a company grows they tend to need more than just a single-tier model. This means they move to a multi-tiered support system.
For instance, if you are selling project management software to businesses, you could get queries like, I forget my username and password, what do I do? Or, how do I deal with a bug that is preventing me from time tracking on an iPad? In the latter case, you need experts to solve this bug issue. While in the first case, a less complex query about usernames and passwords would not require a programmer. When you have proper tiers set up in your help desk support, it helps allocate support resources to meet customer needs.
Recommended Help Desk Support Solutions
1 monday.com
monday.com Work OS is an award-winning no-code work management platform that helps teams manage projects and workflows more efficiently.
Used by 152,000+ customers worldwide, this fully customizable software lets you plan, manage, and track every project in one place. monday.com offers time-saving and easy-to-use features such as automations, time tracking, document sharing, and real-time collaboration. Multiple board views such as Gantt and Kanban help you structure and navigate tasks and projects the way you prefer, and dashboards give a high-level overview of your progress.
In addition, integrations with apps such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and Excel, allow you to easily continue working with your favorite tools from within the platform. monday.com also offers dedicated solutions, such as monday dev and monday sales CRM, designed to answer the needs of specific industries.
2 Wrike
Wrike is the most powerful work management platform on the market, enabling teams to plan projects and collaborate in real time. Our award-winning software is trusted by 20,000+ companies across the globe, including Sony, Estée Lauder, and Siemens.
Wrike’s customizable features include Gantt charts, request forms, dashboards, cross-tagging, time tracking, and proofing. Integrate with 400+ apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce. Automate repetitive tasks and achieve 50% faster planning. Work from anywhere with 100% access to your files via our mobile and desktop apps.
Whether you’re a small startup or an established brand, Wrike has the solution for you. Paid plans start at $9.80/user/month. Join our community of 2.3 million — start your free two-week trial today.
3 Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a leading work execution platform that has real-time work management features, collaboration and automation tools. Users are presented with a familiar and easy-to-use spreadsheet-like interface. However, it has enterprise-grade capabilities that even Fortune 500 companies like Cisco, Bayer, HP, and PayPal are confident to adopt in their business. Strong project management features enable teams to utilize different views of real-time data, and switch easily from Gantt, card, grid and calendar views. Smartsheet has automatic update requests, and can be used for waterfall and agile projects, product launch, sprint planning, and more. The resource management feature provides users the visibility who is busy, and who is not, in real-time. They can also attach files, share sheets, get notified, view the activity log, export, email, and print.
4 Workzone
#1 rated with 20 years of real-world use, Workzone offers a suite of carefully chosen features, making it easy for everyone to use. Looking for lasting process change? Difficulty adopting a tool before? Get unlimited support from experienced trainers who will help you create systems & manage projects successfully for years to come. Starting at $200/month for a team of 5. Access the features you need (without the fluff), including collaboration, creative review, resource management, & reporting.
5 Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects is an online project management application that helps its users to plan projects, collaborate with employees and clients, keep track of time, manage documents, and generate charts and reports. Users work on a central platform where they can keep track of progress, discuss ideas, communicate easily and stay updated. It is cloud-based and highly accessible, where user data is kept safe with stringent security systems. The software is also scalable depending on the number of projects, with the option to add more features. Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management tool that helps you plan your work, track it efficiently, and collaborate with your team wherever they are.
What are the Different Help Desk Tiers?
Tier – I Support
This is the basic level of customer support. The customer representative is a generalist with a broad understanding of the product and may not understand the inner workings. In this case, they would identify a customer’s needs and provide tips on how to manage a problem.
Typically, these solutions are in a FAQ or a knowledge base. Employees at this tier use a knowledge base in a majority of customer calls. Tier-1 support usually provides a 24-hour service and is outsourced to a 3rd party. When a tier-1 support employee is not able to resolve the issue, they classify the problem and pass it on to the appropriate tier-2 employee. At this point, an issue tracking ticket is issued to the customer.
Tier – II Support
Tier-II support involves technical knowledge and is staffed by technicians who have troubleshooting capabilities beyond the tier-1 employees. The tier-II help desk employees are staffed by either the company involved or outsourced to a 3rd party. The technicians tend to have a specialization and will determine which specialization best matches the customer’s needs before helping him. If their technical specialization is one that can help the customer, the tech then determines whether this problem is a new issue or an existing one. Advanced diagnostic tools and data analysis may be done at this point.
If the issue is an existing one, the tier-II specialist then finds out if there is a solution or a workaround in the database. The customer is then told how to fix their problem. However, in some cases, there might be no solution as it’s an open bug. In that case, the tier-II desk adds an entry to the bug list. Then, depending on the number of instances where customers are experiencing the same problem, the help desk could ask the developers to fix the bug.
If a customer experiences a new issue, further analysis has to be done to see if it can be dealt with. The help desk employee would then explain to the customer how to fix their issue. However, if the tech cannot fix the problem at this tier, the problem goes to tier-III. At this tier, the problem is assigned to a developer at the company responsible for the product.
Tier – III Support
Tier-III requires a person who has specialized skills over and above the work the techs do in tier II. This support is usually provided by the specialists involved in product development. They deal with complex issues. To solve the problem, they will collect as much data as possible from the employees at tiers 1 and 2.
In my previous job as a developer at Microsoft in the Windows OS team, I used to get the harder bugs in the operating system passed on from support personnel around the world and from the crash dumps you report when an application stops working. Sometimes fixing the problem involves a deeper analysis of the operating system. Fixing the problem may require a Windows update.
Tier – IV Support
This tier only exists in a multiple vendor case. For instance, if you’re an app developer and the issue involves fixing the problem on an OS mobile level provided by another company, you simply request support from the other company.
