HelpDeskPilot: Help Desk and Team Management
To keep customers coming back, and to improve products and services, businesses need to communicate with customers and other businesses. In the past there were call centers and direct lines, but as many businesses have discovered, web applications can make managing a help desk easier than ever.
HelpDeskPilot is one of those applications, a web based platform that lets customers reach you, and you manage your load of incoming tickets.
To get an idea of what the application could do we ran the trial hosted by HelpDeskPilot, but actual users will download the application to their servers and run if from there. Once installed, the entire operation is web based, and through the one time fee structure, paid for. Let’s take a closer look.
HelpDeskPilot breaks the task of maintaining a help desk into four tabs, each of which has options underneath. To get started we’ll work with the last tab on the right, Manage. Clicking on the sublink Settings we are able to change our defaults, anything from uploading our logo to setting the number of tickets per page, and excluding weekends when calculating end-to-end averages. The next link, Departments, lets us set up our various departments with specific mails and prefixes for simple sorting. Next we can click on the Staff link to set up our staff, set permissions and access. After setting up the department and staff comes the link for Mail Templates, where we can customize new tickets, replies, staff notifications, lost password letters, and a number of other administrative messages that may need to be sent.
Support for 10 languages, including English, German, Spanish, Arabic, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Danish, Dutch, Russian and French can be added in under the Languages link (Manage tab). The links for Spam Filter and Canned Replies allow users to filter unnecessary email, and the Canned Replies allows users to create automated responses. The Customers link allows you to set up a customer portal including a password and username, and the Custom Fields link allows you to set up custom fields that are either ticket (linked to a department) or customer specific. Plugins, such as Knowledge Base, SLA Management, LDAP Management, Branding-Free, Notice Manager, and Spam Prevention are available as optional add-ons for a fee through this link.
With things set up, let’s go straight to the heart of the application, under the Tickets tab. As tickets come in they can be viewed under this tab, separated by their various statuses (open, closed, on hold, assigned to you). The most interesting feature here is that you can create a custom view, showing tickets by status and priority. The tickets themselves lay all pertinent information across the page and there are the new elements of a field for total minutes spent, a print friendly page, and drop-down boxes where users can assign the ticket and change the priority. For managers this is a useful feature to have on the ticket screen, allowing them to quickly evaluate the complexity of the issue and reassign it if necessary.
To measure effectiveness of agents and the products/services, HelpDeskPilot has included a reports feature, visible through the Statistics tab. Users can run breakdowns by tickets, departments, staff, and customers. Each criteria (tickets, etc.) offers several options of comparison and a filter of dates. The Tickets statistics, for example, can be seen as an Aging Report, Daily Inflow, Priority vs. Status, and Time Spent.
The last tab in the HelpDeskPilot is News, where team members can make or read announcements. This is helpful for team members, who can keep up with the latest product changes in the same program that they use to handle customer issues.
Below you will see a screenshot of the customer portal, which offers customers a chance to see their ticket with all the information they submitted, including the attachment name. A printer friendly view, and the abilities to open a new ticket or reply to an existing one are all included in the customer’s view.
The downsides to HelpDeskPilot are twofold: one, they require a business to have its own server, and two, the startup cost begins at $299.95. Though there is no monthly fee, these two conditions are likely to discourage small business owners. The one time cost of $299.95 allows a staff of 5, 3 departments, a single domain license, and unlimited tickets. Packages for multiple domains and additional users are available, or you can purchase components as you go. Plugins, including the knowledge base are also sold separately.
From reports to the ability to see which agents are online at that moment, HelpDeskPilot is a capable help desk application that offers a platform to manage help desk tickets and keep a handle on your help desk team. To find HelpDeskPilot and other help desk applications there is the Listio search: business+helpdesk.
New to Listio? Our tag cloud search offers an easy way to narrow your hunt for the perfect web application or service. No more second guessing of search terms. Just click on one tag, then as many more as you'd like to narrow your search results. It's easy and ensures you get to the listing you want. Finding web 2.0 was never so easy.
Tags: business, email, helpdesk, manage
Posted in: Help Desk | Respond
Bookmark & Share: 
