Multilingual capability

HelpDeskSaaS, a comprehensive help desk software as a service, today announced the general availability of multi-language support. HelpDeskSaaS will now be available in Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese.

HelpDeskSaaS simply use the end-user’s browser locale setting to determine the application primary language. For example, if the user’s browser is set to Spanish, that user will see the Spanish version of the application.

Availability and Pricing

The latest release of HelpDeskSaaS with multi-language support can be accessed from the website. HelpDeskSaaS offers a 30-day evaluation Premium Plan and a permanent Free Plan is also available for small businesses. The monthly subscription price for multi-language Edition starts from $19 per month with unlimited number of end-users. There are no add-on costs for any modules.

To read more about new help desk software as a service features and benefits, please visit us at HelpDeskSaaS.com

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• The subset of the service portfolio visible to customers. It consists of services presently active in the service operation phase and those approved to be readily offered to current and prospective customers.
• A database or structured document with information about all live IT services, including those available for deployment. The service catalog is the only part of the service portfolio published to customers, and is used to support the sale and delivery of IT services.
• A service catalog markets an authorized service portfolio, or subset. A service catalog consists of one or more descriptions of current service offerings and optionally, future service capabilities.

The help desk may have internal goals for first call resolution, average speed of answer, and so forth, but debugging software application issues often fall into a black hole when they are assigned outside of the help desk. It is these escalated cases as well as the issuing of new user logins, computers, and software packages, that will benefit the most from defined SLAs.

Creating a service catalog to begin defining your service levels is always easiest where you have a help desk management system and good data to measure. If you have already divided your cases into meaningful categories and/or subcategories, you can start by reporting on the categories that have the highest volume of cases in a given month. This will vary from organization to organization.

After you have listed your categories from highest volume to lowest, review the list and think through the value of a defined SLA for each. If it doesn’t make sense, also determine if your category is appropriate. You may need to look at more detailed information or redefine your categories to make them more or less detailed.

With your list of case categories that should have defined service levels, report on the actual performance against those service levels. You may find that installing software takes one day to turn around, but creating new user logins takes three. You may find that deploying a new laptop or mobile device takes two weeks when you thought it was only taking a few days.

Now that you have a basic service catalog and a baseline of performance metrics, you are ready to begin the process of defining service level agreements with your support teams. Implementing SLAs is outside the scope of this article, because it is an complex process that requires working through management and people issues that may lie outside of conventional organizational boundaries.

Get started now on your service catalog, since it is your first step to achieving SLAs. It makes escalated support performance objective and helps put you in control of case management.

HelpDeskSaas version 1.7.2 was released on July 31, 2010. The release includes a variety of new features, enhancements and bug fixes for a significantly improved user experience. Notable items of the update are User registration, Ticket attachements, Knowledgebase to ticket linking, Custom fields and Theme Backgrounds.

New Design and Layout

The new design should make HelpDeskSaaS more appealing and give it a more modern and professional touch. One of the most significant design changes is a new accordion menu. Accordion menu is a very handy tool to show and hide information as needed, so you can navigate through the help desk application the more quickly and more easily.

Background and menu themes

New color-theme backgrounds and menus for HelpDeskSaaS have been added to enhance the user experience and provide a more coordinated presentation of content. Users can combine current 7 background themes with 24 menu themes for the accordion left-side menu. Using such a kind of design scheme, you can fit your HelpDeskSaaS account more closely to your current website design.
You can control the presentation of content by setting themes from Setting > General menu.

Improved features

This list describes only a part of the improved software features and functionality of the HelpDeskSaaS system:

• Send notification email to a newly registered user:  During the new user registration process, you can choose whether to send email notification to a user,  so users can be notified with their login information.
• Ability to attach files from Microsoft Office family: Ticket attachments now can accept files from the Microsoft Office family, other than the existing archive, image and text files.
• Relate ticket to a Knowledgebase article: Insert any of the knowledgebase articles right into a reply text, so user can refer himself to a previously solved issue or request.
• Improved user defined custom fields:  Create and manage custom fields for a new ticket creation, and also for a new user self-registration process.

To read more about new help desk software as a service features and improvements, please visit us at HelpDeskSaaS.com

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Information centers maintain knowledge bases that store possible solutions and comments about problems previously solved. Accordingly, a knowledge base used in a help desk environment for a customer support contains information about common problems, incidents, customer requests and their solutions.

Such a knowledge base captures and organizes problem-solving information so that existing knowledge can be applied to new problems. The knowledge base is continually built and updated as support staff contribute their comments, as well as user problems are solved and archived.

Building a knowledge base structure

Knowledge base can be broken down into categories and components. These components include the case base, the vocabulary used to describe the cases, and the similarity measures used to compare cases. Support staff can reach for solutions within the knowledge base when they are troubleshooting. Knowledge bases can incorporate articles, hardware and software manuals, and frequently asked questions.

Until recently, building a knowledge base was challenging and time-consuming experience. It required expert developers, who were well trained in the programming languages, writing scripts, and case-based reasoning theory. The process required specialized training and a serious commitment of resources that did not always pay off.

SaaS knowledge base

Now, with HelpDeskSaaS knowledge base builder, building knowledge base requires only expertise in content. In fact, the best knowledge bases are built by content experts – people who have knowledge and experience in the subject meter. In a help desk environment, its’ usually the help desk technician or support representatives.

HelpDeskSaaS knowledge base builder offers an intuitive development interface that allows anyone to create the knowledge base for help desk with no need for programmers, experts, or even web masters.

Because a knowledge base of support problems and solutions can be huge and grow daily, and the ability to locate relevant information is critical to its effective use. HelpDeskSaaS knowledge base includes powerful search capability, which allows users to search for the relevant content. Full text search feature allows searching within knowledge base article title and content, without additional training needed for help desk staff and the end users.

HelpDeskSaaS.com releases a new version of its help desk software as a service with a set of convenient improvements and upgrades. You can find out more about this product here. The main new feature is the ability to create and share the knowledgebase.

Create and share a Knowledgebase

The knowledgebase allows you to create a collection of commonly asked questions and their answers. You can group these into categories and set them to be either visible or private (support stuff only). The client area offers the user the choice of browsing through the articles in your KB or searching based on keywords they enter.

Self-service portal

The Self-service portal is a vital component in reducing support resources. By enabling users easily log problems and check on the status of tickets via the Web, Self-Service Portal improves the productivity of your helpdesk stuff and reduces the total cost of service delivery.

Customers are able to resolve some issues without ever contacting the help desk. HelpDeskSaaS Self-Service will allow customers to search for solutions to common problems event without login:

• Customized portal page – modify the look and feel of your help desk to direct end users to the tools and information they need
• Friendly web interface for creating new requests via simplified data entry form
• Enable your end users to submit trouble tickets online, and monitor their tickets throughout the support process.

The HelpDeskSaaS enables companies to view their entire small business client base with a single sign-on. Using an intuitive point-and-click menu, support representatives are expected to track and solve help desk issues, preview the reports, and offer online access to help desk information and direct ticket processing for their clients’ employees.

Read more at: http://www.helpdesksaas.com/

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HelpDeskSaaS.com releases a new version of its SaaS customer support product. You can find out more about this product here. New version introduces a set of improvements and convenient modifications:

Using personalized URL address

Your account now can be accessed using nice looking personalized URL addresses like http://yourcompany.helpdesksaas.com/. For users registered prior the version 1.6.3, please contact us to update your settings with the desired sub-domain.

Import users from Excel sheet

If you have a spreadsheet of customers’ information, and need to register them in your HelpDeskSaaS account, to input the data manually is a lot of work. The import functionality allows you to import users’ information, which are stored in Excel sheet or in any other CSV file. To import users, go to Administration > End users > Import users menu option.

Ticket rating system

Ticket rating allows your customers to rate the responses they get to tickets. It also allows you to monitor how pleased your customers are with the support they receive from your staff.

Each reply in the client area will show a row of evaluation percentages for the user to choose from in rating the response. They range from 0% Poor to 100% Excellent. Rating a reply is optional so not end user is required to rate a reply. There are also 3 reports in the Reporting section that allow you to monitor the ratings, among the other parameters.

Read more at: http://www.helpdesksaas.com/

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The very first quality that the company look for is good communication skills. Meeting customer needs is a top priority, so customer service skills is the basic issue for help desk operations. On the other hand, excellent writing skills is also important for help desk agents. During the interaction with a customer, writing notes will help the next agent or technician who assists the same caller, if they call again. The agent can also determine the next possible step.

Since help desk agents are are the front-liners of the business and companies, every interaction is important and it’s vital that customer requests be resolved in timely manner. Satisfied customers spreading experience they had with customer service, so every good respond is a great marketing point.

Being a help desk agent is a thought and stressed job. They have to face clients and represent the company appropriately. Everyday pressures from the managers, customers and interacting with them personally is one of the most frustrating jobs. On the other hand, its an exciting profession, and if a person do it well, it opens a lot of doors to take different training opportunities, to travel, and receive excellent compensations.

There are a lot of opened help desk job positions on the job market. If you are interested in applying to one, make sure that you are prepared not only physically, but also emotionally. This job might test your personality, but then again, this is all part of the whole package. Staying focused on your career objectives and goals will help you to success in this exciting world.

This software release comes with stability improvements and new features that help you stay in touch with your customers: enhanced automation and e-mail templates, general performance improvements, and simplified user management area.

New layout themes with dynamic switching

In addition, this release brings enhancements to overall look and feel of the application. With this release, you can choose your HelpDeskSaaS theme between 7 custom designs, and fit presentation style to your current website design. Dynamic theme switching allows you to dynamically change the style of your HelpDeskSaaS account.

To set new layout theme through your account, select Administration > General settings and then select the theme you want to use.

Read more at: http://www.helpdesksaas.com/

Identify who will staff the help desk

• The person manning the help desk needs good interpersonal skills.
• The person manning the help desk should not be the person providing technical support (because they will be somewhere providing technical support!)
• The person manning the help desk does not need to be technical, but does need to be organized.
• The help desk could be part of another role performed by an existing member of staff.
• Remember that the help desk will enable the person providing technical support to concentrate on that work and not the details of how to log a support ticket.

Single point of contact

Where organizations do not provide a single point of contact, this can create problems when teaching staff and agents need to discuss an incident or request. Organization staff reporting an incident may not always be available when the agents arrives to fix it, which can create delays. Therefore, organizations should provide a single point of contact who is familiar with the details of an incident when registering a support ticket with a agent or third-party support provider. This is most important where technical support is external to organization (for instance, provided by third party support company). HelpDeskSaaS provides a special reporting capabilities for single point of contacts. It also allows to one or more persons to independently manage different ticket queues, and to monitor the different user groups.

How to provide a single point of contact

1. Agree how calls will be recorded.
2. Decide how much extra work is involved in recording details of incidents and requests and creating support tickets.
3. Decide which role in organization provides access for staff and those providing technical support and can accommodate the additional work of maintaining the call log.
4. Ensure that the technical support providers and organization staff know who is the single point of contact.

Who will be the single point of contact?

The role of single point of contact could be an additional function to the following staff, but this is best left to organization to decide.

• Organization administration staff
• ICT co-coordinator
• Network manager
• Other nominated staff

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