Help desk software

You have a great product. People are lining up to buy from you, and your Internet business is booming. One thing you might not have planned for is customer support. A lot of business owners find themselves in this situation.

The one thing that often seems to be the last thing on anyone's mind is product support. Your manufacturing plant or developers assure you nothing can go wrong and the product is fully tested, but sure enough, your customers and clients begin calling in with unexpected issues.

At first, you might assign one or more employees from the quality assurance or development group to assist the customers with problems. While you're still making money, you're business isn't that large yet and you certainly can't afford a dedicated support staff.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't have the proper processes procedures established. If a customer calls in with an issue, who do you assign the issue to? When the problem is resolved, who does the person assigned to the issue notify? Are you having many occurrences of a single problem? Should there be a code change or manufacturing problem you need to address because of this recurring issue?

Without the proper processes and procedures, you're likely to find yourself in a quagmire of lost and mishandled issues, mislaid customer contacts, and unresolved problems.

Perhaps you do have a process? A call comes in with a customer issue, you write it down on a yellow-sticky-note, give it to a developer to resolve, and forget about it.

This process might work effectively, if you have a small number of customers and/or a very small number of problems. If you have many customers, and you likely will eventually, and you have more issues with your products (as they get more complex, you will), this sticky-note procedure won't stand up to the stress.

You'll very likely soon realize your business isn't complete without some kind of comprehensive support plan. This plan will undoubtedly include some kind of software to assist in managing your support issues. This is the situation where you'll need to begin using some kind of help desk software.

Help desk software allows you to manage the issues, inform customers and clients of commonly issues (via a FAQ – Frequently Asked Question posting), send email updates on issues, and track who is working on which issues.

You'll find implementing a help desk solution not only resolves many if not all of the troubles you'll have managing your customer support issues, this implementation will be a key part in making your business complete.

» Free Help desk Software

Rather than paying $200.00 or more for such software, you can give this free of charge script a try: help desk software Hesk

Hesk is a PHP-based help desk software package that runs with a MySQL database. It allows you to setup a ticket based support system (Helpdesk) for your website. Your customers are able to submit support tickets, and the staff has a user-friendly web based interface to reply to and manage help desk tickets