The Outlook Help Desk

Managing a help desk is hard work and unfortunately it's often made harder by a dependency on the improper tools. Countless support teams rely on email, such as Outlook, as their primary support mechanism. Email is a powerful tool, but without the proper organization and tracking, it can leave some requests lost in the abyss of the inbox. Never knowing when a problem has been resolved, who's currently working the issue, and lacking the history of the full interaction between the customer and support team.

Outlook and other email clients are highly optimized for personal email exchange, but they often fall short when it comes to providing a complete history of an event over time. Short of being cc'd on all exchanges, once an email has been forwarded on to another help desk team member the original owner loses insight into the progress. Outlook simply lacks the reporting, reminders, and workflow to manage a support ticket request, which is critical for growing help desks looking to optimize and uniformly improve support staff/customer interactions.

Here's a few signs you've probably outgrown your Outlook based help desk:

• You handle more than 20 emails a day

  If your volume is more than a handful of emails a day you're already spending more time than you should tracking and coordinating your help desk. Even worse is that as your support needs grow the Outlook based system will become more cumbersome to manage with the increased risk of requests becoming lost in the inbox.

  Innovative request workflow means you can handle thousands of daily requests. Requests are always assigned to only one staff member so requests never linger in a queue for someone to answer. Powerful filtering allows you to view requests based on the criteria most important for your desk, ensuring all designated staff have visibility to requests without interrupting a logical workflow.

• You're unable to find previous requests by a customer

  Email systems are often limited in how much data they can store and in many cases you are forced to delete emails every few months. For a help desk, deleting emails can significantly reduce your ability to build a historical picture of your customer interactions that can serve as a valuable tool for future interactions.

  Another problem is the inherent limitations of searching within Outlook. It's simply not optimized for this type of searching. It's also impossible to search outside of the mailbox it controls. So if a request was forwarded to someone else in the organization, those interactions will be outside of the content Outlook can search.

  All requests are stored in a powerful relational database so you never need to delete data. HelpSpots full text searching let's you easily find past requests and built in customer history search let's you view past custom requests at the click of a button.

• Emails are trapped if a staff member is unavailable

  Today, what happens when a staff member calls in sick or is unavailable? Requests sit, unworked, or you have to jump through hoops to access a specific individual's email account; either can have a very negative impact on your customer support.

  Having a centralized request management system means you can always access the data you need to provide consistent and timely customer service.

• Requests you forward fall through the cracks

  When you forward requests to other employees outside the support staff are those requests sometime lost? Considering most people receive dozens of emails a day, it's no wonder you support requests often get lost in the shuffle of the inbox.

  Staff can easily sign in to see what requests are assigned to them or allow HelpSpot to push notices out via RSS, SMS and email.

• Your constantly responding to similar inquiries

  It's not unusual for a support desk to receive the same questions over and over. Using Outlook you're usually limited to copy and pasting standard answers from a shared Word document. This still leaves a great deal of work to customize each response with customer information.

  Predefined, standardized responses can be set on a global or individual staff member level in addition to at the mailbox, auto-reply level. Predefined responses can contain placeholders which automatically add specific customer and request information into the response; adding a customized, personal touch to each response without the additional manual work.

• Staff spends a large amount of time looking for answers to customer requests

  It's not uncommon for staff to look through manuals and other IT systems when trying to resolve a request. When using an Outlook help desk, these answers are always in another system.

  With integrated Knowledge Books and the ability to tie in remote IT systems using Live Lookup technology, staff will rarely need to leave HelpSpot to find a answer.

• You spend hours aggregating data for basic reporting

  When using Outlook as a help desk solution, you're often forced to manually sort through email or have help desk staff keep track of various types of requests in a spreadsheet. Both methods are time consuming and error prone.

  Integrated reporting at the deepest levels let's you truly see how your help desk is performing. Find out your busiest times of day and days of the week; track overall staff and request performance or performance against requests matching only specified criteria.