IT Support Software

IT Support Software

If you have IT systems that you are responsible for operating and fixing when it breaks, you need IT support software. It is that simple. You can only juggle so many questions, requests, issues and updates on your own before you miss something important and your business users are impacted. That is where IT support software comes in – giving you a centralized place to manage all the information about your IT solutions and services, your users and the support requests you receive from them.

Whether your IT support function is a single person or a large distributed team, IT support software can help them be more effective in providing the service and assistance that your users need. Designed to make it easy for you to better support your users, IT support software brings emails, phone calls, chat messages and more into a “single pane of glass” and virtual support command center where your staff can see the big picture of support work that needs to be done. They can sort through the messages, assign them to the correct team members, and make sure everyone gets a timely reply. IT support software also help you build a knowledge base and provide self-help capabilities to enable your users to find answers to common questions and get back to normal business activities quickly.

What is IT Support Software?

IT support software (sometimes called helpdesk software or customer service software) is a suite of capabilities to facilitate your staff helping users solve their problems through a single (or multiple) point of contact. It allows users to troubleshoot problems, track their issues, and get assistance regarding IT solutions or services.

These tools are used to manage a wide variety of user interaction scenarios including:

• Requesting new IT services and features
• Granting access to data and other resources
• Answering questions about solution features
• Diagnosing errors
• Alerting support staff to business disrupting outages

IT support software also helps support teams and their management measure performance and identify ways in which the level of support can be improved. Some examples of improvement opportunities include automating key processes, documenting best practices and recording customer interactions – all functions that IT support software provides.

A main goal of IT support software is to increase the speed and efficiency of issue resolution. By consolidating user data into one easily accessible platform, your staff can access complete client interaction history as well as information about the user’s job role, business processes and the IT tools they use. User related information combined with rule-based routing capabilities ensures requests are directed to the right agents by automatically categorizing and separating issues into work queues for different teams. This helps avoid unnecessary delays in resolving the users’ issues.

IT Support Software Benefits

Companies implement IT support software solutions for two reasons:

1. Increase how many tickets your staff can handle

2. Improve how efficient they are in solving user issues.

Even if your company employs only one IT professional to support the entire organization, you still need a system to manage the requests that come in. The employees of modern businesses are heavily reliant on technology to do their jobs effectively. Many issues can arise when dealing with only a few devices, which means that even small and medium size businesses are likely to have significant IT support needs that mean they can benefit from IT support software. As your company grows, the need for consistent service delivery and support processes increases and so does the value that IT support software can provide.

All the information your agents need in one place

IT support software provides a consolidated portal view for agents and simple end-user interfaces to help your company manage all ticket requests effectively. This is important because:

• End-users want simple support experiences
• Support Agents need access to information to do their job effectively
• Your company needs issues resolved in an efficient and consistent manner

Your IT staff has a lot of responsibilities and their job is often hectic and often complicated. IT support software helps reduce some of the chaos and hassle of hunting around to find information, enabling them to focus their attention on solving your users’ issues.

Work effectively as a team

For larger support functions, IT support software provides the tools to balance requests across agents and teams, route and track large numbers of tickets and monitor the performance of your IT support processes. It helps you with scalability, workload balancing, establishing follow-the-sun support offerings and managing escalations. Armed with more complete and better-quality information, your teams will be able to achieve higher levels of productivity, efficiency and cost control.

Help employees help themselves

Spend less time on password resets and common IT support tasks by providing intuitive self-service capabilities to your users. IT support software provides you with a means of curating information and self-service tools to help users solve their own problems. If they can’t resolve the issue on their own, IT support software provides an effective means of engaging your staff for support. Nobody likes to ask for help, but IT support software can make it a productive and positive experience for both end-users and your support teams. With multi-channel solutions, employees can submit a ticket to you on the channel they prefer (email, web forms, chat, phone, and mobile apps) even if they're not in the office.

Enable more effective communication

IT support software helps unite your whole team in providing high quality customer support by enabling collaboration among agents and enhanced user interactions. Through various communication tools, team members can collaborate and share information which they think might help to improving the service provided to users. The increased communication enabled by IT support software provides:

Efficiency in solving easy issues

Teamwork for solving complex issues

Learning opportunities to build collective knowledge and improve the quality of service.

These tools also help agents engage with users in convenient and interactive ways. IT support software helps to ensure users feel heard and understood and that critical support related information is captured and used effectively.

Powerful analytics for informed decisions

Most IT support software solutions will include reporting and activity-tracking features that provide management key insights and analytics capabilities. Managers then have the information needed to understand:

• How well support processes are operating
• How effectively user issues are being resolved
• Identify areas for improvement

Metrics and KPIs are an important tool in any operations function. IT support software enables you to define and track key metrics like first call resolution and time to restore that give you clear indicators of how well you are managing user issues. The workflows within IT support software provide structure, enable data capture and encourage consistent execution of support processes. Pre-built dashboards, custom reports and analytics capabilities enable leaders to access a wealth of information to help them make informed decisions. It also helps teams to build workflows and create knowledge bases used to train team members and ensure your team is providing consistent guidance to end-users.

IT support Software Features

Selecting the right IT support software can be confusing and figuring out what features you need can be challenging. IT support tools need to include more than a ticketing system and the ability to send and receive email (though these capabilities are essential, so don’t overlook them). Your support software should also include productivity tools like: team inbox, knowledge base, forum, chat, phone, and mobile support that help your team members interact with customers and manage their workload effectively. (IT support software that offers this suite of features is often called a multi-channel support app)

Here are some of the other key features that you should look at when selecting IT support software for your business.

IT Support Software and Vendor Support

Many organizations leverage support vendors and other 3rd parties for various parts of their IT support operations. Facilitating the interactions with vendors can be challenging without the help of IT support software to help capture, manage and route issues to the right resources for resolution. When you use vendors to support your IT systems and services, workflow management and service level agreements (SLAs) are essential to ensuring that end-users receive the levels of responsiveness and quality support they expect. IT support software not only help to keep work flowing smoothly and measure SLA compliance, it provides an important level of visibility to management into the quality of the vendor’s work and the value that is being created from the outsourcing investment.

Integrating with vendor systems

When companies engage with outside vendors for support, they typically have 2 choices when it comes to IT support software:

• Have end-users use the vendor’s systems for support
• Have your own IT support software and integrate it with the vendors’ systems

The first option is only typically used when you are outsourcing all of your IT support to a single vendor (business process outsourcing). That vendor will then typically be responsible for staffing, processes and providing tools related to the support function. A more common scenario is for your company to have relationships with many vendors to support various parts of your IT environment (a hosting vendor, a helpdesk vendor, a field support vendor, etc). In this situation, the second option is usually chosen – having your own IT support software and integrate it with the vendors’ systems.

There are many considerations when it comes to system integration that you will need to address, but the most important ones are:

• Creating a consistent experience for end users
• Facilitating the smooth flow of support requests between systems
• Measuring SLAs in a way everyone agrees on
• Sharing knowledge across companies

In most cases, these considerations will be covered by your service agreements and contracts with the vendors but if they aren’t it is a good idea to seek clarity before they become sources of conflict.

IT Support Software vs. Customer Service Software – what is the difference?

There are a lot of similarities between the Customer Relationship Management software that call centers and customer support organizations use and the IT Support Software that your internal IT team relies on. Both deal with user records, both have workflows and knowledge bases. What really sets these solutions apart are the types of information and related systems that they need to interact with.

Customer service software often deals with sales, finance, product and manufacturing data that is obtained from systems like your order management, ERP, logistics, finance, and product development systems. The issues that customer service staff typically support are related to transactions flowing through the various systems of your company – they are data issues. The tools that these agents need to be effective are often centered around troubleshooting data issues and transactions that have gotten stuck someplace in a business process and need some sort of intervention to get unstuck.

IT support software in comparison, deals with infrastructure, device, software, data access and service availability/performance issues. Your IT support software will likely be integrated with infrastructure management, access control, asset management and technology monitoring systems. Your staff working on IT support issues often need access to diagnostic tools and technical documentation to understand and resolve user issues.

While it is possible to use the same support software for both internal technical support and customer support applications, most companies find it advantageous to implement them as separate systems. This enables them to optimize configurations and business processes for each individual function separately. It also lowers the risk of sensitive internal data being exposed to customers and private customer data being inadvertently shared internally.