The role of a help desk manager

Help desk management is a tricky task to get right and do well.  Amid the many challenges of a help desk manager, the following questions are often asked…

• “Do I need more staff, or should I invest in further training for the ones I have?"
• “How can I reduce the call rate of our clients?”
• “Am I meeting our service level agreement (SLA) with out clients?”
• “Which members of my staff are performing well….and who is not?”
• "How can I standardize the style and content of the support we give to our clients?”

When you use a help desk system like HelpMaster, help desk managers have all of these metrics at their fingertips, along with the capability to standardize the support quality and response the help desk provides.

• Management reports
• Viewing and managing staff workloads
• Standardizing support, workflow and client response

By running regular reports on the help desk data that is captured, managers can easily identify trends that affect the performance of their help desk.  Moreover, the helpdesk manager can use the Helpdesk Explorer of HelpMaster to keep an eye on the workloads of individual staff, as well as groups (or skillgroups) of staff.

HelpMaster ships with over 130 Crystal Reports.

However, helpdesk management is far more than just running reports and looking at statistics.

Thinking about ITIL?

For those considering, or already referring to ITIL as a way of running a service desk, HelpMaster provides a lot of functionality and best-practice concepts that relate well to the principles of ITIL.

See ITIL incident management and ITIL problem management for further details about this.

HelpMaster helps the help desk manager do their job

The modern help desk is in a continual state of change.  Staff come and go, clients mature and have different issues, and there is always new technology that presents a new managerial challenge.

The last thing you need is your help desk software getting in the way, and that's why we've made HelpMaster to be easily configurable.  If you don't like a system code - change it!  If you need new job status codes - make them!  There is no need for expensive consultants, or custom developers to make your service management software do what you want.  HelpMaster allows easy configuration to suit your business needs.  Simple, or sophisticated business workflows are easily mapped and created via the template system of HelpMaster.  Just create the necessary job, action and email templates to describe your business needs, and let the HelpMaster automation engine do the rest.

Managers can create workflow patterns within HelpMaster, and then enforce staff to follow the service/helpdesk pattern via security and rule-based automation.

Clients get consistent, structured support that is based on repeatable, business-oriented service patterns.  Staff can forget about "what to do next", and just follow the workflow, and management can get full oversight on every helpdesk interaction that takes place.

HelpMaster has been designed by helpdesk managers, for helpdesk managers. (developed by ex-helpdesk staff).

No time to download and evaluate?  Let us demonstrate HelpMaster to you via a personalized, one-on-one web demonstration.  It's quick, easy and completely tailored to your needs and questions.  We're happy to make it as short, or as long as you need it.  Contact PRD Software to arrange a demonstration.