Customer Support Software Featured Articles

Recently I was helping a client set up their small business, and the issue of help desk software came up. I had my personal favorite, of course, but we also did our due diligence and reviewed the offerings. And there were many!

Help desk software is essential for most businesses, and for better or worse there is a crowded field of offerings. So how to choose the right solution? A recent blog at Business2Community highlights a study by GetApp that looks at the help desk software issues that most commonly trouble businesses. This can help you develop your personal list of essential traits for a good help desk solution.

The most common complaint about help desk software is that it has a poor user interface; more than 24 percent of those GetApp surveyed cites interface as a problem with their help desk solution.

This makes sense, too, because customer service agents spend a large portion of their time interacting with help desk software, and at the same time many vendors focus on functionality and don’t give enough time to making it all come together and work easily.

Not to say that features are unimportant. Missing features actually were the second most cited complaint about helpdesk software, at a little more than 21 percent. This actually is surprising, since you would think that customer service support software would know how to listen to customers and deliver the features they want.

The third most cites issue with help desk software is a lack of proper documentation and support, however. Roughly 11.5 percent said this was a problem.

This puts the whole space in context, actually. If you look at the top three gripes, you see a trend toward firms that push out products they think the industry needs and not products it actually wants. There’s a certain me-too mentality to it.

So when looking for help desk software, one over-arching question to ask is this: Is the help desk solution solving my need, or is it being pushed on me and trying to persuade me it is solving my need? There’s a difference. One is listening to the customer and the other is telling the customer what it wants.

And as any good customer support department will tell you, ignore your customer at your peril.