The Cost of Free Helpdesk Software

20 08 2008

Why pay for helpdesk software? There is lots a good free software around. However, when it comes to a specialist piece of software that serves a critical element of your business, you should consider the true cost of “free helpdesk software”.

Our site often receives visitors who have been searching for “free helpdesk software”. Target Helpdesk Software provide “paid-for”, easy-to-use, enterprise-class software with full product support. Being “paid-for” enables us to continuously develop it, support it and provide a personal level of service to our clients.

If you are a one-person setup with just a handful of requests each month, then it is probably overkill to pay out for helpdesk software. In fact, in that situation, you may not even need free helpdesk software, and could quite easily manage with a spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet becomes cumbersome, you know you are ready for a proper request tracking solution like Target Helpdesk.

However, when you have a few people collaboratively working as part of a team and serving a client base where you need to monitor volume, performance, produce reports and analyse activity etc., then helpdesk software is required to manage those kinds of needs. If you choose free helpdesk software, you need to consider the true cost of that software. That is, how productive is it? Will it be working tomorrow and if it doesn’t who will fix it? Who will help you? It’s not just about the software itself needing maintenance, it’s about the constantly changing IT environment in which it exists; what happens if your server goes down and takes your helpdesk software with it? What happens when you move to a new operating system like Microsoft Vista, will it still work? If it is a hosted service, will it be available tomorrow? If it becomes unavailble, what’s happens to your data? How fast is the page-load on that web version. Is there a client-version for heavy duty workers, just like your Outlook desktop client?

Say you have an answer for all these questions, it goes without saying that a good commercial piece of software is continuously developed to meet ever changing requirements as well as ensure compliance with new hardware, software and regulations. That same good commercial software can only be sold if it can show a return-on-investment.

Let’s say you choose to use the free helpdesk software, you could easily find you spend an extra hour or so each week if not each day, manually compiling reports or performing your job slower, less efficiently than you might with an optimised solution, designed and professionally implemented and configured to suit your needs. Now lets say you have a team of people that are spending that extra unnecessary hour because they don’t really have the best tool for the job. If you have a team of 5, then that’s potentially costing you 5 hours per week. That’s almost a working day for some people after water-cooler chat :) Roll that time up over the year and you and that software has almost cost you 7-working weeks.

You know what the average salary of your helpdesk techs are, so you can quickly work out the true cost of that free software. That’s not to mention the missed opportunity for improved service through a professional self-service web portal, automated inbound and outbound mail alerts to keep techs and clients up-to-date as needed. Not to mention the powerful reporting capabilities you will find in Target Helpdesk. From that, you can take as a rule-of-thumb, budgeting 1 to 2 months of a persons salary will very quickly give you a guaranteed return-on-investment above and beyond producivity improvements within a short space of time.

 At some point, we will offer a cut-down, subsidised version of our software. It will however be with an agenda to start those who do not currently have budget allocated or those who do not fully understand the value of the software. It will then serve a purpose to act as a gateway onto a full professional paid-for implementation of our flagship product, Target Helpdesk. If you wish to get a trial or more information about Target Helpdesk, then please let us know by contacting us here. We will provide you with a trial, you choose the evaluation period!


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Target Helpdesk Version 3 is now available!

4 08 2008

Target Helpdesk Software are delighted to announce that Target Helpdesk version 3 is now available!

This release represents a milestone for the product with a number of feature enhancements. Find details of over 30 of the key feature enhancements details in the Target Helpdesk Version 3 Flyer. Alongside this release, Target Helpdesk Software are launching 4 Target Helpdesk companion products; Survey Server, LiveReport Designer, Report Server and CRM Mailer.

  • Survey Server – use checklists and gain feedback using surveys
  • LiveReport Designer – design your own live reports for your LiveReport Board
  • Report Server – schedule reports to generate whenever you want and be sent by email to those you want
  • CRM Mailer – Build on your customer relationships by designing personalised emails and targeting all or a group of your customers and end-users. CRM Mailer comes with FREE 100 emails per month for existing Target Helpdesk Enterprise Edition users

Please download the flyer for more info. Existing customers, click here to download the upgrade. Not a customer but want to try Target Helpdesk? Download a full trial now here.


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New Products Announcement

23 07 2008

Target Helpdesk Software are delighted to announce the introduction of 4 great new products. These additions will compliment the core Target Helpdesk product and help further improve and streamline the client support operation. All products have been built with seamless integration as Addins to Target Helpdesk.

The Surveys AddIn lets operators seek additional information from end-users by using a survey as a checklist request. In the more classic fashion, surveys can be used to obtain feedback on performance and satisfaction. Information is available in realtime data and graphical format.

The LiveReport Designer lets managers define both day-to-day, monthly reporting information. Reporting can be viewed as charts or data grids. So whether you need an adhoc query based on ticket requests for a customer, service contract or asset or you want current view of requests for your top 3 clients, LiveReports Designer is the answer.

Report Server allows you to define who gets what information, when. Scheduling reports means you can save even more time. Run any report and request that report to be sent to you, your team or a client in the format you want, when you want. Have yourself and each client receive a regular pdf on outstanding requests or recent performance.

CRM Mailer Build on your customer relationships by designing personalised emails and targeting all or a group of your customers and end-users. CRM Mailer comes with FREE 100 emails per month for existing Target Helpdesk Enterprise Edition users.

The above prodcuts will be available from August 2008. For more details about these products, please contact us.


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LiveSearch, LiveFilter and now LiveReports!

14 07 2008

Build your own LiveReports Board

Target Helpdesk places great emphasis on both the helpdesk operators and helpdesk manager. To that end the addition of LiveReports will be an added bonus for the helpdesk manager or business owner.

LiveReports lets you design your own dashboard using pre-configured “LiveReportlets”. You can refresh all your LiveReports on-screen live. You can choose to view each LiveReport data as either a chart or data grid. Each LiveReport can be printed, emailed, exported or even scheduled to be sent by email to anyone you choose periodically.

Emailing the current output of a LiveReport can instantly inform a client, a colleague or your team of the top 10 outstanding calls, the current workload or a statistical analysis of helpdesk activity.

Adding a LIveReport to your scheduled reports list means yourself, your team or even clients can receive a report as either a chart or data grid whenever you want without having to do anything more. Scheduled reports are a powerful way of staying informed about key statistics and helpdesk activity.

The reporting options on your LiveReports board are endless especially when you consider Target Helpdesk Software offer a service to create customised LiveReport definitions that can be added to your LiveReport board immediately.

LiveReports will be available as part of the Version 3 release on 1 August 2008

 

LiveSearch is a feature of Target Helpdesk that allows operators to quickly find tickets, assets and knowledgebase articles. Target Helpdesk server works in the background indexing all information so that when you need to locate an item, Target Helpdesk gives you instant results as-you-type.

LiveFilter is another productivity enhancing feature of Target Helpdesk that helps operators quickly and easily filter entries within lists. When faced with a list of tickets, a list of end-users or a list of assets, LiveFilter lets you simply type your filtering keywords to reduce long lists to a relevant manageable size. Perhaps of all the entries in your “Open” ticket list, you just want to see those logged “today” and quickly then see all those logged “yesterday”. Perhaps you want to quickly see any other tickets for a particular client or category. LiveFilter lets you limit results real-time, Live!

For more information regarding Target Helpdesk features, click here


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Helpdesk Software Selection

3 07 2008

Leading the hunt for the best helpdesk software to recommend to your manager? Or are you the helpdesk support manager looking to compile a shortlist of products to trial for your team?

Here are a few points to consider when selecting your next helpdesk software.

Step 1. The Product

Choosing the right helpdesk software for your support team is so important. Your whole team will be using it day in, day out. It’s not the sort of software you can each choose your preferred tool to use (though thats a nice idea!) such as one person might prefer WinZip while another might prefer to use WinRAR and both get to the same end. It’s also not a piece of software that you can switch out at the drop of hat, such as the whole team use a utility like WinZip this week and maybe next week you all decide to use WinRAR.

Helpdesk sofware is much more important because what you choose will determine not only what your team spend each of their working day using, but will determine how they perform. As helpdesks tend to serve end-users or external clients, its pretty important that your helpdesk team performs optimally, especially as most helpdesk support teams are always so busy. For your team to perform well, you need a helpdesk solution that is easy-to-use and well thought out whilst also cost-effective to satisfy the purse.

Step 2. The Vendor

Once you have considered the tool, its also important to consider the company behind the tool. When you need help, what kind of help are you going to get? Can you call and talk to someone. Each time you call, is it a different person? The best way to find out how well a company responds, is to email or call them during your trial! Try it with us! What you want is some continuity of personell dealing with you, someone you can talk to if you wish and ask advice. You want a company that does not just send quick meaningless responses by email (we have all experienced that and we all know how frustrating being a “number” can be so you really dont want that kind of support for your own helpdesk!)

Aside the customer service delivery, Target Helpdesk Software offer professional services from implementation assistance to get you up and running as fast and smoothly, offer training to get your team up to speed without delay if required and offer professional services for custom development and consulting.

 

Step 3. The Platform

This is simple but not always obvious. You want to take advantage of latest technology, which is why we built Target Helpdesk, 100% on .NET. It’s stable, reliable, high performance and goes pretty much anywhere Windows goes. Using latest .NET technology for example, meant we were Vista compatible and now Windows Server 2008 compatible without changes. This is simply because, with a 100% .NET application, the application only talks to the .NET framework and the framework in turn deals with the Operating System.

In terms of operational platform, don’t make the classic mistake of thinking web-only will make things easy. How many times have you spent most of your day at your desk using Outlook Web Access (OWA)? Probably not many when you have Outlook client available. OWA has its place and is great for when you are out-and-about. You want your helpdesk support team to be productive and that means a desktop client will almost always outperform the web-only. The web-only is an easier sell, quick single install and access everywhere. We have a Web Portal for both operator and client access, but we recommend and still find our users much prefer the desktop client, just like they prefer Outlook client.  In fact, we have migrated clients from web-only solutions to our solution specifically for the productivity of the desktop-client.

 

Target Helpdesk is designed by support professionals, for support professionals, used by us every day as both a CRM system and helpdesk system for supporting clients. Target Helpdesk is designed to do much more than just call logging. It monitors and reports performance, shows the value you add and saves you time, every day. Check out our features page. As a company, we provide personal service right from when you start a trial to implementation, support and account management. Try us and see! As for the platform, Target Helpdesk is built 100% on .NET, desktop, windows service and web portal. We continue to aggressively develop the product to ensure it continues to meet the changing needs of business, your business of delivering great service that is.

 

If you are tasked with implementing a helpdesk system, contact us. Whether you just want to discuss your project or get assistance with setting up a trial, we will be happy to help you.


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Target Helpdesk runs on Windows 2008

1 07 2008

Fyi: Target Helpdesk Software confirm that Target Helpdesk runs on Windows 2008, out of the box. Just as per Vista, this is expected since Target Helpdesk is 100% built on the .NET platform, so whereever the .NET platform exists, is where Target Helpdesk can run.


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Target Helpdesk Version 3 Coming Soon

27 06 2008

The wait is almost over! Target Helpdesk Software are pleased to announce the imminent release of Version 3 which represents a milestone for the product. Version 3 includes a roll-up of 2 years worth of feature enhancements and a number of previously unreleased enhancements helping you achieve ITIL compliance, operational efficiency and improved service delivery. Some of the latest enhancements include a modern updated Office 2007-style skin as well as the following.

 

Ticket Management

·         Notes editor – for administrators to edit ticket notes

·         Improved Notes view design for easier viewing of tickets with many notes

·         Context menu on ticket notes list offering privacy setting control (to administrators), note sort options (which is a remembered preference) and copy-to-clipboard)

·         Submit request and follow-up in a single action, for even faster ticket entry where a follow-up might be given on the spot

·         Team Queue visibility – when looking at your “open” tickets for example, you will also be able to see the “open” tickets in queues where you are a member

·         Ticket Group Management – for grouping problems and processing group actions; update multiple tickets in a single action

·         During ticket review, administrators can now change the originating requestor of a ticket, with full auditability

·         Ticket attributes now include Impact and Urgency ratings giving you extended ability to achieve ITIL compliance as well as enhanced classification of tickets

·         Scheduled tickets lets you setup a ticket to be created on a periodic basis, great for tracking those daily, weekly and monthly tasks

 

Email Management

·         Multiple inbound/outbound mailboxes – for inbound email processing and email sending

·         “Send email” facility now features a great multi-function attachment button. Attach files as normal or the drop-down options on the button allow you to attach whatever is on the clipboard to the email as an attachment. Also, you can select to add the ticket attachments to the email. These single action options make for improved productivity and ease-of-use.

·         Canned email templates can now be pre-populated with the ticket attachments so if you want to enforce the process of including all attachment history, just set the indicator in canned email setup.

·         When reviewing a summary list, you can now use the righ-click context menu to send an email without even opening the ticket.

·         HTML email composing no longer relies on Internet Explorer and is now completely .NET framework managed providing increased performance

·         HTML emails now include a spell check facility that supports a number of languages including UK English, US English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish

 

Service Level Management

·         SLA by keywords – you can now specify keywords including email addresses that should activate a service level – useful as an additional call routing method

 ·         Stop-The-Clock – useful for tracking the time when a ticket is out of the helpdesk’s hands – so does not affect their SLA achievements

·         TicketWatch control - set clients to receive email notification when a ticket is created or receive all notifications that the assignee receives

·         During ticket review, administrators can now change the assigned SLA, with full auditability.

 

Active Directory Integration

·         Active Directory account unlocking facility from within a ticket

·         Active Directory account password reset facility from within a ticket

·         Login to Target Helpdesk using Active Directory authentication – no need for a separate account

·         End-users can now login to the Web Portal using their Active Directory account credentials, even if they have never logged in to the Web Portal previously

 

Workflow Management

·         Workflow tickets – allows you to define a series of tickets to be sequentially carried out to achieve a particular job

 

Management Report Analysis

·         Management Matrix trend analysis useful to identify busy periods on the helpdesk across the month, quarter and year

·         LiveReports Board lets you desgin your own dashboard using pre-configured report queries. Add both charts and data grids to your board which can be printed, exported and emailed

 

Web Portal

·         Privacy control - Notes privacy is now available so you can pick and choose which notes your end users can see when using the Web Portal Self-Service facility

·         Web Portal “Self-Register” facility for end-users to sign-up for access account themselves

·         Web Portal “Forgot Password” facility so end users can obtain their login details

·         Client Web Portal activity logging history available on the contact card when logging or reviewing a client ticket. See the “Web History” tab on the contact card to to see what kb articles the client has viewed and downloaded

 

Asset Management

·         Asset history is now available directly within the ticket both when logging or updating a ticket. Just click on the History tab which already also contains ticket history for the client requestor and the organisation as a whole

 

Knowledge Management

·          Email kb articles with ease; just locate the kb article using the powerful live search or KB search and click on “Email KB” to have the kb article and attachments composed in an email ready to send

 

New Products

We are coinciding the release of Version 3 of Target Helpdesk with the introduction of 3 great new complimentart products that will further enhance any customer support facing operation

·         Surveys – gain important insight into your customer service levels, request further information with checklists on common issues and gain feedback on how you are doing

·         LiveReports Designer - get the information you want reported as charts or grids with an easy-to-use designer interface giving direct access to all information in the Target Helpdesk database

·         Report Server - Run a Crystal-based BusinessReport or a LiveReport and with one-click schedule that report to be generated and sent to anyone by email in the format you want, whenever you want. Consider this, have a report of work-in-progress sent to each customer automatically every Monday morning

 

Version 3 is due for general release on 1st August 2008. This is an exciting release so be sure to mark this date on your calendar and be ready.


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New Report - Service Level Response Analysis

14 06 2008

Ok, we just developed a very powerful response analysis report to add to the existing suite of Target Helpdesk reports. This is another report that gives you a straightforward answer as to how your helpdesk is performing.

Basically, it tells you how fast or slow ;) you are responding to requests. It even checks back against the pertinent service level agreement for each ticket to see if you have achieved or breached your response this target.

At the end of the report you get the usual summarised results such as performance breakdown (numbers and percentages).

At the moment, we have developed the report to pivot on company (Client-organisation). As soon as the report is perfected and has gone through design tidy-up and QA, we will replicate the report so you can run by status, category, service agreement, helpdesk assignee, asset, priority, and even client contact.

No doubt this report will become a regular one to run, daily, weekly and monthly. Not sure how we managed without it to now!


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Welcome!

2 06 2008

Welcome to the Target Helpdesk Software Blog!

We will use this resource as an informal complement to the formal website - http://www.targethelpdesk.com

We will post information about Target Helpdesk including latest news, updates as well as brief discussions and scenarios on how to get the most from Target Helpdesk. We will cover areas that are IT service management “hot topics” all with a view to helping you gain more insight into us and your helpdesk software.

We hope you will find this more “informal” information a valuable addition to the more “formal” web site information and help guides already available for your helpdesk software.

Please feel free to offer comments and suggestions.


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