In this feature focus, we will be looking at how FocalScope can help companies better deal with an issue that has plagued the support departments of companies the world over. That is, the issue of high support-staff turnover rates.

The crux of the matter

In the world of customer support, frontline agents are like the waiters of the restaurant industry. They are a critical part of any business that has to provide customer support. It remains a reality that support staff has a very high turnover rate, which can cause major problems for companies that deal with high volume customer queries.

A customer does not want to hear that the agent they are speaking to only started work there a week ago, nor do they want to hear that the agent is still being trained. This is a reality of customer support that will not vanish. Customers want results, not excuses.

Unskilled and inexperienced support staff cannot accurately represent the company to the customer. When customers are already aggravated by a problem or misunderstanding regarding a product/service which they purchased, encountering ineffective frontline support staff will simply add insult to injury.

One of the key problems with ineffective frontline support is inadequate training and experience. Support staff often doesn’t stay in one place too long. Frontline support is where many professionals start, and from where some get inculcated into other areas of the company. Another portion of that group may choose to extend their experience in another company, and thus, the number of support staff that have the skill and experience to engage customers effectively wanes.

What is the solution?

New staff has to be brought up to speed quickly. FocalScope is the only system in the industry that allows companies to rapidly and effectively train their staff without the need for expensive and difficult to run internal training programs.

FocalScope uses a 2-tier approach to get new support staff up to speed. First, FocalScope’s interface closely resembles that of commonly used email clients. This helps to ensure that any newcomer to the system immediately feels comfortable to start performing their duties without the fear of ‘pushing the wrong button’.

Second, FocalScope has a built-in training mode that can be enabled for any user account. When training mode is enabled for an agent’s account, all ensuing communications from that account are diverted to a designated agent. This more skilled agent will then refine the message and the allow it to pass to the intended customer(s).

Happy customers

This ensures that customers always receive professional responses to their queries. Any changes that were effected to the trainee’s message can then be reflected back them so they progressively learn how to communicate with clients, while being productive from day one. Customers are completely unaware of this background process and see the message as coming from the trainee, not the supervisor. Trainees get a transcript of the changes to their reply so they can compare the differences and learn on the job.

Customizable training

Each company also has its own methodology when it comes to customer support. FocalScope’s training mode allows companies the freedom to train new employees in the methodologies that best suit their business. This has tremendous benefit over generic training programs that sometimes cover the basics of customer support, but fail to address aspects that are unique to each company’s support style.

Companies make first contact with customer colonies, on the edge of new markets, as they expand their businesses and trade routes deeper into unchartered market space. In order to advance deeper into market space, Companies strike treaties with various customer groups, thereby, allowing them to push their trade routes through customer market space. In return, the customers receive services and technology from those advancing corporations, which fuel their own pursuits.

Initial dealings with the customers give companies the illusion that customers come and go, that they are somewhat uncoordinated, and thus, not much of a threat when provoked. But as companies rapidly expand they begin to neglect the treaties they signed with the customers, a hive-mind like mechanism is triggered in the customers and they fight back with unrelenting tenacity. All companies, regardless of size and industry, are vulnerable to customer attacks and this is why this report has been made public.

An Eerily Accurate Analogy

Ask any support division, which has been involved in skirmishes with customers, even small colonies of resentful customers can prove to be as resolute, threatening, and effective as any other advanced alien threat out there. It starts out like a scene from a science-fiction film. A group of customers first makes contact with a company’s support division. It soon becomes apparent to support staff that the customers have some issue with how the company is conducting itself. Customers argue that agreements are being broken or altered without mutual consent. After a brief spat between support staff and disgruntled customers, a few customer scouts strategically target the support processes to test a company’s defences. Then they step up the frequency and the scale of the attacks. Soon the company’s support team finds itself isolated and facing off against ever-larger waves of customer forces.

The Desperate Hour

In order to survive, companies have to successfully manage the skirmishes and limit their own mistakes on the battlefield. Most companies counter the rising friction by digging in deep and focusing their support troops on the immediate customer encounters. Many Companies wonder how a few disgruntled customers can so quickly coordinate large-scale assaults in retaliation for treaty disputes. However, those companies do not see the massive social networks the customers rely on to draw in ever-greater numbers for the escalating conflicts. As casualties continue mounting and ammunition begins to run low, companies realize that customers are technologically more advanced, and utilize tactics that the support troops were never equipped to deal with. Soon, the once comforting sound of smoothly running company is drowned out by ringing alarms and robotic voices barking orders at the crew to make for the escape pods.

An Advanced Opponent

The common customer is highly adaptable and remains difficult to capture and study. Just a few decades ago, the customers did not seem to have much of a command structure and attacks against larger companies were usually short lived and ineffective. Recent studies have revealed that customers have already mastered technologies most companies have yet to discover. Social media networking is one such technology. Customers are able to use vast support networks to quickly send out a call for reinforcements, and can thusly unite and overpower even the largest corporations.

Any one company that is sceptical of the power of the customers’ social networking technologies need only search for a few negative keywords on social media platforms to see the on-going battles being raged against companies and devastating results thereof. Make no mistake; customers are very adept at using their social media technology. Even if a company is oblivious to the threat, or fails to acknowledge the reality thereof, an attack from this technology will be a rude awakening!

In addition to technological advances that eclipse that of most companies, customers also run the gamut of battlefield tactics. They will target your live chat, email, and telephonic channels and overload them with their high-energy queries. These flanking manoeuvres are very effective at overrunning support troops that do not have the necessary tools to fend off such assaults.

Help is at Hand

Not all is lost. The hardworking men and women at the Federation for Corporation and Customer Unification (the FCCU) have secretly been working on advanced support technologies and strategies to repair and strengthen fragile relationships with between companies and customers. Further straining these relationships poses a tangible threat to bottom lines (and real bottoms) out there in the frontiers of market space. These new support technologies were developed and exhaustively tested over the last 5 years. In 2011, the FCCU rolled out the most advanced support system on the planet, called FocalScope Help Desk and Live Chat Solution!

FocalScope features such advances as:

• Rapid field deployment
  When you’re embroiled in an on-going spat, the last thing you have is time to regroup. FocalScope’s rapid field deployment technology helps your company get aid to your frontline agents and troops without the need to halt your operations. Choose your method of delivery: Cloud SaaS, or on-premise. The FocalScope drop ships are standing by to drop-in your order no matter where the battle rages!
• Experience based training academy
  FocalScope’s training academy is specifically design to keep your frontline bolstered with skilled troops. The training academy allows rookies to experience frontline battles with the guided hand of a skilled veteran. If your frontline troops are succumbing in battle or defecting, you need FocalScope’s training academy.
• Replacements on call
  Provide your wounded and battle-weary support staff with a much-needed respite and send in reinforcements that pick up and press on without your forces tacking a step back. FocalScope’s agent view lets agents stand in for injured agents within a moment’s notice.
• Auto-response turrets
  Keep your support team focused on the big issues while FocalScope automatically launches answers and solutions directly to any incoming enquiries. Help your team reload and fire more solutions with auto-response templates, and watch the invading force subside.
• Multichannel defences
  FocalScope provides ample flank protection to your support team by equipping them with live chat, email, SMS, IP telephony, and instant messaging. Your team will never be caught off guard and they can rapidly counter multiple points of contact without spreading their numbers thin.
• Social media technology
  That’s right! FCCU scientists and engineers have successfully reverse engineered the customers’ primary technology, and found a way to use it to calm down disgruntled customers and keep them from triggering a hive-like response. You can now engage any customer force that uses social media technology against you, on equal footing. Field tests of this technology showed that customers who are properly engaged through social media technology would lose the will to escalate attacks on companies. This effectively neutralizes the hive-like response.

The team of scientists and engineers at the FCCU are working around the clock, fervently developing and enhancing their support technologies to help companies expand and adequately engage the customer force. Whatever your business, whatever the region of market space your company occupies, do not get caught by the customers unprepared—get the FocalScope customer support solution today!

Bad customer support = poor business practise

An equally fitting (albeit more alluring) title for the article would have been; “how you can profit and grow your business by capitalizing on the biggest let-down in the consumer market today namely, customer support!” So don’t buy that new book “Surviving round 2 of the global financial crisis” yet, rather listen to the very lifeblood of any company in any prevailing global financial conditions, your consumers! They are literally screaming the solution to you “give us good customer service, and we will stay loyal to you; helping you grow beyond your wildest dreams!” Unfortunately, it seems to be a request uttered in a language not understood by most companies; purely judging from the spectacle that has become customer service.

Give your support staff the right tools

And the right tools are found in a proper help desk solution. While no help desk system can solve all your support and communications problems, the right help desk system can get you a long way to satisfying the majority of support needs your customers have. A solid help desk system should always make things easier. It should be easier to use, easier to customize, easier to migrate to and easier to integrate with the other software tools you use to run other aspects of your business.

This does not mean that conventional telephonic interactions are obsolete. However, it is becoming common practise for telephonic support to be incorporated into help desk systems, facilitating better tracking and logging of telephonic interactions. Along with email management, ticketing, task management and internal and external chat channels, your support team should have the right tools to start serving your customers properly and efficiently.

The 8 key roles played by the help desk

Following, are the 7 key roles a help desk needs to fill if one is to provide effective and exemplary customer support. These should be considered as the foundation for most conventional and online businesses. Each point can be subdivided into finer details; however, that is not the aim of this article and such details will be covered in future articles.

1. Nonrepudiation and auditability
   The only way to have nonrepudiation is to have complete traceability. If you cannot follow the “paper trail” of every ticket in your system, you are simply creating an environment where you have minimal control and insight into what is happening with your support cases. You also can’t hold people directly accountable for inadequacies since you don’t know who handled what case. The best way to keep track of things is to mark every interaction with a unique ID and have an interaction log that records every interaction with the ticket. This is commonly called ticketing, and can be found in any proper help desk system. Ticketing should not be limited just email interactions, but should cover all the communications channels your help desk solution offers. If 20% of your interactions are over live chat and another 30% over the telephone, how feasible is it to use a help desk which only identifies and tracks your emails?
2. Classification, analysis and adaptation
   Once you are properly tracking and monitoring your interactions, it becomes imperative to sort and organize them. Professional help desk systems provide you with tools to categorize your emails, chats, and record conversations in a way that pertains to your needs. You may wish to categorize closed tickets based on satisfaction levels, or other criteria. This is where solid analytics comes into play. Categorization alone can’t provide you the detailed information you need to be proactive and capitalize on favorable indicators, or snuff worrying trends. Only solid reporting tools can help you do that. Reporting tools should also give you other information (preferably in real time), such as queue lengths and customer waiting times. Only with all of these combined features can you truly grow and enhance your customer support. When you have no yardstick, you cannot measure where you are and calculate what you need to get where you want to be.
3. Preclude the passing of the ‘hot potato’
   This phenomenon is observed when a customer calls in and talks to an agent who then transfers them to the “correct department”, who then transfer the customer to the right person, who then went out on lunch without anyone knowing. Few things are as infuriating as not reaching someone who can help you. This is a sure fire way to alienate your customers. This requires a multifaceted approach to rectify. First, front line agents are not answering machines; they are supposed to have enough knowledge to deal with common and minor issues. Second, agents should be aware of the movements of other agents, when they need to transfer customers to available staff. Third, agents should have access to knowledgebase resources to point customers to or source information from in order to render assistance to the customer.
4. Polite ineptitude is still ineptitude
   Having agents who are respectful and patient with customers is a step in the right direction and will help your business. But sadly if they don’t have access to resources and tools that help them resolve customer issues, they are merely a polite annoyance. A help desk should facilitate the training and collaboration of staff so they can become more skilled and customers’ needs better. Internal chat and an up-to-date knowledgebase will go a long way towards helping your frontline agents become experts on the issues they need to manage and resolve.
5. The impersonal and disconnected nature of online customer support
   When a customer experiences lousy customer service at their neighbourhood bakery, they can quickly demand to speak to the manager and probably get the issue addressed. But when they are dealing with an online business, purely over the internet, they don’t have the same recourse. Customers are then totally dependent on going through the channels provided to them on that company’s website. So, make sure your customers have enough channels for customers to contact you through; channels, such as live chat, email, telephone, or a social media profile. Also, provide detailed solutions to common issues in your knowledgebase and ensure you have a forum to help the community help each other.
6. Multichannel support
   Offering support over various channels and mediums is exactly where unfailing support starts. Customers might all have email, but some still prefer the voice of another human (telephone) or status updates to their tickets via SMS. Others may want an immediate answer regarding shipping to their destination, before they click the purchase button and thus prefer chatting to a sales agent. Email is no longer the main or only online support channel. This is clearly evident when one looks at the great lengths companies go to, to promote customer support on social networks and over multiple channels.
7. Reduce satisfaction lag
   The likelihood of a customer abandoning your company for the competition is directly proportional to the length of time they wait to have their queries satisfactorily addressed. Thus, a fast turnover rate is essential to your customer support, and you need solid processes in the background to manage ticket assignments and escalations, so tickets don’t slip through the cracks unanswered. Regular email simply cannot provide this, but many help desk make setting up these processes so obfuscating that many companies just don’t bother.
8. Small things that matter – the personal touch
   Nobody likes to be just a number in a system, especially after they just forked over their hard earned cash to you. The powerful effect you have on people when you address them as an individual (preferably by their name) is an effective tactic exploited by many face-to-face salespersons. They try to get on a first name basis ASAP. If you can have your automated replies and email templates reflect this personal touch (without excess effort), then you should incorporate this detail to make customers feel that you are approaching them as individuals, not a nameless case number.

In closing – the value of exemplary customer service

Customer issues and after-sales support are a part of any business and paramount to future growth and profits. When handled professionally and most importantly with dignity, customer support becomes the stage at which you temper the relationships you have with your customers and make them last a lifetime. Most people are realistic and can live with the occasional hiccup. It is in trying times that our trustworthiness gets tested. When we fail to show customers that we’ve got their backs (no matter what), we expose our vulnerable belly to the competitors. Competitors who only need to do slightly better than we did to convert a substantial share of our customers.

Donovan Kretsman, Senior Writer and Editor

By combining his technical experience in the IT industry and his proclivity for writing, Donovan dispels IT myths and explains confusing concepts to help businesses make informed decisions regarding their IT needs

An overview of SaaS & cloud computing

When explaining anything related to the Cloud, it is remarkably easy to fall into the habit of over explaining things in complex terminologies. That is not the goal of this article. SaaS is a subset of Cloud computing, which maintains that the supporting infrastructure and client data are stored with the vendor and not on the client’s premises. Henceforth, I will be talking about the benefits and risks of the cloud, since SaaS is merely a subset of the cloud. To draw an analogy, the cloud based service works like the electrical power grid your home and office are wired into and dependent upon to power your home or office. You simply pay a monthly fee for the amount of electricity you used, and you do not need to know the infrastructure behind this service in order to benefit from it.

More than a passing fad

When faced with this tall order, we can see why–despite the meanderings of many skeptics–SaaS has successfully been adopted by many businesses around the world. The SaaS industry exceeded the $10 billion per annum mark in 2010, and the projected growth rate for 2011 is at 20.7 percent. These are hardly small numbers for a supposedly niche market populated by a few souls who blindly ventured forth into the fog (pun intended). The cloud is here to stay (it seems) as SaaS is being adopted by more businesses each year, and no amount of bemoaning the fact will change the trend. Or will it?

The appeal of SaaS

Initially many companies not bound by legal or contractual obligations express shock at this model, as well. After all, their data is the lifeblood of their business. Why would anyone want to have their data reside on someone else’s infrastructure? But just ask anybody who has moved their core services or data to the cloud, why they chose to do so, and you will most likely hear the reply “It makes things a lot easier.” This statement should not be taken as a sign of laziness on the part of those who do not like things to be complex.

Many companies are already all too aware that running your own IT department can be a hugely expensive and stressful practice. You first need experienced IT professionals (who don’t come cheap) and then must evaluate hardware and software products for your infrastructure. After weeks or even months of planning and analysis, you need to implement it and once it is up-and-running (provided there were no issues) you need to maintain it, upgrade it and make it disaster proof.

The first thing to look for – reliability

Here follow some availability ratings which vendors may display on their websites, and exactly what you can expect as far as uptime of the service is concerned:

99.9% (called a “three nine rating”) = 8.76 hours of downtime per year
99.99% (called a “four nine rating”) = 52.56 minutes of downtime per year
99.999% (called a “five nine rating”) = 5.26 minutes of downtime per year

A higher rating usually corresponds to a higher cost for the service. Some vendors may even sell premium packages with even higher availability. You need to ensure you choose the option best suited for your business. For most companies, 52.56 minutes of downtime a year won’t do any harm. For a company like eBay, it could easily amount to millions of dollars in lost revenue and dented trust from consumers that further adds to the losses incurred.

Determining when SaaS is not needed

There are some instances where SaaS is just impractical. So we’ll get those out of the way first and then look at the difficulties faced by those who have use for Saas, but don’t know if it’s viable. Because the hardware and software sources are entirely cut off from the client, certain functionality gets sacrificed when one goes onto a SaaS model.

Government agencies, military, research, and medical organizations

Some organizations will (by the very nature of their data) not accept cloud-based solutions. These include governmental agencies, the military, police services, law, research or medical companies… In many cases, such companies and organizations are obliged by law (or contracts), to store their data in-house, and have off-site archives that can only be accessed by certain personnel.

API integrations

The developer API or Application Programming Interface and the various integrations that can be performed with it are lost. Since the client can only log into the software and not access its core, there is no way to code data exchange pipelines between various systems to accelerate information lookups or unify software tools. The lasting impact of this can be somewhat dissuading, though to utilize API functionality properly, a programmer is required. Chances are if you have a programmer, you have an IT team, and as such might prefer an on-premise hosting model.

When you divorce SaaS—it keeps everything

What happens to your data when you sever ties with your SaaS provider? This is possibly one of the least asked questions and even IT professionals often overlook the problems it will cause. If you fail to gain absolute clarity regarding this issue, before you sign up, you may end up being held ‘hostage’ because of your precious data that is fused with the SaaS provider. It is considered a bad practice to tie the success of your company to the success of another. If the SaaS vendor is bought over, goes liquid overnight or simply loses its competitive edge (which means you lose something too), then you will find yourself tied to a sinking ship.

Recent SaaS failures

Saas has suffered an undeniable tarnishing of its image following Google and Microsoft’s recent cloud services failures. It has made a lot of people stand up and pay attention to the risks involved in cloud computing. The failure of an online service can be disastrous for any business that depends on it. Imagine walking into the office, switching on your PC or laptop and realizing you can’t connect to the internet. The sense of disempowerment is exactly what you will feel if your cloud service gets disconnected.

One is left to wonder, if technology GIANTS like Google and Microsoft can suffer outages (considering the amounts of money they have to throw at their datacenters), can any of the smaller vendors be trusted to keep your data safe and your subscription service readily available for production? The answer is undoubtedly yes! There is no rule that states the size of a company determines the quality of its security practices. This was painfully evident when the third-rate hacker Gary McKinnon (the bloke from Scotland) broke into more than 97 NASA and US military computers trying to get information about UFO and Alien coverups. He was mostly using a simple password guessing attack to infiltrate the networks (hardly complex hacking). Many small companies are immune to these attacks simply because they follow better security practices.

The same is true for service uptime. A lot of smaller vendors are totally dependent on the proceeds from heir SaaS clients. They have the tenacity and urgency to safeguard their datacenters and replicate client data elsewhere in the event of a disaster. While this does not mean you won’t ever suffer downtime, many of these vendors state their reliability in the form of a percentage uptime rating. Some may even charge extra to give you a higher uptime rating.

Conclusion

Even if only for a while, cloud computing and SaaS are again hotly contested topics, thanks to the recent failures of large companies that provide cloud-based services. Such failures should not be seen as a failure of the technology itself, or the fact that it can be a lifesaver for many companies that simply would not be in business, if they had to have the in-house experts and infrastructure to host their data. Cloud computing, like anything in the technology world, comes with risks. Companies must weigh up the risks VS rewards before making a final decision, and it is vital to remember that the failures of a few should not be counted as the failure of the lot. Cloud computing remains a growing and improving technology and will undoubtedly become the norm for some industries. Whether all digital products and services will one day be in the cloud and we all sitting behind ‘dumb terminals’ (as during the mainframe-days of the 1970’s and early 1980’s) is an altogether different matter, and perhaps the cornerstone of why many cloud naysayer spread confusion regarding the viability of cloud computing for business.

Donovan Kretsman, Senior Writer and Editor

By combining his technical experience in the IT industry and his proclivity for writing, Donovan dispels IT myths and explains confusing concepts to help businesses make informed decisions regarding their IT needs

The most common complaints

When cost and implementation are not factors, many businesses still resist migrating to a help desk. Reasons often cited are as follows:

• Convoluted and slow processes
  Many help desk systems are constructs that do nothing more than mash together a whole bunch of tools and features without considering information flow, or the labor involved in effecting the tools. A system could be capable of any task, but if it takes 6 months to become familiar with the system, few people will stick around long enough to see what the system can do once mastered.
• Steep learning curve
  If a system is more complex and deviates by a certain margin from established norms, it becomes harder and takes longer to use the system with confidence. When users do not feel confident they can use a certain application or system to do their jobs, they will not endorse it. Businesses with hundreds of employees and up are particularly concerned with how easy it is to train their staff to use a new system.
• Unintuitive and confusing interface
  To add fuel to the fire: many help desk systems seem to strive towards making interfaces that scare the living daylights out of anyone who tried to use the system. Longwinded menu navigation, difficult subscript executions and scattered locations from where information needs to be tracked, which should have been in one place and organized logically, are just some of the problems users struggle with when they try most help desk systems on the market.
• Declining system performance resulting from database growth
  Many help desk systems provide adequate performance provided they are used by a private dentistry that, at most, stores a mere few thousand emails per year. The real limitation of many help desk systems only becomes evident when SME’s and Enterprises start to realize their systems are slowing down by perceptible margins, because their rapidly expanding databases quickly exceed what most of these systems were designed to handle.
• Lack of integration and proper homogeny with existing business software
  When businesses start using help desk systems, they quickly discover that they could further speed up processes and simplify tasks simply by linking different components of their software infrastructure together. How well a help desk system lends itself to TRUE and SEAMLESS integration, will determine how much additional benefit a business will get. This does not mean the system has to tie in with every existing software system on the market, but it should at least provide an API for their customers to use to create their own implementations.

The list does not stop there, but these are the most common complaints people and businesses have with some existing and even “popular” help desk systems out on the market.

Thus, any help desk system that wants to differentiate itself from the pack evidently has formidable market expectations to not only meet, but also exceed, if they are to make a lasting impression. The market has wised up; help desk vendors claiming to offer a revolutionary, intuitive, pro-integration and high performance product no longer impress businesses. Any help desk vendor that wants to differentiate itself from the pack, better live up to their claims or risk adding their carcass to the already large heap of dead and discarded “help desk solutions”.

Once bitten, twice shy. A market that learned from experience

It is perhaps fitting to set the tone for the rest of the article with a short lesson from the past. When Information Technology started its worldwide proliferation, it mostly marched forth unchallenged and unconcerned with the needs (or later grievances) of those it converted to its “logic”.

In the past, IT consultants would go to companies and deliberate for a few hours on what their systems could do, for whom, how, where, when and under what conditions. If a company had some existing system that had to run in parallel or god forbid, work together with their product, it was usually told to scrap it and buy the vendor’s ‘compatible’ version.

Those, who out of sheer need or over eagerness decided to latch onto these rare and specialized systems soon found themselves vendor locked and strapped into something akin to a creepy theme park ride they would just have to ride out to the end. Without alternatives, it was almost impossible to free themselves from the clutches of these products.

A prime (and recent) example of this is the debacle that ensued from Microsoft’s release of Windows Vista. Most businesses shunned the use of Windows Vista outright (due to incompatibilities and the convoluted design). Those who blindly drank from the infected pit were soon crawling around, their entire IT ecosystem covered in festering boils. For many the cure was costly and extremely invasive.

Conclusion

The way the different markets are consuming ‘specific’ products, gadgets and software today shows that the industry is outgrowing its adolescent impressionability. Gone are the days where we were told we must be made more ill, before we can be made better. In the world of help desk systems, it is decidedly much the same case.

Any vendor that claims to offer you a ‘revolutionary’ help desk system should be held to the merits, and standings of the IT industry today. If Jane and Joe ‘Everyday’ cannot use it, and if businesses cannot integrate it with their ecosystems (to their benefit I might add) there probably is nothing revolutionary about it!

Donovan Kretsman, Senior Writer and Editor

By combining his technical experience in the IT industry and his proclivity for writing, Donovan dispels IT myths and explains confusing concepts to help businesses make informed decisions regarding their IT needs

The main problem(s) with email clients

At first, most companies manage their email communications just fine using email client software. There are many free or commercial options to choose from for just about every platform, which is why email clients are still popular choices for many businesses. However, as a business grows so does the volume of emails it has to cope with both internally and from outside. Since most email clients simply offer a point-to-point solution for sending and receiving email, most people (and businesses) soon struggle to cope with the sheer quantity of emails they need to process on a daily basis.

This problem is something most organizations will face sooner or later, since we all rely on email during performing our daily duties (some of us can’t do our work without it). It is usually not long before the entire business starts feeling the sting as customers complain that their queries are not being dealt with in reasonable time or at all. Eventually internal communications suffer and you are left waiting for a reply from someone, only to run into them and find out they never received your email or “lost” it.

The list of issues which may result from unorganized, unmanageable and ever-growing email is endless, but these are real issues facing many companies who are reaching the limit of what desktop email clients were designed to do, with regards to email management.

Technical issues of email clients

An additional problem with email clients is they operate in isolation, usually from the user’s laptop or workstation. An organization has absolutely no audit trail if it cannot trace the history of incidents and communications as they move around internally. Moreover, emails left on a user’s machine are prone to accidental deletion, loss from hardware failure or even theft.

Even storing emails on a central server does not guarantee sufficient traceability of incidents and the email client still only acts as a sending and receiving application, for the end user. This leaves most companies totally in the dark as far as monitoring and auditing their communication and support processes go.

Why smaller companies are starting to embrace help desk solutions

Help desk systems used to be complex and expensive proprietary systems which consisted of many different software tools meshed together by a group of highly skilled IT professionals and software engineers. The cost of implementing, maintaining and further customizing such a system required companies to have their own IT departments, which alone came at a cost beyond the reach of many smaller businesses and start-ups.

In recent years help desk systems have come down in price, grown in out-of-the box functionality and become much easier to integrate. Now it no longer costs a fortune to own a help desk nor does it require a dedicated team of specialists just to get it to work. These improvements finally made help desk systems a realistic option for many businesses.

How a help desk system can help you overcome email client problems

A good help desk system gives you management and tracking capabilities far beyond those of any email client. When a company invests in a help desk system suited to their business, to replace aging email client software, the difference most experience is similar to the upgrading from riding a bicycle to driving a car. Yes there are fuel bills and maintenance costs, but the comfort, safety and speed you get really make a difference and usually outweigh the cost differences.

The learning curve depends on the specific system chosen, but once a company starts to use the capabilities of a help desk system, they usually find a much better flow of emails and communications and an array of tools to help them sort, escalate, share and store their emails.

Some of the main things to look for in a help desk system

Conclusion

In this, the first of a 5 part series, we’ve briefly looked at some of the main problems associated with popular email client software and touched on some of the key benefits and considerations involved in choosing a replacement help desk system. Some of the key points raised in this article will be revisited in coming articles, and looked at in more detail.

Donovan Kretsman, Senior Writer and Editor

By combining his technical experience in the IT industry and his proclivity for writing, Donovan dispels IT myths and explains confusing concepts to help businesses make informed decisions regarding their IT needs

SLAs are typically dependent on time references.  For example, a company may commit to reply to a service ticket within 48 hours of receipt of email.  Or, alternatively, the SLA might promise a reply within 48 business hours.  Naturally, these two commitments, though similar in appearance, require vastly different time calculations. FocalScope has the built-in capability to set office hours for one or more helpdesk ticketboxes, also factoring in any number of pre-scheduled company events, holidays and time-zones.  By attributing SLAs to a ticketbox, FocalScope is able to customize your calculations no matter how complicated your working hours are.

With your office’s working configured correctly, you can then set up your SLAs to follow these hours precisely.  FocalScope managers and supervisors can set up dynamic SLAs to reflect commitments they have made to customers and internal workflows.  Subsequent actions can be created to automatically take place if a ticket is not closed within those requirements.  Actions can include highlighting a ticket in a certain color, emailing a manager or supervisor, issuing an alert to supervisor, and/or placing a copy of a ticket in a specifically created folder.  The status of any outstanding or overdue ticket is visible at-a-glance to a manager with one click.  Similarly, SLA results are included in the reporting functionality.

Using placeholders, SLAs can be inserted into standard and auto-replies.  If a customer writes an email with a request, your ticketbox or shared email can be configured to automatically and instantly reply to the customer with a personalized Standard Response, informing the customer that the email has been receive with the specific SLA inserted.  The FocalScope email and SLA management systems process this seamlessly, so customers get the instant acknowledgement and answers they require, while helpdesk agents can focus on problem-solving, not writing routine emails.

Try FocalScope’s SLA functionality to manage and exceed your customers’ expectations today!

FocalScope allows you to easily create an unlimited amount of Standard Responses and store them in a similarly unlimited number of shared libraries. For example, you can create one Standard Response “master” library in the main Shared Folder and/or create separate libraries specifically for certain ticketboxes.  FocalScope users can access the Standard Responses either from within an already-open email with a drop-down menu or directly from the library by right-clicking on the selected Standard Response.

Standard Responses are more than the average “canned reply,” however.  FocalScope allows you and your team to add attachments and insert placeholders to your Standard Responses.  Thus, if you need your Standard Response for address changes inquiries to include an attachment, the customer’s name in the email greeting and indicate the appropriate SLA, you can have an address change request form automatically attached and use placeholders to insert both the particular recipient’s name and SLA to further personalize the message.  Placeholders can pull numerous fields of data from your database, including sender’s and/or recipient’s names, sender’s and/or recipients addresses, ticket numbers, SLAs and other customizable fields.

Please watch the video below in which we walk you through a real-life demonstration of how to use Standard Responses in an everyday scenario.

Standard Responses can be further customized and automated through a ticketbox’s properties. We can modify templates and signatures for each new email and reply associated with messages in this ticketbox.  Also, if we switch the Auto-Responder tab, we can set up auto-replies to be sent to customers for both new incoming emails and customer replies, pulling templates from our Standard Responses.

Standard responses give you and your team a fast, convenient and personalized method to reply to inquiries and automate communications.  Customers get responses and answers they require more quickly; you and your team free up time to work on more complicated tasks and tickets.

For example, if your customer cannot find the help they need on your website, they simply click on a “Live Chat” button or tab that you can place anywhere on your website.  This opens a window and starts a live online chat with an assigned or available helpdesk agent.  Additionally, a helpdesk agent can insert a Live Chat link into an already ticketed email and encourage a customer to chat in real-time through Live Chat. Inserting the Live Chat link into an email is simply a click away.  When/if the customer does chose to Live Chat with a helpdesk agent, the link contains “smart” features which will direct the Live Chat to the correct helpdesk agent and present him/her with all background information.

Collaboration is key, too.  If a customer requires specialized assistance, you can transfer the Live Chat to a support engineer or other subject-matter expert.  Your customers can also save and download a copy of the Chat, which gives them added confidence and can be used if there are any miscommunications in the future.  This is all done without having to put anyone on hold, having to call anyone back, and in real time.

If your helpdesk is only open during certain hours, Live Chat will also ask an after-hours visitor to leave a message.  This message will be converted into an email and will be available for the first helpdesk agent when he/she logs in.

Live Chat’s deployment simply requires inserting a Java-script code into your website’s HTML.  Your FocalScope solution will automatically generate and provide the code to you which your web-design can easily integrate into your site.  You can also generate codes for more than one button so that if you wish you route chats to specific departments, such as technical support, billing, etc, or to specific language speakers. Within the Administration environment, you can also control how many concurrent Live Chat’s your agents can individually have open in order to optimize workflows.

Live Chat is just one of the ways to communicate with and assist customers through FocalScope while maintaining your crucial tracking and logging capabilities.  Learn more about email, SMS and Jabber in other blog posts.

Until recently, if there was an issue that required a helpdesk agent to work with a colleague, he/she would need to make a phone call, lean over the cubicle, walk down the hall to have a one-on-one conversation or write a potentially lengthy email. Discussions between colleagues, however useful, could not be tracked and, if there were any concerns about the progress of a specific issue, supervisors or managers might have little information to review. Writing an email to explain the situation accurately, though properly logged, can require too much time. Instant messaging, built into the FocalScope solution, is an innovative solution to these dilemmas.

With Jabber, helpdesk agents now can collaborate in real time without sacrificing any tracking and logging functionality. Helpdesk agents can chat and share files instantaneously while having discussions logged and associated with specific ticket numbers for later reference. Managers can broadcast a group message to select colleagues or user groups to update meeting times or other team information. Since the Jabber client in built into FocalScope, it can also detect in live time whether a contact is online, away from their desk or busy from the icon display and status bar.

FocalScope’s Jabber client is fully integrated into its user-interface and is compatible with any standard open-source Jabber host. Access to the Jabber tool is clearly located on the toolbar or by clicking on the Jabber status icon on the bottom status bar. You can install a Jabber host for FocalScope users only or you can connect to your pre-existing one,  allowing helpdesk agents to also chat with non-FocalScope users.

All chats are recorded and stored in chat logs as standard. If a chat is opened through a ticket, that chat will also be linked and logged in the ticket’s notes.

Many current mobile instant messaging clients also support Jabber, so you can keep in touch with your colleagues on your Blackberry, iPhone, Android or other devices when you’re away from the office. You do not need to be logged into FocalScope to have access to Jabber chat functionality.