Best Help Desk Solutions: 10 Questions to Help Compare Help Desk Solutions

City or Country? How many bedrooms? What is your optimal floor plan? If you’ve bought a house before, you know there’s a string of questions to answer before you go to your first open house, so you don’t waste time looking at homes that don’t fit your needs.

Selecting the best help desk solutions for your business is very similar. Before you start meeting with IT service provider companies to compare help desk solutions, it helps to have some understanding of what you’re looking for first. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before selecting a help desk services provider:

Help Desk Questionnaire

Looking for the best help desk solutions for your business? Before you select a service provider, ask yourself these 10 questions to help you better compare help desk solutions:

1. What kind of availability does your business need?

When determining what kind of availability your business needs, you should factor in if you have multiple offices in different times zones, when users are actively working, and what the cost of a user’s downtime is to your business. If your provider doesn’t staff a 24×7 help desk, encountering an issue on a Friday evening means not even having the issue touched until Monday morning. The best help desk solutions offer support around the clock to keep your business operating smoothly.

2. Where would you like your help desk based?

There are many help desk providers out there, but not all of them are located in the U.S. Many help desk providers outsource to another country to help lower costs. By using a US-based help desk, you are able to avoid potential language and cultural barriers that may lead to longer resolution times and frustration for your users. Be sure to consider the physical location of the provider when you compare help desk solutions.

3. What is your ideal SLA resolution time?

Every minute a user waits for a technical problem to be resolved can cost your business time and money. Determining your realistic and ideal service level agreement (SLA) resolution time can help you pick a provider that has the right processes in place to meet your business needs. Be sure to consider your ideal resolution time for your business before you compare help desk solutions.

4. Are you looking for any special services, such as private labelling?

If your business provides technical support for custom applications or monitors proprietary software and infrastructure, you may want to compare help desk solution providers that offer private-labelling services. With private labelling, a help desk is branded as part of your company and tailored to meet your specific requirements.

5. What kind of pricing model fits your budget?

For many businesses, the best help desk solutions align with budget requirements. While per-ticket pricing may be the best option for some, others may do better to have a monthly recurring SLA. Flexible pricing options help you know what to expect with each monthly bill so you can align your IT budget accordingly.

6. What responsibilities will the help desk handle?

If you have an internal IT department, you will need to determine what incidents the help desk will handle versus what the IT department handles. Gathering this information can help you compare help desk solutions and select the best provider for your organization. This ensures you are picking a provider with the right level of expertise to handle your tickets.

7. Do you need reporting?

After deciding that your business will utilize a help desk, you should consider how you will measure efficiency and improvement. Reporting is an important element of a help desk solution as it can include ticket volume, trends, and customer satisfaction. The best help desk solutions incorporate comprehensive and custom-tailored reporting data.

8. Who in your company can use the help desk?

Help desk services can be an asset to the entire company, or they can be funneled through your internal IT department. Deciding who will access the help desk can help your business determine which services you needed.

9. How do you want to contact the help desk?

Help desk service providers may have different ways that you can contact them. With some, you may have to call in, while with others you may have the option of submitting tickets via email, chat, a web-based portal, or a mobile help desk app. The best help desk solutions offer a variety of ticket-submission methods.

10. Are you looking for more?

Utilizing a help desk can start to uncover other issues within your IT, such as network monitoring and management. If there are other services you’d like to outsource or supplement, you should consider a managed service provider (MSP) that can scale support to meet all your IT needs, not just help desk services.

Choosing the best help desk solutions for your organization can improve your business while turning your dreams into reality. Now that you have a better understanding of how to compare help desk solutions, it’s time to start vetting your options. While sifting through your help desk options can be a daunting task, you can start (and end!) your search strong by contacting Dataprise.

Find out how our help desk services can be your perfect fit and help you win with IT.

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