In the words of Veruca Salt, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s” infamous spoiled brat, “I want it now!”
Young or old, bratty or humble, customers want quality customer service support…but they’re not willing to wait to get it.
A 2014 study found that 82% of customers say that having issues resolved immediately is the most important factor in quality customer service. And the best tool for ensuring that customers’ needs are met immediately and to their satisfaction is the establishment and maintenance of effective and functional help desk software.
With so many options out there, selecting a help desk solution that gets the job done right is hardly an easy task. As you begin your search, you’ll need to decide between two very different solutions: on-premises versus hosted. Both solutions have their benefits and their issues, it could be argued that there is no wrong decision. We know that before you commit to a solution for your business that you want to gain as much information as possible. However, before making your commitment, consider the following reasons for why you might NOT want to select a hosted solution.
1. You’re bound by regulations requiring data to be stored on site.
At the beginning of your software search, your first task is to note any industry, state and/or federal requirements that may dictate specifics of your data management. For example, if your business is part of the healthcare industry, you may be required to store data on an HIPAA-compliant platform. And while some hosted solutions are HIPAA-compliant, the feature-rich hosted solution at the top of your list may not be. So don’t choose indiscriminately. If your business prohibits you from storing data with outside parties, you may be among the few that do not have the luxury of outsourcing their help desk through the use of a hosted product.
2. You don’t care much about remote access to help desk software.
Hosted solutions allow for easy remote access to the system, which works perfectly if you want an army of free-to-roam workers. If you’d rather have your workers maintain a typical nine-to-five behind a desk, however, this feature isn’t as much of a benefit. If you want your workers to create a clear delineation between work and life, select an on-premises solution. In doing so, you make it clear to your employees that you expect them to leave work at the door and live their lives unencumbered by work-related worries.
3. You’d prefer to use your own servers.
If you’re an enterprise-sized business currently maintaining your own servers or storage cloud, and prefer to keep your software and its data in one of these locations, then an on-premise solution is likely best for you. When working with a hosted customer support option, your business depends on the performance of that company’s servers. Considering these businesses make their living by offering you quality service, it’s highly likely that they will have a high caliber of support for their servers. Many companies offer you a contractual guarantee that their servers are reliable, stating guaranteed uptime percentages and not charging you for periods of outage. Ultimately, that’s one less thing to add to your already-full plate.
4. You need to integrate proprietary software into your help desk solution.
You’ve spent thousands, even hundreds of thousand of dollars, building a proprietary software that must integrate into your help desk. Or perhaps you have a massive team of techies who are accustomed to tweaking lines of code in order to suit your needs on a whim. If either of these suppositions are true, you likely need an extremely custom solution and should really consider on-premises options. That isn’t to say that needing customization means that a hosted solution won’t work for your business. Often when helping a business get setup, the help desk solution teams will complete custom integrations with the use of APIs, for example. Not to mention, many SaaS solutions are already built to support integrations with other off-the-shelf office solutions.
Author Tip: Use time and cost of integrating necessary solutions as your deciding factor. If it’s more costly to integrate your proprietary systems into a hosted option than actually building and maintaining a complete system yourself, you’ll likely want to skip hosted options.
At HappyFox, these reasons above are true, but this is where we shine and break the traditional mold and thoughts about what a SaaS support solution can do for your business. Give us a peek, visit HappyFox today to see how we can improve your business and keep your information secure!
Of course, customer support isn’t one-size-fits-all. Given your businesses’ unique needs, which option do you believe is a better fit for you?
