What should Enterprises look for in a Help Desk Software? [Infographics]

Last Updated: April 23, 2023

The quality of the product or service that any enterprise business deals with is an important reason why their customers choose them. But what makes the customer stay? The simple answer is a high level of customer service relayed through a capable and efficient help desk software that can address the needs of their customers. 

It is vital for any enterprise company to choose a help desk with all the required integrations, is available for varied use cases, aids effortless and effective collaboration amongst your team, and can adapt quickly at scale without dipping too much into their operational costs. An enterprise help desk from a reliable SaaS company will help you deliver consistent and personalized customer support. 

What is an Enterprise Help Desk? 

Bigger companies have bigger responsibilities and challenges. An enterprise help desk or enterprise service desk is an all-encompassing solution designed to solve a large company’s support or self-service needs. It can specifically address the requirements of employees and meet the expectations of the customers. 

An enterprise help desk differentiates itself from help desk solutions for small-medium businesses by supporting escalation features, incident management, audit log, and SSO. They provide a system for orderly ticket management and quick issue resolution for large and expanding companies. 

What should your Enterprise Help Desk software be able to do?

Each enterprise business needs to invest in help desk software that can help them meet the growing expectations of thousands of customers. Below are the use cases and features you must look for, as an enterprise, in your service solution software.

1. Allow seamless collaboration across your organization

A good enterprise help desk will be able to help you run your organization smoothly. It can standardize the way you resolve issues within your organization and localize all queries by becoming the single point of contact. For example, the HR department can implement self-service portals that answer small and complex questions and make it easy for each employee to find what they are looking for. Troubleshooting within your corporate network will become much easier and save you from seeking external assistance.

On the other hand, as your product or service offerings mature, you may need more than an individual or department to resolve a ticket completely. A help desk with collaboration features that allow agents across different departments to add private notes and comments to internally discuss an issue, consult on, or get approvals before responding to a customer can have a huge impact. This would increase the first contact resolution and decrease service level agreements (SLA) breaches, thus improving overall customer satisfaction rates.

2. Industry-accepted security and compliance frameworks

Help desks often store important company and client data. Therefore, transparency, backup capabilities, reliable system uptime, and data security are important factors to consider. You need the option to secure your help desk data with data encryption at transit and at rest. This, coupled with security features like 2FA, SSO, and audit logs, will decrease the risk of unauthorized access. Additionally, ensure that your help desk conforms to the industry-accepted security and privacy frameworks such as GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, and CCPA certificates.

Other security features you should look for include SSL encryption of the help desk URL, IP restriction for staff login, password encryption, and password strength checker.

3. Boost efficiency with improved agent workflows

The larger your operations, the higher the volume of customer questions that come your way. An enterprise help desk will recognize this and give you tools to help you save time, effort, and resources while improving the efficiency of your support team.

Canned responses are one such feature. They are pre-populated and rule-based automated messages that you can use whenever appropriate. Another time-saving feature is knowledge base creation and management. Help desk agents can keep track of what is being asked and can quickly ensure that relevant knowledge base materials are developed and updated.

Additionally, issue and service request tracking is one of the primary and most important features of help desk software. You can easily track and manage issues from your customers and also view the progress of the resolution. This makes your shared inbox redundant and gives you the option of putting your customer support staff on more important tasks. Furthermore, enterprise help desks equipped with automation will allow you to automate repeated tasks, multi-level escalations, and routing in the presence of predefined conditions and also gather feedback from your customers via survey tools.

4. Give you space to scale your organization

Every business wants to grow and your help desk must be positioned to adapt to their changing needs and help you achieve growth. Your help desk can support your growing business requirements and a large volume of customers is a vital functionality. It is important that your chosen help desk solution is future-proof and aids you in your scaling efforts.

Functionality on mobile devices

An enterprise help desk should ideally also have an app that lets you easily resolve tickets on the go. Read more here. 

Your help desk should be able to provide high levels of customization and be equipped with capabilities that can level up with the quality of support you want to give your customers.

5. Help in making data-informed decisions

Your help desk should give you access to reporting and analytics tools that help you gain a deeper insight into customer interactions and build your customized reports and dashboards. You can measure and monitor key metrics to see how you’re performing and use that data to make informed decisions about your staff, hiring processes, and support performance. It will also help you collate feedback and study patterns or repeat support requests and chart a clear path to how you can improve your operations at large.

6. Provide IT-related support

A large volume of incoming tickets for most enterprise businesses is IT-related. You need a ticketing system that also works as an IT help desk that can sort, categorize, and manage all queries in one place. Your help desk must be able to handle the tickets that concern your IT department either through an ITIL framework or by providing features like category support for outages, asset management, incident management, and approval management. It should be able to address all your possible IT support use cases.  

7. Scale operations with AI-driven chatbots

A great addition to any enterprise help desk provider is an AI chatbot solution that works in tandem with it. While the help desk will help you efficiently manage tickets, an effective AI-driven chatbot that answers FAQs amongst other queries in real-time can help you reduce ticket volume by deflecting tickets. This will save you time, money, and effort that can be better spent on tasks that require human intervention. They may be artificial solutions, but their impact on your customer service efforts will be very real. On the other hand, it can also eliminate human-prone and significantly reduce end-user stress and anxiety by its limitless patience.

8. Have a multilingual self-service portal

Most enterprises are multinationals with regional offices and customers in non-English speaking countries. Therefore, you need an enterprise help desk that can talk and provide support in a wide range of languages. It should have functional parsing capabilities so that you can suit needs no matter what language your customers reach out or respond in. In addition to that, one offering to look out for is a multilingual knowledge base portal to reduce the time and effort spent by agents in manually translating articles.

Enterprise-scale support for improved customer experience

The best enterprise help desks can create a real impact in larger organizations. It can gather and track feedback, ensure security and compliance, and apply itself to a variety of issues that enterprises face on a regular basis. A functional help desk that tends to your specific needs has the capacity of being the one thing that pushes you ahead of your competition. Learn more about how your business can gain from adopting an enterprise help desk by requesting a one-on-one demo from HappyFox’s product specialists.