Customer support has become the game-changer in organizations today, as every company strives to provide a superior end-user experience that can in turn boost customer loyalty. Do you know that it takes ten times more time and effort to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one? This is why organizations do anything under the sun to keep existing customers in good books.
Top-notch customer service is one such aspect that organizations leverage. Broadly speaking, customer service includes multiple operations, but to keep the scope narrow, we will focus on the tools that ensure customers' queries and concerns are answered as quickly as possible. ITSM or Help desk software is a category of software that empowers your employees to quickly help your customers to know what they want. These help desk tools come with knowledge bases, self-service portals, automation, and a ton of other capabilities that ensure your customers' satisfaction and happiness.
One such tool that we're going to review in this article is ManageEngine's ServiceDesk Plus. Read on to know all about this tool's capabilities, how it can benefit your organization, and its limitations, so you can make an informed decision about this tool's effectiveness for your organization.
What is ServiceDesk Plus?
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is an IT help desk software that empowers IT teams to deliver the highest levels of customer service. It provides the visibility and control that your organization needs to ensure that the needs of customers are met. Its smart automation capabilities and extensive reporting features also add to the appeal of ServiceDesk Plus.
A core functionality of any IT helpdesk tool is the ability to create tickets through multiple channels, manage them, and ensure their quick resolution. ServiceDesk Plus comes with the capabilities needed to achieve all these aspects, thereby making it a comprehensive helpdesk software option for enterprises of any size.
Let's now dive into the features of ServiceDesk Plus to help you decide if this is the right fit for your needs.
Features of ServiceDesk Plus
ServiceDesk Plus is a full-stack ITSM tool that maintains the high availability of services while ensuring that the industry's best practices are implemented. Here's a look at its important features.
- Incident Management: ServiceDesk Plus is an out-of-the-box incident management tool that makes it easy to create tickets through multiple channels. Users can quickly create tickets for issues raised through emails and phones. ServiceDesk Plus can even automatically convert emails to tickets, for ease of use. Besides these two channels, users can raise issues through a web-based self-service portal, and these issues will be automatically converted to tickets. The advantage of having all issues as tickets is that you can easily track and monitor their progress through a defined life cycle. You can even choose to configure custom status based on your organization's operations and the nature of issues that may come up. Such custom statuses can help you to better understand how your ticket is progressing, so you can assess the additional steps needed to resolve them.
- Automated Workflow: A salient feature of ServiceDesk Plus is its automated workflow that increases the efficiency of your resolution processes, with little to no human interference. You can automate the entire process, right from the time a ticket is created to its feedback after resolution. With ServiceDesk Plus, you can automatically assign a technician/employee to a ticket based on its nature. The software will follow pre-defined business rules to identify the right individual/team for each ticket. You can even choose to have a round-robin or load-balancing-based auto-assignment to boost employee productivity and morale. You can also track the progress made and use them to evaluate the performance of technicians. Specifically, you can create KPIs in incident management and gauge your employees' performance against them, all of it automatically.
- Leverage the Power of Templates for Communication: Communication is an essential part of customer service, as this is the way you enable your customers to know the status of their issues and the estimated time for resolution. That said, regular communication doesn't have to be an arduous process. ServiceDesk Plus offers many email templates that you can set up to automatically inform your customers as the ticket moves across different stages.
- Proactive Response and Resolution: A common problem that plagues many organizations is delayed resolution. Unfortunately, such delays impact your reputation in the eyes of your customers. A good way to avoid such delays is to take a proactive approach to resolve issues. In particular, you can include escalations as a part of your workflow, so the issue meets the agreed SLAs. Also, make sure you have visibility into the progress, so you can take a proactive approach to tackle the roadblocks that delay resolution. ServiceDesk Plus supports both escalations and proactive resolution while giving the visibility and control you need to meet the resolution timelines.
- Assess Satisfaction: Gathering feedback from your end-users is an essential step to knowing the impact of your efforts on their experience. Also, it can give better insights into your customers' expectations and employees' performance, so you can change your business strategies and processes accordingly. ServiceDesk Plus makes it easy to gather feedback from end-users after an issue is resolved. It provides the option to roll out user surveys at periodic intervals to know the end-user experience. Also, users have the option to provide feedback through the self-service portal.
- Empower your Employees: A proven strategy to increase resolution time and end-user experience is to empower your employees with the knowledge and information they need to resolve tickets. ServiceDesk Plus makes it easy to integrate a knowledge base with your incident management process, so your employees can look into the knowledge base for FAQs and resolve issues at the earliest. You can even consider the idea of publishing the knowledge base on the self-service portal to enable your end-users to quickly find the information they want. Needless to say, it will bring down the number of tickets and your employees can focus on the more important issues.
- Integrations: Another cool aspect of ServiceDesk Plus is that it integrates well with other ManageEngine and third-party applications. In turn, this translates to a seamless flow of data to and from ServiceDesk Plus and better collaboration with your existing tech stack and infrastructure.
The above capabilities undoubtedly make ServiceDesk Plus a good choice for resolving incidents and enhancing the end-user experience with your company. Next, let's go through a critical review of this tool to understand how it can impact your organization.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus – A Critical Review
In this section, let's talk in detail about the likely impact that ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus can have on your organization. We'll talk about both the benefits and the potential pitfalls to help you make an informed decision.
- Flexible Deployment ServiceDesk Plus offers flexible deployment options to meet your organization's needs. You can choose from a cloud or on-premise deployment. Also, you can choose from three different packages, namely, Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. The Standard option is ideal for ticketing, while the Professional edition supports both the IT help desk and integrated asset management. Lastly, the Enterprise edition is a full-fledged ITSM suite that comes with change management, service catalog, release management, CMDB, and more. Regardless of the deployment, you can empower your technicians and employees to improve their productivity and the overall end-user experience.
- Centralized Issues Another compelling reason to use ServiceDesk Plus is its ability to centrally capture all the issues. It streamlines the entire ticketing process and even allows anyone to create a ticket through multiple channels. As a result, all the issues related to your tech stack and product can be handled through this single tool. Furthermore, it helps to bring together issues from different departments like facilities, marketing, admin, finance, etc. Needless to say, it provides comprehensive visibility and control into the existing issues and their progress. Accordingly, you can create and implement processes for quick resolution of such incidents.
- Business Objectives ServiceDesk Plus is a powerful ticketing solution that helps you to easily meet your business objectives. More importantly, it helps to track the progress of different business KPIs, so you can make the necessary changes to reach your end goals. ServiceDesk Plus also comes with many reporting templates that can be used to understand your current state of operations. They can come in handy for internal auditing and reporting and can help to comply with external standards as well.
- Easy to Use ServiceDesk Plus is simple to get started, as you don't need any elaborate coding or testing. Simply download the tool and change any of the default configurations to meet your requirements. That's it, you're all set to use this tool. It's also fairly intuitive to use and doesn't require elaborate training for your employees. All this translates to easy onboarding and efficient usage that in turn can boost employee productivity and morale.
- Return on Investment A report by Forrester shows that enterprises that use ServiceDesk Plus can get a 352% return on their investment. It is estimated that organizations can get benefits worth around $2.08 million, with a payback period of just six months. This study also showed that end users can save up to six minutes on every ticket, while technicians spend an average of ten minutes on each incident. It also estimated that IT managers spend 75% less time handling escalations and eight hours less generating monthly KPI reports. Note that these are averages found in the study, and the actual results may vary for your organization. Still, these are good estimates to consider before deciding on a ticketing tool for your organization.
- Creating Knowledge Base ServiceDesk Plus makes it easy to create a knowledge base that your employees can quickly refer to speed up the resolution process. You can even choose to host this knowledge base in a self-service portal for your end-users, so they can look up answers for frequently answered questions instead of raising a ticket.
- Leveraging the Power of Automation With ServiceDesk Plus, you can automate many processes in incident management. For example, it can convert emails into tickets directly. Likewise, when a ticket has the same status for a certain number of days, you can set the tool to automatically escalate it to the next higher employee in the organizational structure. Such automation of processes saves a lot of time and effort, so your employees can focus on the more important issues.
- Easy Customization You can personalize ServiceDesk Plus quickly to meet your organization's specific requirements. It comes with many out-of-the-box customization options that you can leverage to get a personalized experience. The biggest advantage of this customization is that you can define processes and use custom configurations that will provide maximum benefit for you.
In all, these are some of the benefits that come with ServiceDesk Plus. Undoubtedly, it can be a great addition to your organization, especially in the areas of ticketing and IT asset management.
That said, ServiceDesk Plus is not without limitations. Some online users have opined that the software requires frequent updates and hence, they have to plan for it ahead. Also, the search capabilities are limited, and the feature development life cycle is relatively long, so new features and releases are not available periodically.
In all, the limitations are not exactly deal-breakers, but the positives can have a big impact on your organization.
Final Words
To conclude, ServiceDesk Plus is a comprehensive incident and IT asset management solution that comes with many features to provide the control and visibility you need to quickly resolve end-user issues. More importantly, it enhances the end-user experience, thereby boosting your reputation in the eyes of current and future customers. Moreover, reports and real-world use cases show that ServiceDesk Plus provides a good return on your investment. Plus, its easy-to-install feature, knowledge base, automation, and reporting capabilities add to its appeal. Undoubtedly, it can be a good addition to any organization. Start a 30-day free trial.
We hope this information helps you to decide if ServiceDesk Plus is the right fit for your organization.
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