Maintaining accounts and customer satisfaction often depends on the effectiveness of responding to issues. Keeping an integrator's support requirements, warranty information, and field assets organized fall upon its support ticketing and help desk management software.
150+ integrators told us what help desk / support ticketing software they use and why.
Help Desk Software Statistics
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"No software: We have a 42 strong 24/7 helpdesk/call center available"
I would like to know how they are keeping track of issues, dates and times calls or work was done, and how they pass that information along to the field tech. Sticky notes, or just using emails back and forth?
Unless they mean it's like a third party call center? So then the company themselves are not using a helpdesk software, but the call center has their own.
Good point, Daniel. But if that were the case, do they not keep notes and records of service requests of their own? If they are small enough, maybe just notes on their invoices.
Surprising how many are not using software to keep track of everything. While you may not need it because you have all the information in your head. What happens if you get sued and have to produce evidence that you did something or recommended something? What happens if you go to sell the company and you have no records of past interactions? What happens if you get hit by a truck? If you decide to grow the company and hire a new employee how are they supposed to hit the ground and run without organized data? History of interactions with clients is in my opinion of one the most important things we can do in the security industry
History of interactions with clients is in my opinion critical to running a security company.
John, not just to a security industry, but any service related industry! Even if you are making notes in your POS system, that is using the POS system as your ticketing system and better than nothing.
It appears to me from this survey that those that do not have some sort of ticketing or help desk type system to track service requests and capture issues history are:
- Very small or sole propriteroship operations. Which may be understandable, but I'm sure (hope) unless they are a true trunk slammer they at least make some notes on their invoices and keep copies they can go back to.
- May be slightly "larger" of the small integrators who are very much into time and material and offer little in the way of warranty or managed services offerings.
Looking at the specific responses, there is a decent percentage of obvious small operations. There is also at least as many small-medium sized integrators, some with 3-5 different offices and I would estimate 10-30 employees, that responded as not using a help desk support software system. What they offer as far as long term support or managed services as you mention, I couldn't say with any real detail.
Smaller the operation the easier it is to use software and the more important it is. Even using something as simple as Front App as your email client makes keeping everything organized really easy.
Wow.....
I am in the process of looking for something to be cloud based since our current service call/ticketing program (MircoKey) is server based which we have been using since 1999. Thought there would be more programs listed than just none on here. We have some clients who only want to speak to a live human being. Even after that phone call, I still require my techs to document that conversation in our service program and close the ticket out. So do other companies just create a email to the service dept. for that?
We try to get all of our customers to email for support or log into our support portel and create a ticket. . This way to the process is started and all the right people are notified and nothing gets missed. This is very important for customers with SLAs so we can make sure we have the issue fixed within the agreed service time. We also have an answering service which customers can use after hours which will transcribe the message into a ticket for us.
We have some customers which want to call and talk with us when there is a support issue which is fine but we like to remind them email is the best way most efficient way to request support.
I agree with you in principle that email is the best way for service support however it always seems like someone emails the wrong person even when we tell them about our service email. Another problem is not everyone hits the all reply button on email chain. Also the client doesn't always religiously email right back to so the problem lingers a bit longer. Email is fine but I encourage them to call especially if it is an emergency.
Heck I have clients that still want to fax over signed quotes over...
"training" the customer is the hardest part. I still have customers that text me for service requests. I don't mind this but I tell them what happens if I am in a meeting or driving?
We also have an onboarding process which we review with the customer how to request quotes and how to request support. This helps to "train" the custom to follow our process.
You don't need to tell the customer how to request help. Aren't we in a customer-centric society? Let them pick the most convenient way to reach you and change your business process accordingly.
Most of the modern Service Desk software systems allow you to track multiple input channels, including emails, auto-attendant, text, facebook private messages, twitter. I would suggest Zendesk, I like it very much.
it's very good as well, just a bit complicated (and more expensive) for a typical service company. Do you use just a help desk or control & monitoring modules as well? I tried those but I like PRTG and teamviewer more. No deep integration though
We are a full Connectwise house right now: Sell, Manage, Automate and Control. PRTG is nice and great for SNMP monitoring but Automate lets us do more with system monitoring and scripting. We can monitor a customers system and if there is an issue Automate will automatically create a ticket and depending on the issue Automate will run a script to automatically fix the issue. If Automate can't fix the issue it can then push the ticket over to a human to work on.
One of the main reasons we went with Connectwise is so we can assist track all of our customer's devices so we can track warranty status and service history. When a ticket comes in we can attach the assist to the ticket so the techs can see all the info from the time the product was ordered right from the ticket page.
We switched from Teamview to ScreenConnect (Control) and are much happier. We can jump right into customers servers right from the ticket with all the time attached to the ticket automatically. We have found Control to be much faster then Teamviewer and it's cheaper.
Sounds like a very comprehensive setup. Are you security company at all? :)
We will have projects in Denver and Dallas areas soon (CCTV, Access Control, Alarm, some basic automation), do you operate there?
Steve,
My organization uses Connectwise Manage for our ticketing system / CRM. Not sure that we could get by without it. I have also run across software called Bitrix24 that I utilize from a sales perspective. I won't get into a ton of details here, but if you are looking for a affordable, statistics driven software suite . . . this is absolutely worth a look. Plus there is a free version that you can use to test it out. There are a lot of features that I don't personally use, but the sales tracking is the best I've seen.
Just thought I'd throw out what little info I could, as I am always personally looking for this same type of info from others in our field.
Thank you John. We will take a look at both programs. Our problem is we have 18-19 years of service records in our current software platform so convincing the bosses to move will take a bit. I'm using Quickbooks for quotes but I know there is better stuff out there.
We had a similar situation when we used to keep service tickets in our CRM program, a role it was not designed to do well. We went to a different, cloud hosted solution for service tickets. We now run a copy of our old CRM on a virtual machine that we remote desktop to if we need to reference historical data. After 7 years we can dump it all if we wished.
The security area is even more disorganized than I thought. I would like to see this statistics in the context of company age
Interesting, how many security integrators have at least ITIL foundation certified guy in their team. I believe, these days it should be the same mandatory certification for the middle or senior techs as some basic network training like CCNA or Network+
I would be very curious to see a survey on what companies are using, if anything, for Field Service Software. And if that is tied into their accounting system for billing.
Btw, for field service software, I plan to ask a more general question:
"What, if any, software, do your technicians use in the field to record and track interactions with customers?"
Any feedback or changes, let me know.
"What, if any, software, do your technicians use in the field to record and track interactions with customers?"
John, I think that would be a good and important distinction to make, and maybe also ask, "Is the software the technicians use in the field that same as your help desk or service tracking software". Maybe.
Ty, that post is now live - Integrator Technician Field Software Usage (Statistics)
I was kind of viewing "help desk" and field service platform as the same thing. We use our platform for both. But then you bring up a good point in that when we were looking for a platform, there were some "help desk" systems that seemed to worked great for internal use or for customer phone support, but they were not very conducive for providing field services. Things like allowing for products and costs to be added to service tickets and custom fields for warranty and non-warranty customer's, for example.
There seems to be two distinctions for a services platform in the technology world:
Help Desk and Professional Services Automation (PSA) software.
In a nut shell it seems PSA does what help desk does, but has added features and functions for the service providers that also have field service personnel.
By the way, I found this website very helpful when looking for a PSA platform and this is where I found our current platform that we use.
https://www.capterra.com/professional-services-automation-software/
isn't it a point of service desk software? You use it in your office, field techs use it on the smartphones/tablets, customers can access a cloud-based service and see the ticket flow, management sees the statistics, etc.
