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Managing a small business can be quite exciting, if you have a small team that come together everyday to get things out. You will hardly have any rules or hierarchy that slows you down.

You still have to do a lot of things like answering the questions, clarifying doubts, taking special requests, etc. to earn the trust of your customers. You should be present round the clock to show your customers that you care for them. However, things may change at some point. The tickets may tend to get lost or you may forget to provide some important information, which increases the risk of losing business.

With the right help desk solution, you can get your support under control and focus more on your customers. There is a chance that you have been shuttling between tools that give you very little, and cost you a bomb. You need to choose a reliable help desk solution that is perfect for your business at a price that growing companies like you can afford easily. The below guide will help you determine the right help desk solution that meets the requirements of your company as well as fits into your budget.

Basically, the price of Help Desk Software depends on two factors –

1. Number of customer service agents
2. Level of features

Free Plan

Many popular help desk solutions have free versions for less than 5 agents. However, the free version is available for only a month or two, after which you have to pay a nominal fee every month. There are many tools that will help you manage your tickets and communicate well with your customers. This category keeps every agent on the same page with a shared mailbox and has email support, phone support and knowledge base channel. However, you should know that the best features for help desk solutions can be utilized at large volumes of tickets and agents. It doesn’t make much sense to download, set up an account, manage and maintain a database for a few tickets or agents.

Standard Plan

Teams with 5-10 customer service agents can use this plan with varying features such as – customer support level, customer stats, tracking time, etc. This plan includes the ability to accept help request, complaints and feedback through multiple channels like – phone, email, live chat or social media platforms. You will get upper tier features like – real-time visitor monitoring, help desk reports, mobile applications, automated ticket management and community forums at this level.

Premium Plan

This plan is suitable for teams with more than 10 customer service agents.You will get all the best features like – live support, multiple products & locations and enterprise report at this level. Instead of tracking the tickets, the support teams can get inside the client’s computer, get inside the firewalls as well as report back the system issues and fix them remotely. You will also get unlimited email response management and multiple customer support channels.

The amount you are paying for help desk software is significantly less than the paycheck of that employee. It saves your money as well as the time of employee every month. With light and clear pricing, help desk software sits light on your wallet. You will get round the clock support at no extra cost, regardless of the pricing plan you choose.

Cost benefits of Help Desk Software

Your staff might be wearing multiple hats for network administration, system administration and help desk support. It often becomes difficult to provide quality services, when your staff spends more time receiving and tracking tickets, rather than resolving them. The main objective of help desk solution is to help businesses simplify the ticket creation and management tasks, and deliver an effective service without spending much. Some of the cost benefits of a reliable and efficient help desk software are-

• Reduce the cost of adding more staff
• Enhance the productivity of help desk staff
• Generate better ROI from help desk software

No matter how large or small your business is, help desk software allows you to manage ticketing centrally, automate processes and achieve results at a fast rate.Help desk software has changed a lot in the recent years and top companies are focusing heavily on automation to simplify support ticket handling process. This might be the best and most interesting time for help desk software.

Calculating ROI for Help Desk Software

The key to reduce costs while enhancing customer experience is to have a reliable Help Desk Solution. The question is “How to maximize the value of the help desk and get better ROI?” The answer would be the best-in-class Help desk solution that helps you manage your user requests. Companies should focus more on providing better training, resources and support at level 1. In a recent survey, when customers are asked to name items that are important for overall customer satisfaction, 82% named service desk and 45% named desktop support.

If your service desk could close at a higher percentage of requests without any escalations, then your ROI will be higher. Your service desk team will raise the level of customer satisfaction, if majority of tickets are closed at level 1. There is no doubt that the top performer in the support team will have the lowest loss of productive hours. And it is estimated that the top performers improve the productive time by 30 hours per year compared to bad performers. Thus, you can help the company add 1 week of productive hours per customer service agent per year by using Help Desk Software.

So, we can say that Help Desk Solutions not only help you solve customer’s issues on level 1, but also dramatically raises Return On Investment (ROI).