Lots of support teams still rely on email, such as Outlook, as their main support mechanism. While email is still a great communicating tool it lacks proper organization & tracking.
Nothing. Email is a powerful tool. The only problem with email is that it is highly optimized for personal communication. Email clients (i.e. Outlook) fail to provide, say, a complete issue history over time. Outlook can't flexibly forward and "cc" other team members, managers, support staff. Outlook has no reports, no workflow, no tagging and categorizing.
A full transition from Outlook to a full-featured IT helpdesk application can be hard for your team.
What you need is a helpdesk application that will tightly integrate with your suppport mailbox. So you could still use Outlook - answering tickets from your favorite email client - but having support tickets stored and organized in the helpdesk database. With advanced reporting, search engine, customer history etc.
Jitbit Helpdesk offers tight email integration via POP, IMAP or Exchange protocols. You can connect to your Exchange Server so it picks all the emails from the support mailbox and converts them to tickets. After the email has been picked a notification is sent to all the support team members (optionally to a group or team members responsible for a particular "area"). The agents can then simply hit "reply" in their MS Outlook without even touching the helpdesk web app. The reply will be forwarded back to the customer's Outlook and logged within the helpdesk application in the ticket history.
Read about our EWS (Exchange) protocol support.
Agents can even do some basic ticket operations via the Email API.
Your company has probably outgrown Outlook based help desk if you answer more than 10 emails a day or you have more than one support agent. Once you find yourself hitting "reply all" - that's the time you need a helpdesk app. Once emails are hung because a staff member is unavailable - it's time to move away from "Outlook Helpdesk". Once you find yourself in need to simply count "requests per day" - that's when Outlook help desk stops fitting your needs.
Outlook is one of the best and easiest ways to manage help desk tickets which makes help desk software for Outlook an excellent way for a company to manage their support issues. Since company email can often be accessed from anywhere it also allows a company to hire telecommuting support staff at a far lower rate than they normally could and also cut back on their overhead and expenses.
Help desk software for Outlook can push tickets directly into the mailboxes of the relevant support technicians. The support staff can then deal with the support tickets directly however they need to be managed or transfer the tickets to a more relevant and advanced support team member. The customer who originally initiated the ticket can be contacted for further information and they can also be alerted when the issue has been properly resolved.
Jitbit Helpdesk Software integrates fully with a company's existing email allowing companies to use their Outlook email to deal with support issues easily. Not only is help desk software for Outlook available through Jitbit Helpdesk Software, the software also allows support staff to resolve issues through a mobile application or through web based delivery. Jitbit Helpdesk Software can substantially increase a support team's effectiveness and productivity.
Last updated: 5/23/2017
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