A hosted ticketing system such as Jitbit's hosted help desk can be the difference between a business that runs like the proverbial clockwork and one that stutters and splutters like an old banger that is fit for the scrap heap. If you're in the market to upgrade your help desk or looking to add one to your arsenal you will see that there are many on the market to choose from – some great, some, well, just a bit meh. In this article we'll try to show you some of the key features you should be looking for when you make your decision and why we think our help desk might be the nest out there.

Hosted Ticketing System Key Features

A hosted help desk should:

• Be easy to use – a good hosted help desk requires no training or technical skill to run and anyone should be able to get working with it immediately.
• Convert emails to tickets – a ticket is a traceable file containing all the key information about any issue raised and dealt with by your support staff and is much easy to process and track than any email.
• Offer free upgrades and support – a key benefit of a hosted ticketing system is it is upgraded by the host frequently and painlessly and supported fully.
• Include reporting, asset-tracking, a quality knowledge-base and file-attachments to ensure you are always abreast of your support analytics.
• Be customizable – okay, not as tweakable as a downloaded help desk, but everyone needs the ability to personalize their help desk.
• Be hosted on first class servers and programmed for speed and reliability – Jitbit uses Amazon's rock solid datacenters in North Virginia and California and we are always testing and tweaking to ensure we're offering the best service.
• Be as secure as a bank – again, Amazon's servers are like a fortress and are used by massive concerns such as Reddit and Pinterest.
• Be multilingual – you're going to need to communicate worldwide as you expand so your help desk should support all the major languages of commerce.
• Have a support widget – nothing says “we're here for you” like a support widget on every page.
• Be affordable - here's where many come unstuck. Jitbit's hosted help desk is yours for as little as $29 a month and our enterprise plan offers unlimited users, tickets and attachments.

At Jitbit we think we've thought of everything a great help desk needs so why not sign up for a free trial and start testing our ticket system out in a matter of minutes.

There are many benefits to your company in making use of a help desk solution such as Jitbit’s hosted ticketing software, but first we should probably explain what a ticket is. Well, if you currently service your clients and customers the old-fashioned way using email and phone as contact points you will have already realised that it is easy to lose track of where each interaction is in the chain. We often hear horror stories of customers having to make multiple contacts often repeating themselves over and over again. Some of these customers even get lost in the convoluted systems companies have in place – how do you think that makes the company look! With a ticketing system that becomes all but impossible. Whenever first contact is made and a customer raises an issue or query an electronic “ticket” is created. This is then tracked through the hosted help desk and sent to the appropriate technician or customer support operative. At no point can this ticket be lost or misplaced due to the tracking process and report systems in place. We’d go as far as to say a quality help desk is essential for improving customer relations.

Hosted Ticketing Software Vs "Downloadable" Help Desk

Although Jitbit offer both options it may be true that hosted ticketing software is a better fit for most users. We use Amazon’s servers for our helpdesk so reliability and security is first rate. We are able to upgrade our hosted version of the software much more frequently because we do not need to tune the database-upgrade tool, build a new set-up package and upgrade the installation manual – and that’s before we even test it and publish it! No, with the hosted version we just upgrade and fire away secure in the knowledge that your service has improved with zero hassle. And zero hassle is also why we use a precompiled mode to copy our help desk to the server. This basically means it is in pure binary optimized DLL files so it runs as smoothly as possible, loads quickly and has fewer glitches.

Just some of the many reasons why we use this version of our hosted help desk ourselves!

Further reading: online ticketing system.