Tech-Talk from Internet Software Sciences President Scott Vanderlip
Notes on optimizing your Web+Center Help desk operations
Empower your Tech staff administrators with options to configure your Web+Center help desk for better increased productivity and efficiency.
In the past few months while talking to several clients, and during Web+Center site visits, I found a consistent issue popping up with Web+Center installations. Mid level Web+Center “administrators” and higher level technicians and dispatchers have expressed some frustration knowing there were more features available with the software but they were not able to make any changes because they did not have the appropriate Web+Center “Configurator” level login accounts necessary to make configuration level changes. These middle level support technicians also lacked direction or the departmental permission to research and implement more functionality of the Web+Center product.
In all of the scenarios, the software worked well for their organization, but from our vendor perspective, we could see that increased efficiencies and a better customer and tech user experiences might result if the middle level staff member were encouraged to research the Web+Center product capabilities and propose and implement more features of the software. We have outlined 5 ways to help encourage your staff to collaboratively research and suggest successful new ways to use the software.
(1) The dreaded USER GUIDE!
Although many (possibly most?) Web+Center users have never seen or opened our Web+Center user guide, we have always published a fairly comprehensive user guide for the Web+Center suite of 7 applications. The current Web+Center Version 8.0 User Guide is a 140 page tome describing functions of all 7 applications Web+Center suite. Possibly asking these middle level support managers to review this document and see if they can find any new applications, or features, settings, etc that would help solve some of the support requirements better would be a good first step. A complete detailed read of the guide isn’t necessary, but better understand of the scope of features available would be beneficial.
(2) View and play in our on-line Demo and Sandbox!
We offer an on-line demo sandbox on our website where you can log in and test features of our latest release without having to risk your current production system. The try-it test page on our website has links to our latest V8 versions so you can experiment and explore features before implementing them on your own sites.
(3) Web+Center features often under utilized by IT support organizations
Here is a short list of Web+Center features that are easy to configure and can easily increase the quality of your customer experiences and ticketing system flow.
- Customer Surveys
- Asset Tracking and management
- Frequently Ask Questions (FAQs)
- Knowledge base searches
- Customer+Center Message Board
- Tech+Center White Board
- Attach file feature
- Customer and tech notification messages – configurable parts of the message
- Web+Center calendar functions
(4) Additional help and recommendations for optimizing Web+Center for your organization
Simple functional and configuration questions can be answered by our support staff. We have a Web+Center consulting group that is ready to take your support organization to a new level by offering hourly training and consulting services to evaluate and customize your Web+Center system to more effectively fit your requirements. Many projects involve asset tracking, custom time spent billing, reporting functions that could integrate with your current internal and external Internet presence.
(5) Internet Software Sciences Newsletters
For many years, we have published newsletter articles about various ways to use the software or new features or releases. It would be valuable to anybody involved in the Help Desk to quickly review previous newsletter articles on our newsletter page on our website.
We hope you and your organizational staff will discover and implement options with Web+Center to make it an even more effective help desk product. Feel free to contact us directly if you have any other questions.
Sincerely,
Scott Vanderlip
President, Internet Software Sciences