As a business owner, you are no doubt aware of the importance of keeping your customers happy and working through complaints and problems in a systematic nature. This is especially true for businesses in the technology industry, who are dealing with customers that have a wide variety of technical expertise. For this reason help desk software has become an essential tool for any business that deals with customer service. Ideally the help desk tools that you use should be quick, intuitive and customisable to suit your needs. They can, however, be fairly expensive, and this makes it difficult to make a commitment before testing the product.

ASP stands for Active Server Pages, which is a server side script engine developed by Microsoft for dynamically generated web pages. Web based ASP help desk software solutions have a lot of advantages over the more traditional desktop software. The biggest advantage is that all the help desk operator needs is a browser pointing at the application. This means that upgrades and bug fixes can be rolled out in one location, ie the server, and these updates are automatically available by the end user. For a large company that has tens, if not hundreds, of help desk operators, this can mean a huge reduction in help desk expenses in the long term.

In a typical business structure, there are four different groups of people that will directly interact with it help desk software; the help desk operator, IT management, and upper level management within the company. The fourth level is the customer themselves, and as any business owner will tell you, it is the customers’ interaction with your services that is the most important aspect to consider. For a help desk solution to be acceptable, it must have the customers’ best interest at the core of its operations. As a matter of fact, it should be an invisible layer between the customer and the help desk support team. If at any time a customer feels like they are being dealt with by a piece of software, they are more than likely to feel unhappy with their level of service, further confusing the issue.


Help desk operators must be able to operate the software with ease. Obviously there is a level of training that will need to be done regardless of the operators technical ability, but this training will be a lot less of a bottleneck within your business processes if the help desk management software is intuitive and able to be customised by the end user. Within your core business operations there should be a little room for flexibility, and allowing your help desk operators the freedom to customise the user interface of their software to suit their individual preferences will provide a much more comfortable working environment. For this reason when choosing as help desk software, it is important that the customisation of the user interface is addressed.

IT management have their own needs in relation to online help desk software. It is the management’s responsibility to ensure that response times are acceptable and within the customer support rules set out by the business. For this reason, IT management must have access to reporting functionality that allows them to filter support tickets by duration. They will also need to be able to report on individual help desk operators, in order to determine if there are any bottlenecks within the support team. Once again, customisation is imperative. An off the shelf product that is developed for a generic business model and does not have the ability to be customised is going to end up causing you more headaches than it’s worth.

Upper level management, while obviously having a vested interest in the running of a customer support team, are more interested in the overall reporting capabilities of IT help desk software. Ideally the reporting options available should be accessible by upper level management, and help to improve the lines of communication between all four levels of the help desk framework. CEO’s want access to data and reporting that is going to help them to make the business decisions that will benefit the overall health of the company, and any business manager will tell you that customer satisfaction is the cornerstone of any good business.

Help Centric is considered to be an extremely comprehensive help desk software solution, that can be customised an streamlined to suite individual business needs. Built using the ASP framework, purchase of this software gives you full access to its source code, allowing in house developers to modify the engine to suit their needs. If you do not need that level of customisation, Help Centric is still a very affordable out of the box package that has a large number of functions available. Advanced filtering and sorting functionality allows administrators to adapt their reporting requirements on the fly without having to get knee deep in code. The packages boasts easy delegation of support tickets to technicians with a couple of clicks of the mouse, along with preset responses that make customer communication a breeze. As the software is used, a knowledge base of previous problems that have arisen is automatically created. This knowledge base is completely searchable, meaning that you can provide your customers with solutions instantaneously based on what has been suggested before.

If you require something that can be completely developed in house, Zen Help Desk could be just the solution you are looking for Zen Help Desk is another ASP help desk software solution, and is not only free to download, but completely open source. Zen Help Desk can communicate with both Microsoft Access and MS-SQL databases, provides advanced search functionality out of the box, and gives the user the option of having multiple levels of help desk ticket priority. Installation is a breeze with the installation wizard, and if you get stuck there is an active community of users in the discussion forum that will help you to troubleshoot any issues that arise.