Equipping Your Helpdes k: 4 Products To The Rescue By Diane Danielle   In all too many companies, the helpdesk has remained relatively stranded for more than 30 years--poorly understood, poorly respected and poorly supported. But if yours is an intrepid, forward-thinking company that wants its helpdesk to serve its customers and staffers well, while benefiting the bottom line, an arsenal of tools exists to help you. To view the Report card. Helpdesks vary significantly in function and size. Perhaps the primary functional distinction is orientation: toward outsiders (the company's customers) or insiders (the company's employees). The demarcation line may be weak--in some companies, "internal" helpdesks "outsource" some calls to the "external" helpdesk. Because tools that are necessary or work well in the one environment are unnecessary or poorly designed for the other, we're focusing in this article solely on the internal helpdesk; however, much of what we will cover will apply to both. The helpdesk arena is one of the last remaining competitive software markets. Almost 200 vendors sell products for helpdesks of all kinds and sizes. Traditionally, the market has been something of a three-layered cake. On the bottom are the relatively inexpensive products that run on standalone desktops or LAN servers and provide basic call tracking and reporting. On top are the client/server vendors whose products run on Unix boxes or, increasingly, Microsoft Windows NT, and purport to support helpdesks with hundreds of agents. They typically contain a plethora of additional functions, including expert systems. Vendors usually associated with the high end are Peregrine Systems, Scopus Technology, Software Artistry and Vantive Corp. In the middle are those products with a range of features and the ability to support mode st-sized helpdesks. (According to a May 1996 Aberdeen Group report, "big" players in this middle tier had 4 percent to 6 percent of the share of 1995 market dollars.) The boundaries between the upper and middle layers are becoming increasingly blurred as the players on top try to position their wares downward, and players in the middle push both upward and downward (Remedy Corp. and McAfee Associates are examples). Bill Keyworth of Gartner Group distinguishes the top layer not so much by performance as by functionality--these products focus on the consolidated helpdesk. They provide problem, asset and change management; work with event management systems; and focus on management processes. Products at the top layer are quintessentially proac tive (designed to help the helpdesk change its orientation from a service that responds to trouble to one that prevents it), while midlevel and lower-level tools remain largely reactive. We evaluated four solid players in this midtier market that have some high-level components: Bendata's HEAT for Windows, SupportMagic SQL from Magic Solutions, TOP Of MIND (TOM) from Molloy Group and Utopia from Utopia Technology Partners. The Tools What tools do all helpdesks use? According to the Help Desk Institute's October 1996 "Help Desk and Customer Support Practices Report," 80 percent to 90 percent of respondents use e-mail, fax, telephone headsets and voicemail; 77 percent use problem/service management software; 57 percent use automated call distributors (ACDs) and network management tools; and 21 percent use interactive voice response units (IVRUs). Only about 16 percent say they use expert systems, though one-third say they plan to acquire them in the next year. Usage of these tools, except in network management, went up 3 percent to 8 percent from 1995, but ACD usage is up 11 percent. ACDs and IVRUs, used more by larger helpdesks and especially by those that service external customers, offer significant functionality and value. ACDs route calls to agents, track how many calls they take, how long they talk, how long the calls stay in the queue and how many people hang up before reaching an agent (the "abandonment rate"). Although it is illegal in some countries to collect statistics on individual agents, the number of calls and the abandonment rate are vital in tracking how well a helpdesk answers the calls it is expected to answer. Combined with automatic number identification (ANI) or caller ID (CID), these systems also can save agents considerable data-entry time and angst.

Internet Platform: Pick a Winner by Dan Backman Updated January 24, 1997