I remember reading the story of a farmer who became discontented with his lot in life and sold his farm and everything he had, so that he could go in search of diamonds. He spent his whole life searching, returned a pauper years later and found that the man who had bought his land had found diamonds in the back yard and become a rich man.

The Moral of the story: “Look at what you have before you go in search for something else”

This story comes to my mind, every time I see a helpdesk system. A helpdesk system is often seen, just as an interface between the customers and the company. We ignore that it is in fact, a treasure box full of data. Webhosting owners can make a lot of their decisions based on the data available from the helpdesk system. The webhosting companies looking out to cut cost and run leaner, should indeed decide to take a look at their helpdesk data first.

Let me list a few of the statistics details that you can get from your helpdesk and that would come in very handy when making decisions in business.

With proper management of all information available from the help desk systems, you can build stronger and lasting relationships with your customers and gain a solid competitive edge.

Figure out the average number of tickets that come in during the business hours, after hours and on week days. This can help in deciding the number of support techs that you require during specific hours.

If you have global customers, this will also give you a fair idea on which geographical location needs more help or support. And then you can provide targeted solution to your customers.

Or in other words, how fast does a customer issue get resolved? This is a clear indication of the performance of your support team. If a ticket takes more than 12 hours to get resolved, then it shows that your support team is a ticking timebomb.

Focus on the team to figure out what can be done to reduce the number of hours spent on a ticket. In case, the team is spending its time trying to dig out customer details, you can get the customer to send all the necessary data, when he opens the ticket itself. This can be done by integrating your helpdesk to the client info.

If the average number of responses per ticket is above four, you need to work on your support team. Higher number of responses per ticket could either mean under-confident (or technically incompetent) support staff or that you need more support techs during those hours.

Though difficult to get, this information is almost always available from the helpdesk system. How this information can be made useful for business is easily understandable and does not require any further explanation.

Enquiry is when a customer asks for something like “Does the company provide PHP?”.
Request is when he wants to know if we can do something for him, as in “Can you please install a phpBB forum for me?”. And Complaint is when he says “My email is not working”.

It’s when the enquiries increase that you should start looking for improvements in your self-help solutions like FAQ’s, Knowledgebase and such information systems. When the number of requests increase, try to automate your tasks as much as possible. Requests can also be seen as a good opportunity to provide value added services. And when its the complaints that have increased, you’ve some work to get your systems in place.

The web hosting companies looking out to cut cost and run leaner, should indeed decide to take a look at their helpdesk data first.

You can generate a lot of such stats from the data that you can gather from your helpdesk. In today’s competitive business environment, where customers are more demanding than ever before, we must strive to deliver world-class support, in order to maximize client loyalty and ensure ongoing profits.

With proper management of all such information available from the help desk systems, you can build stronger and lasting relationships with your customers and gain a solid competitive edge.

So, before you decide on what are the new plans that you need to put up for your customers or before deciding on where to do marketing, just dig your helpdesk system to get the real data.

Make your business experience all the benefits of your helpdesk system.

Sojish Krishnan, Sr. Engineer at Bobcares.com is an Executive Team Member. Sojish has worked in Bobcares for over five years and is a passionate advocate of superior Customer support. He graduated Bachelors in Computer Science in 2001. He is also a speaker in conferences related to the Web Hosting industry. Sojish loves to play table tennis, and also possess a never-ending desire towards biking.

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