Help Desk is a department in a organization that handles customers' interactions on a product or service. Customers contact the help desk when they have a question or a problem and a product expert addresses the question to the customer's satisfaction.

In a typical scenario, a help desk is a space manned by product experts from the customer support department when customers require assistance. Most companies give out an email address or a toll-free number for the customers to request help from the experts. Customers can reach the company through these channels when they need help.

A help desk software automates most of the steps in this process as possible. A help desk software consists of at least 3 parts: Ticket Management, Automation Suite, Reporting and Optimization. Here's how:

1. Ticket Management: The software pulls customer emails from an email address and lists them in a single place. It allows a help desk executive to answer calls from customers and log them easily. It enables customer support executives to listen and respond to customer feedback on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.


2. Automation Suite: The Automation Suite allows a help desk coordinator to ensure that questions from customers are redirected to employees who can answer them satisfactorily. It enables the coordinator to monitor when a support executive hasn't responded to a ticket, or when a ticket is taking too long to get resolved, or one of the several other possible cases.


3. Reporting and Optimization: This is the most important function of customer service. It pulls pertinent information about the critical aspects of the help desk. Managers can understand parameters such as load on the help desk team, turnaround time, and resolution rate of each executive etc. Metrics like these give managers a quick perspective of how things are faring and let them make amends for the better.