You can be greatly successful in your efforts at improving customer service if your help desk has fast reporting and smart filtering abilities. An efficient help desk solution will manage all the basic function with minimum supervision and keep you updated with the data necessary to improve customer service.

It is basically the admin funtions of the help desk that help you do that little extra for your customers. For example, certain solutions provide a dashboard feature to the administrators. This feature allows you to look at your customer service data in different views, at different times and at a broad overall level. More sophisticated dashboards display customer request data in dynamic graphs. This helps you determine if and how much on track your service department is.

Request tickers display the latest requests in the system, the time they were generated, the operators they are assigned to and the workload on each operator.

You can check the details of each request and the way the requests are bieng handled from forum topics that some solutions provide. You can take advantage of the reporting tools of a helpdesk support software solution to determine the time, the day or the month when the number of requests are at their maximum. In addition, you can determine the average time taken by your service personnel in resolving a request or a group of requests, the average workload on the staff, or the type of requests made by a particular customer. Powerful and flexible reporting features allow you to take reports on any system or user-defined field of a request.

Be aware that all helpdesk reporting solutions may not be this flexible, especially those that rely on SQL querys or Excel ODBC connections. In these cases, you may have to spend some time defining the tables on which the reports can be generated. While using reporting gives you a high-level view of the requests in your system, at times you may want a more detailed a look at the requests. You could, for example, want to see all the requests that fit a particular criterion. To view data in these ways, you should select a solution that provides powerful request filtering functions.

The more powerful the filtering function, the more will be the variety of criteria on which the views of requests are generated. For example, you could use this function of a helpdesk support software solution to display all requests assigned to a particular technician. You could determine the requests that have exceeded the time limit for resolution. In addition, you could display requests that match a specific search string from the content of their history. Another useful result could be a list of requests from customers belonging to a certain domain, such as @sagacioussol.com