So in November 2010, the payment company decided to make the switch. One challenge was loading the firm’s historic trouble-ticket data into the new system. Vendors have proprietary methods of identifying help-desk information, so moving data from one system to another usually requires re-entering the data. To avoid that step, Optimal decided to start from scratch, enter new trouble tickets into the ManageEngine system, and have its agents work without the historical information stored in Remedy.
The rest of the installation was straightforward. The new user interface was similar to Remedy, so there was no need for additional training. ServiceDesk Plus was up and running in January 2011.
After working with the system, Optimal identified a couple of things that would improve the product. For example, better workflow would enable technicians to automate a few processes in the approval cycle, and Optimal would like to see tighter integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory.
Despite those issues, the payment software and services company is content with the new system--so much so that it is examining expanding its use to areas like asset management. Once this change is made, help-desk technicians could monitor and answer questions about employees’ desktop assets via ServiceDesk Plus.
As more IT departments reshape themselves into private-cloud purveyors with new levels of service and even service-level agreements (SLAs) that raise the expectations of the end business they support, the help desk is becoming a central focus because it can capture important SLA metrics for mean time to response and customer satisfaction on IT service requests. Companies can also analyze help-desk data to determine where future problems are most likely to occur. This will enable IT to make preemptive strikes on bugs before they become real issues.
As IT enters an SLA culture, it will also be important to use business analytics to predict problem-response and resolution trends before they become reality. New help-desk software solutions can facilitate this. "Help-desk software now has moved to a more holistic approach," says Raj Sabhlok, Zoho president. "It now includes metrics that answer trending questions like which applications are creating the most problem issues? And is the average time to respond and to resolve a request increasing or decreasing?"
Taylor says Optimal is satisfied with the solution and looking forward to using it in a variety of applications.
"Switching to ServiceDesk Plus has been quite beneficial for us," he says. "We are now looking for new ways to leverage our use of the system."
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