A business without help desk software just isn’t helpful at all.

Remember this and maybe even make a lovely wall hanging of it. Whether you have an in-house IT team or consult with an outside source, you’re taking wise steps to offer expert advice, troubleshooting and professional competence to your organization.

In comparison, companies that prefer to wing it, cross their fingers and hope that all their devices do what they’re supposed or IT can figure it all out, are as near-sighted as the caveman who thinks he can get by smashing stuff with rocks or while his peers are experimenting with more nimble spears.

The Stone Age comparison is certainly apt – some pro-active early humans learned to team up to hunt big game or defend each other. This mutual assistance eventually led to the roots of basic civilization, while those who stayed solo usually ended up something’s lunch.

In a modern organization, help desk software can go a long way to keeping help desk members and employees on task.

• It helps IT prioritize. Rather than basing assignments on “whomever I like the most,” “whoever I feel like,” or “whatever order is on top of the stack,” software can provide a chronology of when calls come in and who is assigned to them. It removes the excuse of “I didn’t get your message.”
• It reassures employees. The software can tell them that their message was successfully sent and maybe even give a time estimate of when they can expect assistance.
• It lets IT members compare notes. If everyone on the team can access the same work orders, one person may be more familiar with a particular error, or see what previous repairs/upgrades have already taken place for that user, machine or software. It also can show who is assigned to a particular job, removing any redundancy of several people trying to respond to one order without realizing it.
•  It gives supervisors good evaluation tools. Your basic caveman probably didn’t have someone trying to measure productivity or making sure everyone is pulling their fair share. But today, software can offer this objective data to IT administration/managers like call volume, types of calls, and average time to respond.
• It helps workflow. Provided there’s not a major disruption, employees can continue their daily duties knowing that their work order has been received and is in the works. An automated request system can allow help desk team members to focus on one project at a time, rather than having regular interruptions from phone calls with more requests for help.

Overall, software can be as good as a tool for the modern help desk as the extra pointy spears were for the caveman.