Kambee, a hosted survey software solution allows you to measure and analyze the success of your customer service and help desk team by giving your customers a link to an online survey. Using Kambee you can easily create a hosted survey within minutes which you can send to clients via a link in your PerlDesk response template. Allowing your customers to provide extensive and measurable feedback on the service they have received from your staff.

To create a Kambee account please visit www.kambee.com

Using Kambee in PerlDesk

To take advantage of Kambee within PerlDesk you are able to modify the response email sent to your customers by PerlDesk, simply edit the /include/tpl/email/user_response.email file. This is the email template used whenever a staff member responds to a customer ticket, you could simply edit this and put the unique link to your Kambee survey.

You can use Kambee for free, simply visit www.kambee.com to create your free account.

We are currently offering free remote installation on all PerlDesk (download) orders placed before February 2008. To take advantage of this, please just tick the installation option on the order form and we will email details on how to request your free installation after your purchase.

To install PerlDesk we will need remote access to your machine via Telnet/SSH or Remote Desktop for Windows servers. Please ensure the dependencies are installed prior to your request (Web Server, Perl and MySQL) which can all be obtained from the following sites:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#downloads
www.activestate.com
www.apache.org

After supplying the details we aim to complete all installations within 24 hours (excluding public holidays. Please also inform us of any email handling options you would like us to setup (and the relevant pop access details) when requesting your installation.

Managing thousands, even hundreds, of emails a day in a normal email client is almost impossible. Keeping track of customer conversations, outstanding emails and effectively managing your daily activities in relation to your customer communications can be immensely difficult.

PerlDesk vs an Email Client

An email client will suffice for handling your incoming and outgoing emails, but to effectively handle volume an email client will not offer the same features that a help desk product such as PerlDesk can offer. Some of these features include automatic assignment of emails to department queues, shared email access for your team, threaded discussion, private and public responses. You also have a lot more options in relation to single emails (or tickets) you can mark them as Resolved, Assign them Internally to other staff members, or escalate an issue to another member of staff or department. There is no forwarding emails and email getting ‘lost’ in your internal network.

How PerlDesk Can Improve Your Email Efficiency

All of the features detailed above are there to help you to increase your email efficiency and to better serve your customers. Here are some of the many outstanding features PerlDesk can offer that differentiate it from an everyday e-mail client:

• Assign emails to departments. You can create rules that automatically forward an incoming e-mail to the right department. So, if you have received an e-mail with a pre-sales question, there is no need to bother your technicians with it.
• Assign emails to specific staff members or technicians. This allows you to assign particular incidents to specified employees, thus improving your internal organization and providing for faster response times.
• Easily view the history of a single incident. No matter how many emails have been exchanged in order to resolve it, all the correspondence is kept into one PerlDesk ticket.
• Respond and update the status/priority of emails. When you receive an email, you can set the priority of that email (ticket) within PerlDesk allowing your staff to effectively view which emails are urgent. You can also update the status of an e-mail, so that both your staff and the customer know how things are going – is the issue still open, is somebody working on it, or is it already solved.
• Ban IP adresses and users. PerlDesk allows you to ban particular IP addresses and/or allow emails only from registered users, thus significantly decreasing the amount of spam that makes its way to you.

PerlDesk has many other features in addition to the ones listed here and if you want to get a more in-depth idea of its email features, please have a look at the demo.

You can also test the email handling features of the demo by sending an email to perldesk@logicdemo.com, all of the automated correspondence can be disabled and customized.

Accountability and auditing are two of the most important tools for successful management of a customer help desk. You will never know for sure how much you have achieved, which areas you have failed in or who has been doing what, if you don’t have the right statistical tools at your disposal. Statistics and reporting are important in any sector but in customer service they could be the primary way to keep track of your team’s successes and failures.

Why Reporting Is Important

Statistics and reporting are the history of your business. Even if you are not buried in the past and are looking confidently into the future, statistics and reporting is not something you should overlook. It is very easy to say that the past is past and you disregard past operations but to really succeed you should be able to look back, evaluate efficiency and make improvements. When you can see your activities history at a glance, you can learn from mistakes (and avoid them in the future) or see if there are particular trends you need to pay attention to or perhaps tackle in the way of producing more documentation or literature for your customers. PerlDesk’s built in reporting gives you detailed reports about your help desk activity, so you can quickly see what has been going on in the past days, months and years.

How PerlDesk Reports Can Improve Your Efficiency

The reporting features of PerlDesk are of huge importance to a team leader or manager who wants to measure the performance of his or her team and improve support or customer communications. PerlDesk offers many reports and statistics, as seen from the screenshot below.

For instance, if you want to see basic data such as the average response time, the number of support requests, the number of accounts (users and staff), or the percentage of various submission methods (Web desk, via email, or staff logging), the Statistics page offers all this information. If you want to see more detailed data, such as tickets by assignment, tickets by department, priority, status (open, closed, hold), you can also view it from the Reports page. You can generate reports for any period of time and thus you can compare how your team performed over time. If you examine reports carefully, you can quickly see who from your team has the most open tickets, how long they have been open, who the most effective employee is, etc.

Who is logging the most tickets, to which department, what is the most common problem your customers have - and how are your staff at effectively managing these incoming requests… time to look at the PerlDesk Reporting modules!

We have launched a free hosted trial of PerlDesk. You can now have a private hosted trial created to try a fully functional installation of PerlDesk for 7 days. As the installation is private, you can customize the install URL, setup POP retrieval and see all the benefits of using PerlDesk within your organization for managing incoming emails and support tickets.

To setup your help desk trial please go to http://www.perldesk.com/hosted.html and follow the relevant link in the header.

You can easily convert your trial to a full paid hosted solution prior to your trial expiring, alternatively fetch a backup and replicate your installation locally if you decide to purchase.

Try the hosted PerlDesk Help Desk solution now!