In today’s tough economy, businesses are scrambling for ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Many focus on flash, features and price while ignoring the foundation atop which all those must stand to succeed–customer service. Customer service must be convenient for both users and staff. It must be able to grow with your business while remaining easy to install and maintain. These are all areas in which any number of existing PHP helpdesk solutions shine.

Convenience for users is key to a good customer support experience, as they often turn to support from a place of frustration. As people become busier, our ability to put our lives on hold to *wait* on hold diminishes. Web-based solutions allow customers to log tickets directly from your website and go about their lives while your support staff attends to submitted issues.

Convenience for support staff is also critical. Resolving an issue in real-time via phone isn’t always the best way, and by adopting a web-based ticketing system, problems can be researched and actions taken without making the customer wait. Also, just as users are frustrated by complexity, so too are your support staff, and whatever system you adopt should be as streamlined as possible. After all, support staff will be using the system many times per day, and as such their experiences with it should strive to increase customer satisfaction by reducing administrative stress.

A helpdesk solution should be able to grow with your business, and many PHP solutions offer such features. It is important to choose a solution that supports multiple users and user roles such that administration of large departments is only a manner of selecting an appropriate user role. Support for multiple departments is also a must-have feature, thus keeping technical queries separate from those for sales and other miscellaneous areas. Also, while reloading a page multiple times per day is certainly a viable option, helpdesk software should support other notification mechanisms such as via email or SMS.

With many web frameworks and deployment platforms available, why should your choice of helpdesk software be PHP-based? Despite the flash and glamor of new technologies, PHP solutions are easiest to install, maintain and adapt. Newer and heavier technologies generally require larger and more complex server stacks, often proxying requests from one server to another specifically launched for the application. This is rarely needed for PHP-based solutions which are supported natively by most web servers, often only requiring that they be uploaded into a directory accessible via the web and then configured. It is because of these minimal requirements that a plethora of low-cost PHP hosting solutions are available, many more than are found for other technology platforms.

Your business is unique, and likely requires unique solutions to some challenges. PHP-based solutions are easier to maintain, and a vast marketplace of developers and consultants are available to implement whatever changes you might need. As PHP code is often clearer and quicker to follow than that found with many other solutions, time to market for any solution you might require is also lessened.

If looking for a way to push your business ahead of the competition, consider a PHP helpdesk solution. It may be just what is needed to make your customer service shine.

Help Desk Software written in PHP is software that utilizes a database to help companies improve their customer support. Most are fully web based and have a great many features. They are web based systems. This gives you the ability to track a customer issue from inception to completion. The helpdesk software gives you the ability to interface with your customers concerning their support issues. The system tracks these support tickets and keeps you updated on their status. Some of the more common features are ticket escalation, the ability to set priority levels, spam filter, knowledgebase, categorizing customer support issues, different logins for staff, ticket search functions, and canned replies.

Ticket escalation gives you the ability to change priorities if an issue needs to be ramped up. This can be a great help when you start getting multiple tickets on the same customer support issue. It will also give you the ability to designate a higher priority based on sales potential.

PHP Help Desk Software gives you the ability to set priorities from the outset. This will allow you to set priorities based on customers who are taking the customer support ticket out. It will also allow you to set the priorities based on the issue involved.

The spam filtering helps to keep those nonsense issues from making into your customer support system. Spam filtering is important unless you want to waste time removing these nuisance customer support issues.

The knowledgebase will be accumulated in the database. This then will allow for quicker customer support ticket turn around. This is the goal of customer support. Customer support leads directly to more sales.

Categorizing customer support tickets is an important issue if you segregate who works on a given topic. Help Desk Software that gives the option to categorize customer support issues allows departments to handle their own customer support tickets.

Different logins will help manage which employees will get customer support tickets. The different logins will also help managers to determine performance levels on different customer support ticket types.

All PHP help desk software comes with the ability to search the ticket database for customer support issues. This will greatly speed up the ability to process customer support tickets. If an issue has already been identified and worked to completion. It will also allow you to determine if there are recurring issues that need a more hearty investigation.

One of the greatest functions of the help desk software is its canned replies. The system can identify certain aspects of a customer support ticket request and decide on an appropriate response.
It can be as simple as, “we have received your customer support ticket and we are acting on it”, or a more complicated “check the cookie level for your web browser”. As you can see both of these responses allow the customer to feel his needs are being met.

No matter which PHP Help Desk Software you eventually use, these are the basic functions you should look for. A fully functional system should make your customer’s support experience as pleasant as can be expected. A customer needing support is another opportunity to impress them with why they went with you in the first place. Web based customer support software will give you the ability to shine.

There are many different types of PHP helpdesk software available. The most common being Web Based helpdesk software, helpdesk services and open source helpdesk software.

Most web based helpdesk software is actually web enabled. PHP helpdesk software is web based. A web based system gives you the capability to track customer service tickets from anywhere.

Determining your level of need is the first step in choosing the right PHP helpdesk software for your business or web site. Using PHP helpdesk software will allow you to handle many different inputs to your support system. The type of software you choose will help respond to your customers in an appropriate manner.

The next step in choosing your PHP helpdesk software is to determine how intricate the system needs to be. If you want to manage the customer support tickets in person, you do not need a very intricate system. There are other systems that go a long way in giving an appropriate answer without any human interaction. Many of the available helpdesk software systems will allow you to create a customizable troubleshooting procedure. This will help narrow the problem down, and may alleviate the problem all together.

Most PHP helpdesk software makes it easy for customers to track their customer support tickets. They do give you the ability to govern the customer’s access to the support tickets. You also need to determine if different login levels are needed. Some of the PHP helpdesk software does not give you this ability. Log in levels will also allow you to monitor different levels of the customer support process. This will help you improve your customer support, which in turn may keep customers.

PHP helpdesk software uses database software to track and support the customer support system. You need to determine which database system you will run. Some of the helpdesk software runs on MySQL while use more familiar databases like MSSQL. These databases are SQL compliant, and choosing between them comes down to your familiarity.

Some of the PHP helpdesk software has the option for setting priority levels of customer support tickets. Determining levels of priority and how to set those priorities is an important determining factor for choosing PHP helpdesk software. The will also give you the ability to upgrade the priority level for customer support tickets. This may be an important feature. If multiple tickets come in with the same issue, you may need to move all those tickets higher in priority.

The search-ability of the PHP helpdesk software varies from system to system. This is an important aspect for most users. The ability to search the database for certain key words can reduce the amount of time a ticket is open. This in turn can make a customer happy with your company, and lead to more sales. It will also lead to a much more automatic system.

The last major decision you have to make concerns the ability to categorize the customer support tickets. You need to decide if this is important for you to be able to do. This feature allows you to separate customer support tickets into different departments. Some can then route that ticket to the appropriate e-mail.