Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact with a company's host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes and also used for outbound calling as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems.
Technical support are also known as a tech support is a call centre type customer service provided by companies to advise and assist registered users with issues concerning their technical products. Traditionally done on the phone, technical support can now be conducted online or through chat. At present, most large and mid-size companies have outsourced their tech support operations. Many companies provide discussion boards for users of their products to interact; such forums allow companies to reduce their support costs without losing the benefit of customer feedback.
A service-level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a service provider and a customer. Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user. The most common component of an SLA is that the services should be provided to the customer as agreed upon in the contract. As an example, Internet service providers and telcos will commonly include service level agreements within the terms of their contracts with customers to define the level(s) of service being sold in plain language terms. In this case, the SLA will typically have a technical definition of mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair or mean time to recovery (MTTR); identifying which party is responsible for reporting faults or paying fees; responsibility for various data rates; throughput; jitter; or similar measurable details.
A service-level objective (SLO), as per the O'Reilly Site Reliability Engineering book, is a "target value or range of values for a service level that is measured by an SLI." An SLO is a key element of a service-level agreement (SLA) between a service provider and a customer. SLOs are agreed upon as a means of measuring the performance of the service provider and are outlined as a way of avoiding disputes between the two parties based on misunderstanding.
Information technology service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.
Self-service password reset (SSPR) is defined as any process or technology that allows users who have either forgotten their password or triggered an intruder lockout to authenticate with an alternate factor, and repair their own problem, without calling the help desk. It is a common feature in identity management software and often bundled in the same software package as a password synchronization capability.
An issue tracking system is a computer software package that manages and maintains lists of issues. Issue tracking systems are generally used in collaborative settings, especially in large or distributed collaborations, but can also be employed by individuals as part of a time management or personal productivity regimen. These systems often encompass resource allocation, time accounting, priority management, and oversight workflow in addition to implementing a centralized issue registry.
In the US, an application analyst is someone whose job is to support a given application or applications. This may entail some computer programming, some system administration skills, and the ability to analyze a given problem, diagnose it and find its root cause, and then either solve it or pass the problem on to the relevant people if it does not lie within the application analyst's area of responsibility. Typically an application analyst will be responsible for supporting bespoke applications programmed with a variety of programming languages and using a variety of database systems, middleware systems and the like. It is a form of 3rd level technical support/help desk. The role may or may not involve some customer contact but most often it involves getting some description of the problem from help desk, making a diagnosis and then either creating a fix or passing the problem on to someone who is responsible for the actual problem area.
Request Tracker, commonly abbreviated to RT, is a ticket-tracking software written in Perl used to coordinate tasks and manage requests among an online community of users. RT's first release in 1996 was written by Jesse Vincent, who later formed Best Practical Solutions LLC to distribute, develop, and support the package. RT is open source (FOSS) and distributed under the GNU General Public License.
IP SLA is an active computer network measurement technology that was initially developed by Cisco Systems. IP SLA was previously known as Service Assurance Agent (SAA) or Response Time Reporter (RTR). IP SLA is used to track network performance like latency, ping response, and jitter, it also helps us to provide service quality.
Notable issue tracking systems, including bug tracking systems, help desk and service desk issue tracking systems, as well as asset management systems, include the following. The comparison includes client-server application, distributed and hosted systems.
Call avoidance is a strategy businesses use to reduce inbound call volumes to contact centers in the customer service industry, particularly in the consumer market.
A virtual help desk allows IT support organizations to virtually deploy IT technicians on demand to support a computer user experiencing technical issues. IT can efficiently manage and allocate global help desk resources, including – most importantly – its personnel, to access any computer to provide support despite the end user or IT rep location. Virtual help desks allow IT reps to virtually access end systems through support sessions where they can diagnose and fix computer issues quickly. This eliminates in-person customer service calls and/or ineffective phone-only tech support sessions, making the help desk more efficient. Another objective of the virtual help desk is to improve IT resource management and save organization's money by increasing IT support efficiencies. Through an enhanced ability to allocate resources, IT organizations have the flexibility to create new ways of using its technical support knowledgebase. This technology usually requires a software implementation and support contract.
SIGUCCS is an association of professionals who support and manage the diverse aspects of information technology services at higher education institutions by providing professional development opportunities for SIGUCCS members and other individuals in the field. SIGUCCS is one of 34 special interest groups of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.
GLPI is an open source IT Asset Management, issue tracking system and service desk system. This software is written in PHP and distributed as open-source software under the GNU General Public License.
Omnitracker is a proprietary business process platform developed by Omninet GmbH in Germany. Omnitracker is developed as modular software for medium and large companies. It is used to track, control and evaluate relevant business processes. The main area of application is the support of ITIL compliant processes, which manages requests, incidents/ errors, customer inquiries from the moment of creation to completion. Omnitracker received certifications of the Federal Association of IT-Mittelstand and Pink Elephant that covers nine processes.
Samanage, an enterprise service-desk and IT asset-management provider, has its headquarters in Cary, North Carolina. The company's flagship product, Samanage, operates as a multi-tenant, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system for IT and enterprise service management. As of November 2018, Samanage had more than 1,800 customers in 50+ countries.
Help desk software is a computer program that enables customer-care operators to keep track of user requests and deal with other customer-care-related issues.
Networked Help Desk is an open standard initiative to provide a common API for sharing customer support tickets between separate instances of issue tracking, bug tracking, customer relationship management (CRM) and project management systems to improve customer service and reduce vendor lock-in. The initiative was created by Zendesk in June 2011 in collaboration with eight other founding member organizations including Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Tracker, ServiceNow and SugarCRM. The first integration, between Zendesk and Atlassian's issue tracking product, Jira, was announced at the 2011 Atlassian Summit. By August 2011, 34 member companies had joined the initiative. A year after launching, over 50 organizations had joined. Within Zendesk instances this feature is branded as ticket sharing.
Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future.
