Review of Vision Helpdesk: Pros, Cons and Pricing of Award-winning Help Desk Software
All companies have to deal with customer requests, problems and issues every day, and the only thing that distinguishes the good company from the great one is the ability to deal with them accurately. Such responsiveness, however, is tied to huge systematic tracking efforts, overcrowded maintenance staff, and unlimited expenditure. Unless you have a formidable helpdesk software, of course.
As you can imagine, a proper helpdesk can cost a small fortune, especially if you’re a small company handling a considerable number of inquiries. The good thing is that in our time, price and functionality do find a way to get along. That’s exactly the example we are going to discuss today: the budget-conscious, power-plugged Vision Helpdesk.
Vision Helpdesk is a popular solution that already gathered lots of positive feedback from its users and B2B experts. Our own review team analyzed the software thoroughly and after comparing it to various other alternatives available on the market we were very satisfied with the quality of their services. In fact, we like Vision Helpdesk so much, that we decided to distinguish it with some of our quality awards. You can read more about the reasons for these awards a bit later in this article. Vision Helpdesk’s quality is also matched by its flexible pricing plans that most companies should find really affordable. There is even a great 30-day free trial plan that allows you to try out all the key elements of the software first.
Like most top-quality helpdesks, Vision Helpdesk is also a reliable issue tracking solution that recognizes and identifies queries and tasks with minimal human effort involved. The obvious advantage of having it on board is that it improves customer experience, by providing quick and accurate answers even for ongoing operations. As a result, your expenses are decreasing, while reputation is doing the exact opposite.
Other advantages that go hand in hand with choosing Vision Helpdesk are:
- Tracking the ticket’s lifecycle
- Improving the prioritization of tasks
- Empowering employees and boosting their productivity
You can learn more about various Vision Helpdesk advantages and disadvantages from the detailed review on our site.
5 Things We Really Liked About Vision Helpdesk
1. It’s a comprehensive help desk suite
The reason why Vision Helpdesk made it to our top 10 help desk software list is that the company chose an interesting approach in dealing with customer problems. Most of the time, the basic idea of designing helpdesk software is to respond to customers looking to be served in a timely and efficient fashion. What Vision Helpdesk did is to consider both the needs of service demanders and service providers, and it came up with a suite of three extremely functional products for its 4th edition: Help Desk, Satellite Helpdesk, and IT Service Desk.
Each product aims to serve a different party in the issue tracking process, but they all have the common features of providing ticket/incident management, customer support, SLA setup, and social network integration. Helpdesk is the core product and is included as a default part in Satellite Desk and IT Service Desk. As you land on their website, you will also see that live chat is an active option to every one of these products.
The thing Vision Helpdesk does best for its clients is to facilitate self-service, enabling them to create and use large knowledge database for the sake of their businesses’ productivity. Obviously, the product wouldn’t be as good if it wasn’t offered in a variety of versions, countries, languages, and time zones. That’s why satisfied customers like to call it ‘the internal international’ software.
2. It has multi-channel customer support
Our Vision Helpdesk review reveals that the app provides multiple channels for customer support and ticket management. Its main power lies in the fact that it tracks and converts all incoming requests, either from email, telephone, social media chat, or the web overall.
Once the requests are received, the company uses Vision Helpdesk to organize and categorize them and to respond via single communication channels. This automates the process on the basis of established workflow rules that trigger action once a specific number of conditions is fulfilled. In fact, once the software is introduced, the resolution will depend solely on the escalation level services the company has agreed on.
An additional benefit for the company is that you can be alerted and notified via macros, meaning that you can review and deal with an issue with a single click. The program also features a gamification set of quests and achievement levels and tools for task management; a private Blubby social hub for communication of agents and sharing materials, and a Task Management Desk for assigning and monitoring performance.
Key benefits checklist:
- Organized workflow: Vision Helpdesk automates a company’s ticket workflow using the criteria that have been agreed upon, letting the system decide the matching action that has to be triggered in a particular case.
- SLA/Escalation rules: The company can create various SLA and Escalation rules and Business Hours in the frames of which customer requests are going to be evaluated and reviewed in a timely manner.
- Notification System: Based on the established rules and event conditions, the company is instantly notified on every request, and alerted when a particular action has to be undertaken. Depending on the needs, companies can settle for different manners of notification, but the most frequent one is via email.
- Macros: Multiple ticket operations can be managed with a single click (changing their status, department, priorities, and ticket properties).
3. It has support for multiple brands and products
Satellite Help Desk is a single portal that empowers end-user support for multiple brands, companies, and products. Therefore, it is a suitable product for owners running multiple companies, who want to offer support through a single desk. Instead of struggling between programs, helpdesk/support agents get to manage various client portals and to provide centralized customer support that generates scalable, effective, and cost-conscious results. Due to its purpose, the product deals with each client database separately, being available in multiple languages, countries, and time zones.
Key benefits checklist:
- A single helpdesk for multiple companies
- Personal portals for each brand
- Comprehensive company database
- Reduced effect of horizontal/vertical company scaling
- Imposing wise staff restrictions on department/company level
- A separate workflow for different business hours in multiple time zones
- Scalable reduction of costs and expenditures
4. It offers a solid IT Service Desk solution
Vision Helpdesk is also enriched by an ITIL/ITSM ready product for asset management, including procurement, maintenance, depreciation, and disposal. The product is well-elaborated and it includes a batch of useful modules: CMDB, catalog of products, catalog of services, supply management, finance management, and contract management.
Incident Management
An additional advantage that takes this IT desk a step ahead of its competitors is the so-called incident management, meaning that the companies can identify, evaluate, and fix causes of interruptions and service failures instantly, and they can prevent similar hazards from happening in the feature. Once a problem is discovered and identified, the company can make use of special features such as problem management, change management, and release management to deal with that problem. Here’s how these features work:
- The problem management feature has the purpose of identifying the root cause of the incident so that it would soften and minimize its adverse impact on business in general. If the problem happens to be rooted in the IT infrastructure, the systems undertake all necessary measures to prevent recurrence.
- The change management feature has the objective of confirming that incidents are being solved through standardized methods and procedures, which proved to be the most prompt tactic for handling IT infrastructure issues and service incidents in general.
- The release management feature brings planning, building, design, and configuration of products and services under the same hat, making sure that both hardware and software will be tested prior to their final release. As one could expect, a feature like this reduces the risk of failure in advance, and it helps a company save finances it would otherwise invest in third-party testing and examination.
The incident management process is automated. It begins with detecting incidents and prioritizing between them depending on available resources and support stuff. Assuming there was no similar solution in the past, and the problem cannot be identified that way, the system starts investigating it to find the root cause and to set a diagnosis. The next step is to register the incident in the company’s ICM system, together with the revealed cause and symptom, and to look for a proper solution. The system preserves and categorizes resolved issues as the precedents of a special database, where staff can rely on effective escalation channels to ask for assistance from other departments. Finally, the incident is given an end-status, and it is registered for addressing and further reference.
Knowledge Base
The IT Service Helpdesk also includes a rich knowledge base where issues are sorted in categories and subcategories, and there is a special Question & Answer portal where users can post questions, receive answers, and compare opinions and practices. Attaching and downloading files is also an option to this portal, both for registered users and prospective ones who want to familiarize with the system before purchasing it. A separate part of the portal is dedicated to staff-learning, meaning that employees have joint access and discussion boards to share and obtain essential internal knowledge.
5. It offers useful paid customer support
Vision Helpdesk offers a list of additional pay-per-use tracking features that can help you deal with specific tickets and bill your customers. To start with, you can make use of their Ticket based billing, meaning that you can set rates for different types of tickets and charge customers per ticket. Billing can also be based on the time you’re spending dealing with the ticket. Another interesting possibility is to unite similar tickets in promotional packages, to offer ticket credits, or to organize payment via international and authorized gateways (PayPal, for instance). Meanwhile, you can create and introduce company-specific tax rules and pull off accurate billing reports.
Making use of self-service portals, mobile apps, and integrations
Vision Helpdesk doesn’t require access permissions and management, but allows users to log in with their social network profiles instead (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+). The same profiles are the profiles to be used and edited via this system, meaning that you can import your contacts and organize them in groups and subgroups.
Even the user-friendly and responsive design of these products invokes a ‘social network feeling’ displaying tickets on a newsfeed-like page, and enabling you to rate them and to comment on them. Meanwhile, you can make use of the rich knowledge base which is admirably SEO optimized. Finally, the shift from the web version to the iPhone/android mobile app is seamless, meaning that agents will have no trouble offering support and management tickets while on the move.
Vision Helpdesk Pricing Plans
Before we dive deeper in price comparison, we would like to recommend you to check Vision Helpdesk 30-day free trial first and find out for yourself whether the product is actually what you need. The trial version offers most of the suite’s functionalities, as the company realizes considers that most customers will want to familiarize with every feature first.
The second thing you should remember is that there is a separate price for each of the three products, which doesn’t mean that you have to purchase all of them. The main difference in prices depends on whether you want to purchase a SaaS license, to take a Recurring license and host the app yourself with monthly installments, or to download a one-time license for self-hosting. All prices are per month and per agent:
Vision Helpdesk: $7 agent/month
- Full-feature suite
- Free customer support
- Free software updates
Satellite Desk: $14 agent/month
- All Helpdesk features
- Multi-company support
- Free customer support
- Free software updates
IT Service Desk: $21 agent/month
- All Helpdesk and Satellite Helpdesk features
- ITIL functionalities
- Free customer support
- Free software updates
One-time License prices are as follows:
- Vision Helpdesk: $150 per agent
- Satellite Desk: $250 per agent
- IT Service Desk: $350 per agent
Have in mind that the decision is not permanent, and you can always switch between plans in the way which is most convenient for you. If you want to learn more about Vision Helpdesk prices you can visit their official website.
Awards Won By Vision Helpdesk
Supreme Software Award for 2016
One of the most prestigious awards on our site. It shows that Vision Helpdesk is a top quality B2B product that offers the highest possible level of service to its clients. The award highlights Vision Helpdesk’s extensive knowledge of the help desk and customer support industry and a great understanding of the needs of their clients as well as the problems they face. This shows that the software services offered by Vision Helpdesk are always developed with a goal to effectively deal with the most common problems and to optimize the most time-consuming processes.
Experts’ Choice Award for 2016
This award is given by a panel of B2B and SaaS experts who reviewed the software. It shows that after thoroughly analyzing a wide range of help desk solution our review team found Vision Helpdesk to offer a very professional and particularly impressive level of service. Our experts were particularly impressed with how Vision Helpdesk considered both the needs of service demanders and service providers when designing their suite of products.
Great User Experience Award
This award was given to Vision Helpdesk in recognition of the high level of user experience offered by their product. During our time spent evaluating the app and its features, our team was really impressed with how easy it was to start using Vision Helpdesk. We also appreciated how well-designed and intuitive its interface and features were. There was a clear goal in mind of the team responsible for the software as they clearly put a lot of effort into facilitating the work process.
Vision Helpdesk SmartScore and Customer Satisfaction
Our experts have prepared a detailed Vision Helpdesk review discussing fully its features, benefits, client support quality as well as other crucial elements. Using the SmartScore system, they have calculated a very satisfying score of 8.8/10 for the app, while our Customer Satisfaction Algorithm estimates the software’s overall user satisfaction rating at 99%. You can get your own product evaluated for FinancesOnline.com’s awards and quality certificates as well. Just contact us.
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