What Is Incident Management Software?
Incident management software is a specialized form of enterprise software. Its purpose is to detect incidents that can create risk for your company as well as keep customers happy. Through incident management, companies get out in front of problems as they develop.
No IT infrastructure is perfect, and mistakes happen. When something goes wrong on your end, such as downtime or glitches, incident management keeps you in the loop. IM software tracks incident reports for tens of thousands of companies worldwide.
At its core, an incident management solution is a platform or interface dedicated to identifying, assessing, delegating, and evaluating tickets. In some cases (such as when your company provides its services through IT), IT downtime spells financial disaster in missed revenues.
Incident management tools allow you to stay on top of these issues and resolve them as quickly as possible. By recognizing and cataloging known issues, incident management software lets you assign staff, groups, labels, and priorities to a ticket.
Benefits of Incident Management Software
All businesses stand to gain from deploying incident management software. However, for smaller businesses, the perks are considerably more interesting. The following are a few of the benefits of introducing incident management software.
- Happier customers: Businesses live and die by their customers. Glitches, bugs, and downtime may all be inevitable in the long run. What you don’t want is to lose a good client to an unpleasant issue with the company’s services or products. Speedy incident resolution keeps your customers coming back for more great service.
- More efficient IT staff: A properly configured incident management software program is a huge time-saver. Known issues and simple problems can be quickly dispatched by low-level tech support. Higher-level tasks can be directly escalated to the proper IT personnel for resolution. It prevents wasting your best employees spending hours on minor problems.
- Lower overhead: Any business owner knows that overhead is the death of profits. The big players can rack up sizable overhead and make up for it in sales volume. However, it’s not that easy for the little guy. A budget-conscious incident management software can cut down on wasteful or redundant support processes, leading to lower costs.
Must-Have Features for Incident Management Software
When you’re shopping for your company’s next incident management software, you’ll find a lot of variety in terms of features. Nevertheless, there are a handful of specific capabilities without which you’re dead in the water. The following are features your software should definitely have.
- Real-time tracking: The ability to track an incident report or ticket throughout its entire life cycle.
- Ticket management: Handling the creation, classification, assignment, consolidation, diagnosis, and resolution of incident tickets.
- Workflow automation: Automated ticket creation (through self-service or manned channels), automated SLA enforcement, and process escalations, among others.
- Rich alert and notification system: Great incident management is a two-way street. Your customers need to know that their issues are being dealt with. Your supervisors and high-level techs need to know where their attention should focus. A rich, prioritized, and customizable notification system takes care of both.
The Cost of Incident Management Software
The costs of incident management software are quite variable. The best software in the market can cost you anywhere from $10 a month to several thousand dollars a year. Many providers have tiered subscriptions. The more human agents you need using the software, the more expensive your subscription will be.
Other providers offer more features and capabilities at higher price points. You don’t need to spend a small fortune to get adequate service for your business, though. Besides, unless you’re running a Fortune 500 company, it would likely be overkill.
If budget is a major concern for you, check out the free options available on our list. ManageEngine and xMatters all have solutions priced at $0 for their lowest-tier package. If you don’t want to spend a red cent, consider SpiceWorks Help Desk. All tiers are absolutely free.
