Why a helpdesk system?
Simple e-mail as a means of providing customer support is often insufficient and unreliable. If you are a helpdesk manager, ask yourself the following questions:

Is our support team overwhelmed by the support emails?
Am I concerned whether customer queries are being answered on time?
Are the most time-consuming  and repeated queries being answered manually?
Are we using the right technology to increase productivity for our helpdesk?
Are we keeping the callers in communication loop once a support request is logged?

If such questions are in your mind, then it's an indication for the need to implement a good helpdesk-management system to automate the support processes in your organization. But how do you arrive to the decision of choosing a particular helpdesk? Do you need a helpdesk database system that work standalone within your local network? Or do you need a web based helpdesk to enable your scattered support personnel to work on troubled tickets? Or do you require a helpdesk that make uses of your existing email infrastructure such as Microsoft Exchange?

Typically, an ideal helpdesk system should support the organizations' internal logic and workflows, integrates easily and leverage existing infrastructures, caters to the support technicians on the move, enables automation and processing based on customizable rules and most importantly, should be easy to use with little or no training requirement.

But why in Microsoft Office Outlook?
Your support team members all use Outlook extensively - all day, every day for email communications, appointments, contacts, tasks etc. When they have relied that heavily on Outlook, why not let them support tickets or calls in Outlook, without ever leaving Outlook? When you have your address books, mailboxes and public folders stored on a central Exchange server, why would one want to use another unfamiliar, expensive application with external database, just to log in tickets?

The problems with helpdesks based on Outlook
Microsoft Outlook itself is highly optimized for personal email exchange often falling short when it comes to providing a complete history of an event over time. When an email has been forwarded on to another helpdesk team member, the original owner loses insight into the progress. This has a serious implication, that is, in its original state, Outlook simply lacks the automation, reporting, reminders, and workflow to manage a support ticket request, which is critical for growing helpdesks looking to optimize and uniformly improve support staff/customer interactions.
 

The Solution - Extending your Outlook
The SupportCalls System answers these limitations by integrating itself within the Outlook process (as an add-in) and extending it as an ideal platform to collect, track and resolve trouble tickets while sharing this information with your entire team, all with ease. It brings all of help desk functionalities and automation and tightly integrates with the easy workflow of Outlook, thereby allowing users to work in the same way they do with emails. What you would get as an IT manager, is high rate of user acceptance, yet low cost of operation, training and maintenance.