What is a Help Desk?
Help desk technology systems enable customer service teams to efficiently receive, organize, manage and resolve customer inquiries or issues in an automated fashion.
A help desk often includes ticketing or inbox systems for customer requests as well as routing systems or assignment systems for representatives and an overall dashboard reporting system for tracking results.
Exceeding customer expectations is crucial if you want to build a customer-oriented organization focused on increasing and growing its value to clients.
Humans excel at customer service; using technology for maximum impact.
One such technology is a help desk. Your team can deliver excellent client care that turns clients into advocates - creating what is known as Flywheel organizations where customer success fuels company expansion.
Responding and resolving customer concerns are at the heart of great customer service.
What is Help Desk Support?
Help desk support is a system which enables companies to offer customer service in an organized, formal software system by answering customers inquiries, accepting tickets and resolving issues automatically without the need for rep intervention.
Customers often appreciate such help desk services because automatically prioritizing issues without intervention by your representative is something that offers them a great advantage in dealing with customer problems.
Compare help desk support with customer service without software systems: in-person customer care services.
Some companies provide customer support by email and chat without maintaining a dedicated helpdesk to handle customer tickets or queries.
While the end result remains the same - customers receiving assistance online - reps processes differ drastically: They must organize emails, chats and social media DMs themselves which reduces productivity while increasing clerical errors.
Automating this process with help desk support for both customers and reps provides automation of this process, providing more streamlined operations and help desk services for both sides.
An example of such support would include:
- A customer submits an order.
- The ticket appears in the system.
- The next rep is automatically assigned.
- Replying to the ticket, he offers a solution.
- The customer will reply to the ticket if the problem is not resolved.
- The ticket has been closed.
Another example of help desk support:
- Customer Support receives an email from a customer.
- Inbox shared by the entire team.
- The next representative available is assigned the conversation.
- The customer and rep can message back and forth. The customer uses their email while the rep uses the help desk software.
- The conversation is archived if the issue has been resolved. A ticket is created if an issue surfaces.
What Is The Role Of A Help Desk?
A help desk is equipped with a set of features that helps both the service team and customer keep track of issues and ensure a positive outcome for both.
A help desk will do the following to achieve this goal:
1. This Is A Great Way To Increase Customer Satisfaction
Customer intake is the way customers contact your customer service team with questions and concerns. Customer intake includes:
- Live Chat
- Submissions to the Customer Portal
- Feedback Forms
- Social media
- Phone calls
Your customer communication channels depend upon the industry and customers you serve; offering multiple ways for customers to access you will ensure you provide assistance at their most convenient time and avoid frustrating them so much they leave for competitors who offer more convenient contact methods.
How should a helpdesk fit into this picture? Intake forms may become lost in an impersonal and disjointed process that moves from rep to representative without providing meaningful details that help resolve complaints effectively.
You could lose vitally important details that would aid resolution efforts if this happened.
Your information can then be stored centrally so you can easily escalate issues and adjust priorities quickly, as well as keep customers happy by eliminating repeated inquiries for details or reaching out directly.
This also keeps customers satisfied as they wont need to contact you repeatedly to request answers to their inquiries.
2. All Customer Communications Are Kept In One Place
Shared inboxes provide an effective means of consolidating messages, sorting them and assigning tickets directly to specific reps.
Shared inboxes often serve this function.
Here are a few examples of shared inboxes:
- Create group email alias
- inboxes to communicate more efficiently
- Live chat queues and social media tools need to be constantly
- monitored in real-time for effectiveness.
Your team should then access and respond to these interactions in a consolidated stream, making the customers experience seamless even if they used multiple contact methods in the past to contact you.
In doing so, your organization can deliver an exceptional omni-channel customer journey experience and meet or even surpass customer expectations.
3. It Is A Ticketing And Organizing Service
Help desk software provides powerful features to organize and route tickets that keep customer support teams efficient during times of high ticket volume, such as product outages or busy seasons.
Sorting, prioritizing and assigning tickets helps customer support teams improve response time to customer issues faster while automation allows teams to route them automatically towards members who specialize in certain complaints or issues.
Customers might expect a lengthy response when they submit requests to your business, but with help desk softwares ticket organization features they may be surprised with an immediate reply within one day! Most help desk software offers canned responses so you can set an automated reply for when someone submits their inquiry.
4. This Software Compiles Data On Customer Service Into Reports
Reporting trends and issues related to customer service helps teams optimize their work. Teams can then reward and compensate representatives while making more informed decisions regarding priorities and headcount.
Help desk reporting functions provide insight into how team priorities and systems are performing; dashboards often serve to inform management on ticket resolution times, customer satisfaction measures, representative productivity levels and experience measures as well.
Here is a selection of top help desk software solutions your customer service team can utilize in providing superior services to customers.
Best Help Desk Software
1. Help Desk software: best for seamless cross-team collaboration
Developers.Devs help desk tool is part of Service Hub. This comprehensive customer service software assists small to enterprise businesses deliver delightful experiences for their clients, with features including:
- Customer Management through 1:1 communication via inbox
- Service Level Agreements
Automated bots route, assign and respond to tickets as service level agreements dictate. - Report on customer service outcomes to increase service results
Developers.Dev Service Hub can be an extremely powerful combination when combined with other Developers.Dev tools.
Service Hub provides customers with an outstanding experience by seamlessly integrating bots and automation with CRM data and marketing intelligence. If your goal is to strengthen collaboration among marketing, sales, and service teams we highly suggest trying Service Hub.
If you feel overwhelmed by all the software options, selecting Linux could also be the right decision for you. Not only can it give you many free features and an operating system with which you will become proficient over time.
2. Zendesk: Best for Creating Customer Portals
Zendesk, one of the oldest customer service software providers, provides an array of tools suitable for small, medium and large businesses alike.
Their help desk software is especially user-friendly; all customer data from various platforms are aggregated seamlessly in a central place for convenient management.
Zendesks customer portal gives your customers access to tickets they have submitted and allows for additional responses to them.
A portal that keeps customers up-to-date will keep your team from becoming overwhelmed with requests.
3. Happy Fox: Best Task Management
Happy Fox is an intuitive help desk with ticketing, canned actions and task management features for larger customer service teams.
This tool makes automation of specific tasks possible while creating consistent experiences to assist your customers in helping themselves.
"Task management" is one of the standout features of ServiceNows customer support software. This tool allows users to segment tickets and assign specific tasks.
This feature is recommended for companies offering complex products where customers may submit tickets that require multiple steps before closure; it may not be needed when receiving only complaints such as missing deliveries or products.
4. Freshdesk Is The Best For Field Customer Service
Freshdesk is an all-channel help desk solution which delivers customer support across every channel of communication for businesses.
By unifying customer messages and information into one platform, Freshdesk ensures customers enjoy an enhanced support experience regardless of when or how they reach out for assistance.
Freshdesk provides numerous field service tools, which are invaluable when meeting with customers at home or on the move.
Their mobile app enables teams to designate regional service teams, take customer signatures and more - one of the most efficient help desk solutions available for teams that take service directly into customers hands.
Read More: Deploy An Automated Help Desk For Artificial Intelligence
5. Intercom Is The Best For Saas Customer Onboarding
Intercoms live chat tool is perhaps its most widely utilized service, while their help desk provides an efficient means of customer interaction without lengthy processes or complicated user accounts.
There are tools included within Intercom that aid collaboration while automating customer support operations for increased efficiency and higher service delivery levels.
Intercom boasts many noteworthy features, one being its onboarding tool. This enables proactive customer support as customers begin using your software; SaaS companies in particular may find this useful to reduce roadblocks or inquiries as their new customers begin using it.
6. Zoho Desk Is The Best For Customer Sentiment Analysis
Zoho Desk is an online help desk designed to boost individual customer service representatives productivity. Using its tools, users can identify insights and patterns which enable their teams to resolve customer cases more rapidly.
Sentiment analysis tools also make determining customer sentiment easier if your customer base is small and surveys might not get returned as easily.
Sentiment analysis should especially prove useful if customers do not respond. You might not need an evaluation tool if your customer base is small.
7. Liveagent Is The Best For Call Centers
LiveAgent, an open help desk solution tailored for small and mid-sized companies, was specifically created to offer support services.
While its primary use case involves call centers, LiveAgent supports other email inboxes as well.
LiveAgent is highly recommended to companies offering telephone customer support regularly. LiveAgent allows unlimited recording and transfer of calls for seamless phone support services.
8. Jira Service Desk Is The Best For IT Ticketing And Support
Jira Softwares Help Desk allows for self-service, ticket automation and SLA Management - plus much more besides.
Users can link IT tickets with the backlog of the software team to quickly identify potential causes before problems escalate further.
Jira can serve as an internal IT help desk, giving your team access to assistance whenever technology plays an integral part of running business operations.
Jira features include a self service portal for employees as well as standard tools like conversational ticketing and SLAs to provide this vital service.
9. Use Help Scout for Email Collaboration
Help Scouts customer service desk aims to deliver an enjoyable customer experience by prioritizing internal collaboration between teams rather than focussing solely on tickets or structures; your service reps will be able to tag each other when responding to emails in order to facilitate shared ticket management or customer-related discussions.
Your team should meet regularly to address customer issues and inquiries, exchanging private notes so everyone is informed and can respond effectively when required.
Now is an opportune time to improve customer service efforts with so many tools at your fingertips.
Important Best Practices for Help Desks
Start With The Existing Process
Most businesses create infrastructure when using help desk management software, abandoning current processes in favor of starting over with something completely new.
When doing so, training must occur to familiarize staff members with new procedures - which wastes precious time for business operations.
Integrating help desk software into an existing system may cause customer disorientation; help desk software offers the possibility to streamline and simplify current processes more seamlessly than their physical equivalents can.
Use help desk management software and keep existing processes, rather than training agents; your representatives can focus more time on helping customers.
Iterative Growth
Slow and steady wins is an approach proven effective across industries and businesses alike. Instead of making drastic changes at once, smaller improvements should be implemented gradually throughout a system; businesses that experience rapid expansion tend to struggle due to an excessive increase in workload; start small projects instead so agents can focus on incremental enhancements for greater iterative improvement.
Designing Help Desks To Cater To User Experience
Focusing on user experience is an often-overlooked service desk best practice, yet often unappreciated goal of help desk systems.
Customer satisfaction should always be the ultimate aim, yet when designing such systems user experience should always be kept top of mind as this describes emotions, attitudes and experiences associated with using products or services by users themselves.
Your help desk must offer users an enjoyable user experience. Craft an attractive interface with intuitive navigation and smooth processes for maximum effectiveness.
Agents should systematically gather customer feedback in order to develop software designed specifically to enhance user experiences at help desks.
Agents should focus on gathering feedback related to customers needs and wants; any necessary modifications should then be implemented into the help desk system so it meets them directly.
Create A New Ticket For Every Customer Interaction
Customers are the lifeblood of your business and should always come first when engaging with customers. A great idea would be to use tickets for all interactions you have with customers.
Organizations need a way to keep an open case organized and up-to-date the user data. Businesses can improve customer service by keeping a record of any complaints that arise; ticket creation should occur for every in-person interaction, email correspondence, social media post/share or request, online request/message response form submission as well as phone call alert or notification message received from clients or users.
Value Customers
Help desk management should include best practices for customer software development.
Customers are the foundation of every successful business model; each should strive to give its customers maximum value in return.
Support interactions should go beyond simply solving one specific issue for a customer. Your agents should engage in deep conversation with them to better understand any additional needs or offer links or articles of self-help or demonstrate how your product could assist.
A conversation that keeps customers interested will go a long way toward creating an enjoyable support experience for everyone involved.
Organize Training Sessions For Your Agents
Customer service agents need regular training sessions in order to remain aware of both core values and new trends and tools that have emerged since your last training session.
Your support team should be trained to go above and beyond in their efforts to please customers. By building on areas in which skills may need improving, or learning key service delivery techniques like personalized gestures that delight, they will become indispensable partners in providing exceptional service delivery.
Your team must go above and beyond its usual procedures when helping customers.
Encourage Team Collaboration
Cohesive teams can be beneficial not only to a companys bottom line but also the customer. Cross-functional team efforts allow quick resolution of end user issues.
An effective help desk allows departments to collaborate efficiently and swiftly resolve issues. Your finance team, for example, could alert customer service staff if a client qualifies for a refund from something purchased last month while your delivery team could notify your representatives if there are expected delays that need to be accommodated for.
Work Holistically
This principle states that help desk teams should prioritize all value chains rather than solely one process or activity.
When customers contact them for support, agents should keep an overall picture in mind and offer solutions with lasting effects for your business.
Customer representatives solutions should help customers achieve the outcomes desired, while technical specialists offer not only technical help but also offer other ways of solving issues that might arise.
Transparency Is The Focus
Transparency should be at the core of every organization. Customers tend to trust companies more when informed of its processes, systems and complaint resolution process; plus it helps build rapport with your customer base while expanding business growth opportunities.
Transparency is of utmost importance in any company that prides themselves on exceptional customer service, so automating updates to keep customers up-to-date will save your agents time while decreasing email requests from customers for updates.
Document Service Level Agreements
Service Level Agreement (SLA), often referred to as Service Level Contract, defines the quality of services delivered by an organization to their clients.
SLAs should be utilized for measuring performance against business objectives and meeting set expectations, providing measurement of service success based on pre-set measurements.
Unfortunately, tracking SLAs can sometimes become challenging due to raw data accumulation - the ideal solution would be using robust help desk software with tools designed specifically to track metrics like how long an issue takes to resolve.
Help Desk Support Is a Must For Your Business To Grow
Help desk services are essential if you want your customers to remain more satisfied and loyal, as they allow customers to more easily contact your service team while giving your support representatives the ability to offer top-of-the-line customer care without compromising productivity levels.
By creating delightful customer experiences that foster growth for your business.
