A help desk software is an integrated tool that consolidates different customer channels — email, social media, and SMS for ease of communication with customers. The purpose of any such solution is to resolve customers’ queries promptly, track each complaint, build a good relationship, and eventually have delighted customers.
Providing top-notch customer service is the need of the hour. With exemplary customer service, you can reduce customer churn and increase the LTV of your product. In fact, efficient customer service can help you win customers’ trust, enhance brand awareness, build word of mouth, and drive sales.
With efficient software for customer service at your disposal, you can provide prompt solutions. Thus to make things easy for you, we have listed down five ways you can uplift your customer service and why you should implement a help desk solution for your business.
Without any further ado, let’s get started.
1. Quick access to customer service metrics
Before you select your help desk software, you need to be aware of key customer service metrics. These metrics can help you track your entire customer support process to determine whether you’ve fulfilled your goals. Customer service metrics will provide in-depth insights into your support process to find the scope for improvements.
Some of the common metrics that you should track are as follows:
- The number of issues resolved in a day — ideally, the higher the value of this metric, the better. This metric is a great indicator of your customer support team’s efficiency. If you find this metric declining daily, you’ll know that your customer support team has reached its saturation point or needs to streamline the process.
- Response time, response time is the elapse between a customer raising a support ticket and an executive responding to it. The lesser the response time, the better. You have to take this metric seriously as it has a major impact on your team’s support quality.
- Call wait time, this metric is applicable when you have a telephonic support system. It measures the time a customer has to wait before you engage with them. Excessive wait time can result in high customer frustration and possible chances of churn.
When you have got a system in place, you don’t need to track these metrics manually. Most solutions provide an in-depth report of all metrics to explain how well your customer service is functioning.
Tracking these metrics will help your customer success team work more effectively and be more productive. The team won’t have to put in extra hours because they’re guessing about which metrics should be given the most focus. A well-defined system leads to happier employees who are also healthier in the long run. Keeping track of the right metrics is a win-win situation for the company as well as customers.
2. Top-notch ticket management
The foundation of any successful help desk software is managing and tracking support tickets. In fact, ticket management has to determine whether or not you should use a helpdesk solution. Ideally, these solutions require raising tickets based on customers’ concerns, managing the tickets, and tracking them as long as the issue is resolved.
Here’s how it can assist you with a ticket management system:
- You can find out how active your customer support team is and whether or not tickets are being raised on a priority
- You can identify how your customer service team manages the tickets. That means, do the tickets need an immediate response? Is the ticketing system segregated into different phases? You can monitor it all through a single dashboard
The automated software solution can streamline the entire ticketing system. Hence your customer service team can segregate the tickets based on their root causes
3. Reduces user response time with automation
An apt help desk software emphasizes customer-centric features. One of the imperative benefits of such a solution has to be reducing response time. That means, it can speed up the customer service process like anything.
For example:
- Automate ticketing system
- Fasten team collaboration
- Respond with informative FAQs
- Chatbot step up for common queries
- A product community forum for discussion
Usually, small businesses with a limited budget can easily reduce their user response time with automation. Automation of customer support requests can benefit your workflow in multiple ways, including reduced waiting times for customers, boosting workflow productivity, cutting down overall costs, etc.
A smart way to reduce user response time is by triggering FAQs in the support chat system. In fact, Customer self-service FAQs can reduce your ticket backlogs and number of customer meetings so that the customer service executives can focus on complicated queries.
4. Simple UI to track customers’ complaints
Most helpdesk solutions have a built-in UI that’s extremely easy to use. You can use a single dashboard to track and manage users’ complaints in a hassle-free manner. Instead of using spreadsheets or maintaining manual records of tickets and complaints, you can opt for help desk software with an intuitive UI.
Here’re some of the critical benefits of having a simple help desk UI:
- Your entire team can use it and you can save spend less on training
- An intuitive UI loads quickly and updates changes to the complaint status
- You hardly need to contact the administrator each time you’re making workflow changes
We always suggest that SMEs get a detailed product demo of the help desk solution before investing. That’s the only way to figure out if you are investing in the right customer service software.
5. Easy integrations and collaborations
You cannot restrict excellent customer service software within a vacuum. It needs to be integrated with multiple channels so that customer service executives can access customers’ queries and resolve them promptly.
When you’re providing support to an organization, it is a must that all necessary customer datasets are synchronized. That is how different departments can collaborate with utmost productivity and serve the customers better. If you can integrate your help desk solution with all the existing business tools like email, CRM, social media, and various communication tools, it will only improve efficiency and reduce repetition and duplication. That means faster response to customers’ queries and higher customer satisfaction.
Along with having software to create the best customer experience you may even want to create a blog. So it’s important that you ensure your chosen software solution that integrates with the most common content management systems.
Final Words
Having a happy customer is a common trait of a thriving business. If you want your business to grow you would need to set up a process that supports your customers to make the most out of your product and services. This can be achieved by setting up software solutions that overcome the challenges of error-prone manual processes.
So, what’s your take on help desk solutions? Go for efficient, collaborative, and flexible help desk software to enjoy next-gen customer support activities.
