7 Super Impactful Benefits Of A Help Desk
The main reason that organizations launch a formal help desk is to improve client interactions on urgent issues. Help desk services have the potential to directly influence customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. But did you know that there are actually several additional benefits of a help desk? And these benefits extend beyond the customer to also impact your product and your internal team, as well.
In this article, I’ll be sharing more about help desk software (including who uses it) and listing the top 7 benefits of a help desk. Let’s dive in.
What Is Help Desk Software?
If you’re wondering “What is help desk software?”, allow me to explain. Help desk software creates an interface within which customers can contact your team for support resolving urgent issues regarding your product.
Help desk software takes in service requests from customers (often from multiple channels like SMS, email, and social media). It then creates support tickets, routes these tickets according to custom workflow automation rules that you set, and assists your team in resolving customer issues in a timely fashion.
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Who Uses Help Desk Software?
Help desk software is used by organizations of all sizes. While these solutions come in a variety of configurations to cater to different business needs, they all share the ability to assist companies in streamlining business processes and enhancing customer support efforts.
In-house help desk agents use the back end of the software to monitor ticket progress and resolve issues. End users use the front end of the software to contact your help desk, submit a query, and complete the resolution process.
7 Biggest Benefits Of A Help Desk
Your support team can use a help desk solution to achieve a number of outcomes. Some manifest within the organization, and some extend outward. Let’s take a look at the 7 primary benefits of a help desk.
1) Workflow Automation
While I haven't created this list in order of importance, efficiency does legitimately top the list of the biggest benefits of a help desk.
Help desk managers can establish call routing rules based on the nature of the request that will then determine how customer queries are handled when they arrive in the ticketing system. These rules can filter out requests that might be better suited to AI or a self-service knowledge base (see number 7!), or route requests to specific agents with subject matter expertise.
Workflow automation helps keep ticket volume from reaching a bottleneck in the system, streamlining the resolution process without adding strain to the customer support agent workload.
2) All-in-One View
Your help desk provides a unified dashboard from which you can view:
- All communications from a variety of channels (including social media, email, and SMS)
- Service Level Agreements (SLA) associated with customer queries
- Customer history and customer satisfaction data that you can integrate with your CRM
If your small business is struggling to keep up with ticket volume, having a unified view of all tickets, customer data, and help desk team performance info (more on that in number 5!) can save you time while providing in-depth knowledge about the health of your customer service operations.
3) Help Desk Ticketing
Ticket management is the process of organizing customer queries as they arrive in the ticketing system, assigning each one a number and “file”, and using automated routing rules to improve resolution times. While it’s definitely possible to field customer queries with a first-come, first-served approach, without a proper ticketing system, response times will inevitably stretch and the risk of dropping or forgetting customer queries will rise.
4) Know Your History
As a help desk ticket is escalated or transferred throughout the help desk team, details of the customer query are recorded and stored within the ticketing system. Keeping a record of customer history provides a number of benefits, including:
- Ensuring customers don't have to repeat the same details each time an agent transfers them
- Establishing an understanding of a customer issue across the help desk team
- Improving resolution times since all relevant information is stored in a central location
- Gathering info on customer preferences for later use in targeted marketing campaigns
5) Help Desk Team Performance Analytics
Help desk managers can access a variety of metrics from within the online help desk software. This includes help desk performance KPIs like agent resolution times, customer satisfaction ratings, and the ticket volume processed, which managers can use to assess agent performance, identify gaps, and shine a light on areas of improvement they can address with additional training.
6) Improvements and Awareness
Since your help desk software gathers real-time data on product issues, customer satisfaction, and agent performance metrics, it’s easy to see what needs to change and how you can make potential improvements.
Is there a specific product, interface, or web page that’s consistently the source of customer queries? Is there a recurring theme in customer satisfaction reviews? This data gives you a line of sight on how you can improve products and processes to better meet the needs of your customers.
7) Delegation + Prioritization
One of the biggest ways that help desk software increases efficiency is by empowering your help desk team to delegate repetitive requests and prioritize customer queries that require 1:1 attention. The help desk software solution can send low-priority customer inquiries to:
- A self-service knowledge base for easy-to-solve fixes
- A chatbot to field initial customer queries and guide customers to the next right action
- A list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) to address simple concerns
Delegating repetitive tasks has the potential to instantly decrease ticket volume by moving straightforward concerns through the ticketing system, freeing up your help desk team to address bigger concerns.
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Find the Best Help Desk Software for Your Team
The benefits of simple help desk software are plentiful, so it’s definitely worth considering if your small business is looking for ways to enhance customer experience. These software solutions provide end users with an easy-to-use, cloud-based platform that facilitates speedy communication and efficient resolutions.
To help you in your journey, we’ve carefully curated a list of the best help desk software for small businesses, including pricing, screenshots from the tools, integrations, and primary features. Check it out here:
Best Help Desk Software for Small Business
If you'd like more help with your selection process, this detailed breakdown of how to choose help desk software is a good place to start.
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