Customers are the lifeline of any company. They wouldn’t be in business if not for their clients. This is why companies should thrive hard to take care of their customers. Putting up a help desk system is one way to ensure that your customers are being taken care of. Your help desk can be in a physical form in the office with an employee manning it always or through phone, email, chat and social media customer support with employees always available to answer any query. The popularity of social networking sites in 2008 brought with it a new form of customer support that is being eaten up by the people. There are still companies who do not take advantage of the boom of social media, but this is one channel that many customers reach out to. There are many forms a customer can use to contact you. It is best that you have all those channels covered. All this talk about help desk, but what is it really? Here we will discuss the important and essential information you need to know regarding help desk.
What Is Help Desk Software?
Help desk is what the name implies; somewhere you can ask help from. It provides support to customers, which includes information and solutions to problems a customer might have. The main purpose of this thing is to help any client about any of their problems with regards to the products they have gotten from your company. Helping the customer set up or install your product is also one of the main jobs of the help desk.
Many businesses and enterprises provide assistance to their customers. They usually employ a multichannel approach to their customer support. That includes using phone lines, emails, live chat, and most recently social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. There are still customers who prefer to talk in person that is why some companies still offer a real, live help desk. A survey from Econsultancy yield the results that 90% of firms believe the importance of a multichannel approach to customer service.
What is a help desk software then? It is a computer program made solely for the purpose of helping customers with their problems. It stores and manages the list of issues or concerns that customers may have. This program also creates, maintains and solves complaints and issues or inquiries of the customers. The software issues tickets with the issue, the status of the issue, and other important data regarding the problem and the customer. This software helps customer service representatives manage the number of queries they receive to ensure that every of those queries are answered.
What Businesses Can It Help?
There are many businesses a help desk tool can help. That includes the following:
- Government agencies. These agencies are not businesses and do not have a product per se. But they still need a help desk solution because they offer services to the masses. Sometimes a citizen has questions and they can’t go to the local government office so they resort to calling to have their questions answered.
- Health care system. Many hospitals and care institutions should have a help desk since people often inquire about the services they provide. They also ask how much getting admitted may cost and if what insurances the hospital accepts. These are just some of the queries people might have for the health care system and a help desk will help answer these queries.
- Service providers. One of the companies that greatly benefits from a help desk is the service providers. These companies are vendors of software and other information technology services. These products are very hard to master, that is why some consumers might have a lot of questions with regards to their product. An example would be how to set up a help desk software that they bought. Or how to fix the dashboard, why is it not showing the current customer query on it. Service providers get the most questions so a help desk will definitely benefit them.
- Small enterprises. Being a small business, you probably only have a few merchandise. This is easier to manage than big businesses with many products. But jut the same, you can still benefit from a help desk software.
What Are the Kinds of Help Desk Solution?
There are two types of online help desk software based on where the customers are coming from. The first one is the external type. This means that end consumers are those buying your products and services. This could also mean companies that you have transactions with. They may have questions for you and the type of software to answer these problems is the external type. According to Understand Customers by Ruby Newell-Legner, a business often hears from 4% of dissatisfied customers. These problems are mostly handled by the customer support representatives that you employ. The second type is the internal kind. This means that the customers looking for answers are inside the company. The questions that are most popularly asked are about employee benefits. These types of queries are usually handled by the human resource department.
What Features Should You Look For?
A software vendor might offer many features for the online help desk tools. But that doesn’t mean you have a need for them. Sometimes they offer these features just to get more money out of you, when most of the time you have no need for them and they are just nuisances. So here is a list of features that your software should have.
- Ticket management. You get the best help desk tools for its ticket management. This is the most important feature and every help desk software will have this, so what you should look for it the most exceptional ticket management. It might be hard to look for the best but hopefully checking out reviews of help desk software will help you in finding the best one. Rankings in review sites are also available, so you should check that out.
- Knowledge base. It can’t be helped that sometimes the same problem are being reported by customers over and over. Having a database of all previous problems and how they were solved should be a feature you should look for. This will reduce significant time in resolving the problems and also reduce the workload since the answer will be readily available.
- Quick access. There are statistics and metrics that guide your customer support. There are total conversations, total replies, average response time, promoter score and other metrics important to help desk. More can be found in the Help Desk Benchmark. These metrics are important that is why customer service agents should have quick access to them. Read reviews of help desk tools to know which service providers offer quick access to these metrics.
- User friendly. Help desk tool is very helpful to customer service agents, but it would be more helpful if the software you chose is user friendly. There is training and support available but learning time would be quicker if the software’s interface is easy to understand and use.
How Will Help Desk Benefit You?
Why are companies using the best help desk tools? It’s because this tool helps a lot in their customer service. There are some of the ways a help desk can benefit and help your company:
- Most help desk tools have self-service tools. Because of this you would need less people to handle the customer service. Using a software for your customer support might not be a good idea since there might be problems a program can solve. But getting the best will help your mind of this problem and a human supervisor will be there to check all correspondence that comes out of the program.
- The comprehensive database helps agents solve problems more quickly and efficiently. They wouldn’t have to search over and over for the solutions of the same problems since it will be available in the database of the software.
- Every customer query will be answered. The ticketing management and tracking of the software ensures that no customers will get ignored. This helps tremendously in keeping customers because when you resolve a complaint then 70% of the time, the customer will do business with your company again. This number is based on Lee Resources International.
What Are the Latest Trends?
There are new trends with regards to customer support. One is the boom of social media. Social media can now be integrated to most help desk and customer support software. There are many customers, especially millennial, who prefer to use social media than go the more traditional route like calling and emailing.
Keeping the customers happy goes a long way into keeping the company in business. If you want your clients coming back and staying loyal to you, you should take great care of them. Using a help desk will help with this endeavor. Read reviews of help desk tools to know which will perfectly suit your business needs.
Want to know the top 10 best help desk software? Visit CrowdReviews.com to view the rankings.
Jeev Trika
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