If you’re running a small business, you often may feel overwhelmed with the numerous things you keep track with. You know that an excellent customer support is the main ingredient to a thriving business, but you’re having problems in juggling your tasks, especially in the customer relations department. This is where customer support software comes in.
This software is recommended for all types of business, big or small. This article will talk about what are the things to look for in this software that can help you organize your customer support department for your business. If you want to skip reading, you can just go to CrowdReviews.com’s reviews of customer support software to help you decide which software is best for you.
What Is Help Desk Software?
Help desk is department or an individual that customers can contact with their information technology issues. With this information, a help desk or customer support software, helps businesses answer and resolve any technical issues more efficiently and faster than without it.
This software was created to basically have a centralized customer data, a streamlined communication area and a more organized issue resolution process. You’ll be able to keep an accurate record of your customer’s technical issues. Determine any possible issues and track down any updates of your technical process. It’s also easier for you to receive, record and assign any technical issues to your department or a specific individual.
This software can also be called help desk support software, Computer Support software, Customer Support software, IT Solutions software, IT Response software, IT center software or Technical Support software. It focuses on the technical aspect of customer support.
This software can benefit any company that wants to focus on their IT support. If you want to compare the latest software about help desk, you can read best customer support software to find out more.
What Are the features of Help desk?
Each customer service support software has its own unique features. However, below are some of the most sought after features of this software:
- Communication channels. Communication is the most important part of help desk so that customers can contact you regarding their issues or concerns about their technical issues and you should be able to answer them as quickly as possible. You can provide your customers custom emails and notifications or any public alerts for any scheduled maintenance and the like.
- Help Desk Management. You should be able to track performance using your help desk dashboard and be able to search your tickets if you need them for reference or if you need to quickly check your customer’s history. You should also need to have a complete and accurate audit trail if needed.
- Automation Tools. Being able to create mass ticket updates will definitely save you time than individually emailing your customers.
- It should have the latest technology available especially when it comes to security and how it protects your customer’s data. It should also be compatible to most devices, depending on how customers can contact you.
- Knowledgebase Management. There should be a knowledge base portal where your employees can find all the resource they need in order to answer your customers tickets. Customers can also have their own self-service portal if they are unable to contact or wait for help and be able to answer their own questions instead.
- Reporting Tools. There are many types of reporting tools. They can report time-tracking analysis, metrics analysis, performance reports, IT asset reporting, survey reports and other custom reports. You also should be able to extract, import or export your reports to another software if you need to view or send your data.
- IT Asset Management. This is a good place to store your hardware and software assets such as your hardware inventory and inventory information.
- Task Management. A ticket that needs to be followed up or scheduled can easily be done by task management. You can also share tasks with other departments if an issue needs to be solved together by different teams.
- Approval/Change Management. You’ll be able to see any requests that need approval and change them if necessary. Customers can also reopen or view their previous tickets if needed.
- Survey Management. One role of a help desk is to improve customer relationships. In order to find out what your customers think about you, you send surveys. The survey should be fast, specific and easy to answer to make sure that the customer’s time is not wasted.
All of these features are very useful in your business but not all Customer Support Tools have these features. It’s wise to pick on the software that has features your business needs.
Why Do You Need Help Desk?
Help Desk is very helpful in the following ways:
- Able to handle large number of contacts from customers proficiently. Help desk is faster and easier because it automates some technical processes. It also organizes your customer’s data in a systematic way that you’ll be able to resolve customers’ technical queries at the soonest possible time.
- Centralized customer service. You can determine which issues still need to be answered or prioritize certain tickets. You’ll also be able to check on the quality of the tickets answered.
- Gauge your company’s technical service performance. You’ll be able to find out where your technical service performance stands and improve anything that is lacking.
- Increase customer relationships and build your company’s reputation. Using the software give you the confidence that you are able to answer your customers in a fast and efficiently manner, building a positive reputation for your company.
- Provide a versatile technical support. This software helps you provide an all around support with your customers in everything technical. Sometimes this software can also help answer non-technical inquiries which make your customers happier.
The top customer support software can greatly increase your customer satisfaction ratings and increase your brand’s awareness. The main thing that they should do is organize your customer’s data in a systematic way and be able to answer their queries as soon as possible.
What Are the Things You Need to Monitor in a Help Desk?
As mentioned earlier, help desk has a feature to monitor your tickets and how they relate to your customers issues. Here are the top 10 things that you can monitor when you have a help desk software.
- Ticket distribution. You can monitor your ticket distribution to ensure that your tickets will be answered by a specialist. The ticket severity level will depend on who the ticket goes to, so don’t distribute general question tickets to a manager. Instead, distribute them to a front line specialist.
- Created Tickets. You need to monitor created tickets to know how much tickets you’re managing on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. A created ticket can be made via chat, email, website inquiry or using the phone. It will help you determine what channel customers usually contact you for their queries or concerns. Also, this will help you determine how much staffing you need especially for peak and non-peak season of support.
- Tickets Resolved and Unresolved. The number of tickets resolved and tickets unresolved will help you determine which parts of the products or services you need to improve on. You can also monitor and solve unresolved tickets faster. Additionally, it is a great way to see if there are any outages or some major technical issues going on that you are not yet aware of.
- The time a ticket gets resolved. An issue becomes faster and easier to resolve if it has been done before. You also need to make sure that each ticket gets resolved as soon as possible, especially the basic ones.
- Reply and wait times. If you’re taking too much time to resolve a customer’s issue, it can result to dissatisfied customers. Make sure you acknowledge your customer’s concerns and help resolve their issues within a reasonable timeframe.
- If you’re experiencing a long time in answering tickets, you’ll be increasing your backlogs. This means that the more time you spent a ticket unanswered, the more chance you’ll have a backlog. To prevent backlogs, answer the tickets as soon as possible. You can try to use an automation process to combine tickets with the same category for them to be easily answered faster.
- Predicted backlog. If you’re starting your peak season, it is best if you predict your backlog even before it becomes backlog.
- Overall satisfaction and rating of a topic. Once a ticket has been resolved, it is best to have an unbiased customer survey to gauge what your customers say about your business and their satisfaction with their issues resolved.
- Overall performance. This is to thank your employees that give their best in answering their customers and focus on employees that need to work more. Give them supplementary training and other resources that can help them improve their performance.
Metrics is a good way to determine your company’s success. The ability of being able to monitor your metrics is an integral part of a business. To select the software that’s right for you, just read on in CrowdReviews.com’s reviews of customer support software.
In a nutshell, help desk is an important part of the IT side of the business. And having a software will definitely make things life easier by having organized IT data, streamlined processes and enhanced customer support. If you want to find more what’s the best software for you, why not read CrowdReviews.com’s best customer support software? You’ll find a comprehensive list of software that is suitable for your business needs.
John Tovar
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