How to best use the Help desk for enhancing customer support?

Help desk is a tool that allows support agents to interact with customers, follow-up and resolve queries. Research says most support provided is either late or does not give an apt solution and even in some instances, neither is the solution on time nor what they want.

During the sales process, the product, price, and the overall experience is designed to deliver customer satisfaction. Whereas, the responsibility of extending that satisfaction post-sales falls squarely on support & service teams. Customers are more likely to remain satisfied when the same level of support & service is continued.

As businesses grow and the number of people interacting with the customer increases, and to scale with customer enquiries, sales opportunities and service requirements, it is important to standardize, monitor & review the quality of service and support provided.

Using a quality Help Desk tool, businesses can provide uniform, consistent and contextual help to every customer.

Applications & features of Help desk

In its essence, a help desk tool can be used for sales, support, or service. It is the first touchpoint where a customer initiates a support or service request. Even at this very first point of the interaction, every customer today expects the agent to know the full relationship the customer has had and continues to have with the business.

1. CRM

It is important to have a robust CRM that has all the relevant information about the customers and their history with the business. At the click of a button, agents need to know the demographics, purchase history, any earlier complaints / service requests pending and other relevant information.

2. Knowledge Centre

Also, the agent should be able to access an internal database of common complaints, service requests, support resolutions with solution paths to guide the customer on the next steps and service the complaint or provide support.

3. Automated Ticket Generation

Seamless integrations with Telephony, Chat, and Email, Help desk CRMs should automatically create support tickets and assign it to agents as per preset rules for easy categorization and followup.

4. Internal collaboration tools for assignment & followup

Since support agents are just the front end of the support system, agents should have the ability to assign internal tasks and follow-ups to ensure the resolution of the ticket

5. Communicate resolution, and receive feedback

Once the solution is delivered, support agents should have the ability to communicate with the customer about the resolution and receive full feedback on their satisfaction to the solution provided.

6. Escalation matrix

Help desk CRMs should have the ability to set SLAs for every nature of ticket and to provide automated escalation to appropriate higher management personnel for faster resolution whenever SLAs are breached. This ensures irrespective of an employee’s performance, the customer is satisfied at the earliest.

7. Canned responses

Help desk should automate repetitive tasks. Canned responses help improve resolution times as it can be easily accessed within a couple of clicks.

8. KPIs for a help desk

The help desk CRM helps track ticket resolution time and a host of other KPIs that will enable the service and support teams to measure productivity and improve efficiency. KPIs should be tracked at individual, departmental and organizational levels to ensure the best customer satisfaction.

• Number of contacts handled
• Call time and hold time.
• Turn around time
• First call resolution rate
• Cost per incident
• Recurring incidents
• Knowledge sharing
• SLA Breach ratio
• Post resolution – customer satisfaction feedback ratings

Benefits of using help Desk

• Improves quality of service.
• It helps understand the customer better.
• Helps manage performance.
• Compresses response times.
• Reduces workload for the customers and employees
• Improves security on the IT network.
• Improves the employee and customer responses.
• Multitask smarter, even on the go.

Summary

Even as the help desk tool will help becoming organized and ensuring no support ticket slips through the cracks, providing quick resolution, prompt updates and empathetic response to customers are the key to a productive and effective help desk. It is probably one of the most important touchpoint with the customer that can prevent loss of customers.