If your goal is to resolve support issues quickly and effectively, you owe it to your service agents to invest in a robust help desk system. With the right tool, you will not only improve the speed at which your staff processes support tickets, but this, in turn, will help reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty to the company. Modern help desk systems have evolved to meet the needs of today’s businesses, for example, by integrating with other essential business software such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. They often support interactions across multiple channels, including email, phone, chat, social media, and web forms. Recently, they have even included other modern techniques such as AI-powered chatbots.
What is the use of help desk software?
Help desk software secures and operates key functions to make the support team more responsive and efficient. At its core, it revolves around “tickets” for assistance. Regardless of the channel used by the customer, any request is formatted as a digital ticket that contains all related information. This includes a summary of the request or issue, the identity of the customer, the reported time, the channel used, and the employee assigned to work on the request.
What are some key features of help desk software?
Although modern help desk software features, such as artificial intelligence and sophisticated chatbots, may seem appealing or even daunting to implement, they are not mandatory. In fact, it will be best to focus initially on ensuring that the specific solution meets your basic needs in a help desk system. You are looking for four key capabilities:
- The ability to create, route, and track a problem ticket
- The ability to modify and close the ticket while maintaining a closure record
- The ability to share ticket data with other systems
- The ability to receive tickets across multiple channels, such as chat, email, SMS, and social media
Do you need ITIL?
If you are implementing a help desk for an IT management company or a company managing large custom software development projects, check for ITIL support for the IT help desk. ITIL is a matched set of best practices that defines how to use checklists, procedures, processes, and tasks that help the organization handle various problem scenarios in a more structured and efficient manner.
How to choose the right workflow for tickets?
As mentioned earlier, the issues that reach the help desk typically arrive as “tickets.” These tickets start as summaries for each support request and contact information for the submitter, then evolve from there. Every interaction related to a specific issue is recorded in the ticket, along with the support agent’s feedback and the description of the final solution. This is not the end. If you have integrated your help desk with sales or marketing technology systems, it may contain additional sales data, surveys, and even purchasing data to add.
How are chatbots used in customer service?
Another feature that has become essential in modern help desk software is chatbot support. These increasingly advanced software services can take over, or at least enhance, the live chat capability on your support site. Many products in our lineup offer this feature.
Think of chatbots as the first line of defense for the help desk in high-pressure situations. Customers who interact with a chatbot often believe they are discussing their problems with a real person when they are actually conversing with a rules-based program that uses detailed questions and natural language processing to identify issues. If possible, the chatbot resolves the issue by providing a specific answer to a common problem, offering alternative information sources, or executing an automated process.
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In cases where the problem cannot be resolved, the most important function of the chatbot is to direct the customer to a real person, preferably someone armed with specific knowledge in the field. They can even guide the customer to the appropriate service representative based on the representative’s expertise in similar issues. Sometimes, customers are aware of the transfer process, but at other times, they leave without knowing anything.
Do help desk systems integrate with other software?
Companies typically implement help desks as platforms for customer satisfaction. They focus on providing customer service representatives with effective tools to maintain customer satisfaction. However, this is often not a well-researched journey. Unfortunately, assessing support customers about their experience with a 1-5 star rating is the only real effort many companies make in this regard. While those ratings are important metrics, they are subject to many factors, not least of which is the reality that customers are eager to return to their regular routine as soon as possible.
One way to empower the support representative to have a more robust conversation with the customer is by allowing customer data to flow from other software systems into the help desk system through integrations. We previously mentioned that the data collected by the help desk can guide other processes, such as sales and marketing. However, data can also flow from other systems into the help desk system.
For example, it might be beneficial for the sales CRM data to include information about the customer’s purchase history. What other products have they bought over a period of time? How satisfied are they with those purchases, and what are the details of those deals? Other integration goals might include analytics tools like Tableau; collaboration software, like Slack; and even sales platforms like Zoho CRM. All these tools can integrate with the ticket management system and create a bidirectional data flow.
Look for a list of pre-built integration modules on the help desk system provider’s website to see if the vendor offers easy integration with your other software. Alternatively, a more technical solution could be current REST APIs, which have become the standard for integrating cloud software services. If your help desk system supports them, you will be able to hire developers to build custom integrations.
How to choose the right software for your help desk
It should be clear now that before settling on a help desk solution, you need to consider several factors. First, look at how tickets are created, routed, and closed, and make sure those capabilities operate in the way your business needs them. How does the system communicate with users or customers on one side, and how does it assist the help desk team on the other?
You should consider the channels supported by the system and how they are supported. This can be particularly important if you need your help desk ticket routing system to connect with an email-based call center, social media, or a voice-over-IP (VoIP) call center.
Finally, look into how the data that flows through the system is collected and stored and how you can easily leverage that data
Source: https://me.pcmag.com/en/old-help-desk/12137/the-best-help-desk-software-for-2023
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