Red Akrim
No product or service will be 100 percent functional. Whether a company likes it or not, there will be customers calling in for complaints, lost passwords, merchandise returns, delivery tracking queries, or service downtime, even employees asking their in-house IT guys to assist with issues concerning tools like computer hardware, software systems, among other things.
Considering the sheer number of help requests, internal or external, some companies have to deal with on a daily basis, systematically keeping track of everything – to ensure all requests are addressed in a timely manner and effort duplication among customer-facing personnel is eliminated – can become a seriously formidable task.
This is where a help desk software becomes indispensable.
Help desk software – what it is
According to Techopedia, a help desk solution, or issue tracking system, enables help desk operators to keep track of user requests using a unique identifier, easily find solutions to common queries, prioritize tasks, and so on.
Far from replacing the people who power your help desk team, a help desk software automates tasks such as:
- Ticket categorization and prioritization
- Ticket routing
- Alerts and notifications based on certain triggers
- Ticket status management
- Canned responses with placeholders to personalize content
Which, in turn, helps you develop a tech or customer service team that’s reliable, fast, and accurate – a priceless asset for any organization.
Help desk software – the clear advantages
Because this article is here to talk about advantages, below are 8 benefits to deploying a help desk software system:
Provide better customer experience
The easiest way to lose a customer is to provide a crappy customer experience. When customers call in to log an issue with your tech/customer support hotline or send an email to your service help desk, they expect to receive an answer at the soonest possible time, particularly if the issue in question is critical to keeping their business operations up and running.
Because help desk solutions are designed to simplify the issue management process, your help desk support team’s ability to efficiently respond to customers’ help requests within the shortest time possible is given a boost. As a result, the company’s reputation remains solid, existing customers are retained, and word-of-mouth marketing, thanks to happy customers, becomes a major factor in acquiring new clients.
Track ticket life cycle and time lapsed from creation to resolution
What you don’t track, you can’t measure.
This is certainly true, more so when determining the effectiveness of your help desk efforts. Most help desk solutions are created with a reporting functionality that makes it easy for help desk managers to establish the amount of time technicians or customer service reps need to close an open ticket.
The same reporting feature lets managers know the competencies of their team members so that ticket routing can be modified to reflect such competencies. In time, issue resolution will be a whole lot faster because tickets are routed to the people who are most qualified to address them.
Better prioritize tasks
Not all issues are the same. While it’s true that all customer concerns and technical support tickets must be treated with urgency, there are those that are business-critical and far more important than simple product queries.
With help desk support software, help desk specialists can more easily visualize team and individual priorities, ensuring that important tickets aren’t lost or forgotten.
Realistically establish due dates
The ability afforded by help desk management software to track the total amount of time help desk professionals spend on tickets allow managers to set and assign realistic due dates. It also lets them automatically allocate due dates to tickets, and tickets can be classified according to the dates they’re due.
Manage your time well (and that of your team’s)
As a result of better prioritization and realistic due date assignments, team members are able to properly manage their time, allowing them to work more efficiently and manage issues more effectively.
Manage a knowledge base or FAQ page
There are issues that customers can solve on their own, if only they have a step-by-step guide to walk them through the process. One important feature most help desk solutions provide is a self-help portal, which, when leveraged to the fullest, trims down the number of help requests your help desk team has to grapple with on a daily basis.
Empower your employees
You may have the best help desk talents, but if they’re not equipped with the requisite tools to efficiently get things done, you’re not maximizing their potential. Even worse, a chaotic work environment isn’t necessarily a good breeding ground to grow and nurture the best in the industry.
A cloud-based help desk solution provides a platform where employees can create, track and manage tickets, even collaborate with other team members so that no work is unnecessarily duplicated and information is readily available for better decision-making. Empowering your employees comes with a myriad of benefits: employee satisfaction, loyalty, and creativity.
Accurately track employee productivity targets versus actual scores
In a fast-paced world where delivering optimum customer satisfaction is a vital ingredient to business relevance and longevity, productivity is a big word. Help desk systems give organizations an accurate insight into the actual productivity scores of individual team members, and whether or not they’re meeting the goals set out for each of them.
If they are, best practices can be collated for the whole team to adopt. Otherwise, areas for improvement can be identified and, ultimately, rectified.
Help desk software – the question of price
For majority of small businesses, price is a factor whenever software rollout is discussed. The good news is that there are a number of help desk software providers that offer free subscriptions for budget-conscious entrepreneurs or those who simply want to test drive certain help desk systems to understand how the products might benefit their businesses.
Some of such help desk software that provide free plans are UserVoice, Zoho Support, ClickDesk, and Freshdesk. And then, there are lightweight packages like Zendesk that start at $ 1 per agent per month.
For more on the best help desk and ticket management software, visit Cloudswave’s library of web apps where you can also find various expert and user reviews.
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