For every $1 you invest in customer experience through help desk and similar platforms, you can reap a return on investment of $3. So it makes sense to leverage on a support desk software to grow your customer experience. After all, you cannot afford bad customer service. U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.
In fact, if you are a startup company, you cannot take any chance by offering substandard or poor quality service to your customers. You may not have an abundance of resources or a large manpower to take care of the ticket overload, but you can be prudent enough to employ customer support tools.
Customer support tools make your operator’s job easier in many ways. This way, when operators provide efficient support to their customers, they feel delighted and stay loyal to your brand.
Why is Support Desk Important?
Having discussed about the relevance of customer support tools in today’s business arena, it is crucial to understand why your business cannot survive without a support desk software in place.
#1 For Effective Ticket Management
Customer Support Challenge: It is a key customer support challenge when your customers keep on sending you their questions and requests.
How can you manage if you have to face a huge ticket overload?
You may have a big customer support team handling customer queries and the best team, but you may often miss on these questions. Humans are prone to making errors and effective ticket management is not a cakewalk.
Solution: Employing a support desk software enables you to easily sort, prioritize, collaborate, and track customer questions and requests in one place – shared inbox. Tickets are never missed or lost. Your employees can see who is working on what customer question or request.
Not everyone is responsible for everything. In other words, the system administrator assigns tickets to the concerned individual, team, or department. Tickets are sort based on SLAs and priorities.
The parent ticket is broken down into child tickets, where internal subtasks are tracked through comments and notes. Everyone is well-aware of the update on a particular ticket and can intimate the customer about the same.
Real-life Example
Facebook helps customers resolve their problems, as the brand doesn’t want them to only rely on support tickets and inbound calls. Content on Facebook answers most of the users’ questions. The dynamic help section provides documentation on several topics, besides site overviews for new users.
The brand also makes available tours of new features as and when they rollout. Facebook’s example here and success proves that users wish to learn as they go and figure things out firsthand.
#2 To Ensure Faster Problem Resolution
Customer Support Challenge: Do you know your customers are impatient? Speed is everything to the buyers of today, and their patience wears out at 10 minutes.
In fact, if there is one distinction to be made between companies who have loyal customers and companies who struggle at customer retention, it is the speed of customer service.
If you can offer quick answers to your customer questions, there is no other factor that can beat your customer support game.
Solution: One of the major support desk benefits is faster problem resolution. When the ticket is visible to a large number of people, they are free to make comments and notes on it internally.
Multiple teams and departments collaborate to resolve and close tickets faster. The support desk software allows you to create users and organize them into different teams.
Managing roles, task assignments, and permissions, thus, becomes easy. You may even set up your workflow rules around filters, service level agreements, and priorities.
Besides, having a live chat window on their website is common to online businesses. The live chat software enables them to offer real-time answers to their customers’ queries.
Let’s take the example of BufferApp here.
The social media management app keeps customers in focus; its support team is better known as the Happiness Team. As the company stays in close contact with its customers, it can address customers’ questions and problems; resolving them at the earliest. Not only do customers matter the most to Buffer, but also, employees are on the lookout to “wow” customers.
#3 To Effectively Monitor Customer Support Performance
Customer Support Challenge: Your customer support team may offer the best support in the world, but if your customers are not delighted and they are switching to your competitors, there is some, or the other issue you are failing to figure out.
But, what is the issue? Well, your inability to measure the health of your customer support through key related metrics or how your customer service has been performing over time can be really challenging. You need to learn your customer service experience in and out.
Solution: Reporting is one of the key features that makes support desk software an indispensable tool for businesses?Using it, you can easily get access to data on new tickets, rated tickets, average rating, and total open tickets.
This data can help Customer Success Managers learn whether the customer support could improve on the first response time. It can come handy for operators too. For example, with the data analysis, operators can know that they should not be getting busier with more number of tickets, as this may imply they are getting repeated questions from customers.
As you measure the health of your support, you should have answers for:
- Support rating improvement over time;
- Average rating;
- if your website visitors are happy with the support performance, and
- their service experience over time.
When you monitor and track help desk metrics, you can improve on the operator’s performance. This data is captured by sending customer surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys post ticket closure.
Key Takeaways
- Send surveys to customers after tickets are closed
- Capture customer data
- Track performance of tickets and operators
- Evaluate key help desk metrics
- Improve customer service with targeted training
#4 To Trim Down Operational Costs
Customer Support Challenge: The operational costs of your business rise when you employ more operators to support your customers. They, of course, aren’t employed for free.
Minimize your operational costs through cost-cutting. It is the easiest way to improve your business profitability. As you introduce a systematic cost-control method, there is an immediate saving for the business. In addition, competitive profit margins are ensured in the long-run.
Solution: Embracing technology enables you to deliver excellent customer support without compromising on the quality and performance.
An external knowledge base enables customers to help themselves with answers to common questions. Operational costs decrease when agents don’t have to answer the same question time and again.
- Create a self-help center so that customers can help themselves with answers to their questions.
- Enhance the efficiency and productivity of your operators, without them having the need to answer the same questions time and again.
- Reduce tickets by up to 80% and lower your support costs.
- Employ a support desk software that comes integrated with knowledge base
- Create an internal knowledge base for smarter operators and teams.
#5 To Offer Omnichannel Customer Service
Customer Support Challenge: When you have customer data and support processes spread across a variety of tools, the quality of support gets hurt. Multiple channels have different routing abilities due to which your agents may be overloaded during peak hours. Your customer support team, of course, can’t address and resolve loads of customer queries and requests on varied platforms like forums, webinars, email, social media, etc.
Which is why you need a solution.
Omnichannel customer service is another key support desk benefit. Businesses should ideally have one help desk for all support channels. An omnichannel help desk software enables you to unify customer messages and information across a variety of channels.
Your operators can thus reply to emails, answer customer calls, social media queries, and chat with customers within the help desk software. They can even easily access past interactions with customers, irrespective of the channel. Isn’t it great if you can follow up with customers and convert all types of customer queries into tickets?
Tips to Build an Excellent Omni-Channel Service Strategy
- Offer good mobile services
- Improve your response time on social media
- Go the SMS way
- Strengthen your email game
- Increase sales with live chat
- Create a self-help center to offer better customer service
The Final Word
You have realized so far why support desk is important and it is high time that you opt for help desk software. This way you can resolve customer questions faster and offer a delightful customer service experience.
So are you ready to grow your business with robust and feature-rich support desk software?
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