Your help desk is the core of your customer service team and does it all: train employees, manage interactions with customers, and track the overall health of your business. It’s an invaluable tool that helps your company provide the best possible customer experience!
With the right system and setup, your help desk can be a crucial piece of the puzzle in your company’s overall success. But when information comes in through multiple channels, it’s easy to get disorganized and drop the ball when handling customer tickets. You need an effective process for prioritizing inquiries and resolving customer complaints without adding extra workload to your team.
That’s why many businesses turn to help desk software to help them stay on top of everything that needs to be done. Software can help you track tickets and team performance, respond to customer inquiries outside of regular business hours, and gather data for future analysis.
Help desk software can also offer some great tools, such as knowledge bases and FAQs, so users can help themselves without ever reaching out to customer service. But it also takes a bit of planning and setup to get launched! Here are a few best practices to keep in mind while building a new help desk system that empowers your team to do their best work.
6 Help Desk Management Best Practices
1. Don’t start from scratch. Work with what you have!
When investing in help desk software, you don’t need to tear out all your existing processes and start from scratch.
Instead, set up your new help desk software in a way that complements what you already have in place. Training your team on an entirely new system is costly and time-consuming. It will be much easier to train your team when they’re already familiar with some of the steps.
To start, use the help desk software to sort, filter, and prioritize customer inquiries. Prioritize critical issues and send the minor issues back to users for self-resolution. The “policy rules” in the help desk software will automatically manage routine requests as they come in without any human intervention.
For example, if users frequently ask for help with the same process, try creating a filter that automatically directs them to an FAQ or a screen recording tutorial that helps the customer resolve the issue themselves. Directing users to self-help options will keep your help desk from becoming overloaded with routine requests and allow you to focus on more critical issues.
Sorting inquiries like this won’t uproot your entire system, but it will reduce help desk workload and free up resources for more critical tasks.
2. Every time you interact with a customer, consider it a ticket.
Every customer interaction could lead to a new customer, so treat every interaction with the utmost importance. Whether a customer steps through your business doors or reaches out by phone, email, or social media, treat the exchange like a new service ticket.
Depending on your help desk software, you may be able to integrate with your existing tools to make this easier. For example, you can set up rules that automatically create new tickets based on specific criteria. If someone emails [email protected] with a ticket subject line of “Help!” your help desk system might be able to create a ticket and assign it as a priority one.
Tracking this information is a powerful customer service tool that helps you provide fantastic customer service. Tracked tickets are less likely to be forgotten or overlooked by your team.
It also provides you with up-to-date knowledge about that particular customer. At a glance, you can see if they’ve had issues in the past and how your team responded.
Customer retention is one of the most important metrics for the success of your business. Personalized, proactive customer service is a powerful way to make them feel valued, so they stay with your company for years to come.
3. Make user experience a top priority.
Your help desk exists to help customers, so it only makes sense that you design the system around the needs and desires of those customers. The last thing you want is to frustrate and confuse customers while they’re looking for help!
When creating your knowledge base or FAQ, organize information based on what you hear from customers. Your customer service team should already know what customers ask most often and where they get confused. You can prioritize which knowledge base articles to create first and how to order them on the page.
Ask your customer service team to collect customer feedback, too. Customers can tell you directly what they like or don’t like about your new help desk system, providing you valuable insight into where to improve.
4. Be transparent and communicative with customers.
These days, customers are looking for honest, straightforward, and transparent brands. They want to work with a company they can trust. If you can show that you’re being open with customers, they’ll be more likely to trust your brand.
A personal, genuine experience with clear communication goes a long way in building that trust. You don’t want your customers to feel forgotten or abandoned. Transparency and communication go hand in hand with user experience!
Reassure the customer that you received their inquiry, even if your team can’t take action immediately. Give customers a way to stay updated on their ticket status. Without transparency practices like these in place, customers may send their tickets multiple times or continue trying to reach customer service. It can end up creating even more work for your team!
If possible, set up your system to assign each ticket to a single customer service representative. Some businesses will bounce the customer from rep to rep each time they reply to the ticket, resulting in a poor customer experience. Your customer will feel much more satisfied with their experience if they can communicate with the same person throughout their issue.
5. Encourage teamwork and collaboration
Customers reach out to your help desk for answers. They may be confused, frustrated, or even angry with the issues they’ve encountered. If everyone on your team gives the customer a different answer, they’ll only end up more confused!
Ensure your team is on the same page. A clear, consistent message from everyone on your team will reassure customers and make them feel more confident about the response they receive. Your help desk software may allow you to set up templates that help reps show that consistency while still personalizing the message to each customer.
Internal teamwork and communication can also help build out your new system. Gather your team’s feedback–not only about the customer experience, but also about their employee experience! If your new help desk software is clunky or time-consuming for your service reps, it can defeat the purpose of having the software in the first place.
Finally, how is your cross-department communication? Customer service often involves multiple teams, so make sure your service reps are empowered to provide the customer with everything they might need. When will the shipping department ship their item? When does the operations team expect to receive more stock of an item? Is the customer eligible for a discount that the marketing team sent in an email? Clear lines of communication between your company’s various departments will help your rep provide quick, accurate answers to customers.
6. Don’t rush! Expand at a comfortable, steady pace.
In the long run, your help desk management software will streamline your customer service systems, make customers happier, and save your team time.
However, there’s a lot of upfront work to do when you first get started. You will have to plan, create, and train your team on the new system’s templates, policy rules, and workflows. In the meantime, your customer service team must continue helping customers and responding to tickets.
Take your time when setting up the new system. Building too quickly can lead to mistakes, confusion, and team burnt-out. A slow, comfortable pace gives your team time to learn and develop a solid foundation.
Superpower your Help Desk with Zight (formerly CloudApp)
Take your help desk to the next level. With Zight (formerly CloudApp), you can screenshot, record, and annotate problems and then share them with customers in seconds.
Upload screen recordings to your knowledge base. Email customers annotated screenshots to answer their questions. Share solutions with your team with intuitive, easy-to-use tools and features. It’s all at your fingertips with Zight (formerly CloudApp)!
Ready to get results? Get in touch to see a demo today!