Customer service research shows 67% of customers will pay more for a great experience.
Be it a global giant like Microsoft or a startup; every business has customers that need top-notch services and assistance. However, dealing with multiple requests, complaints and issues can be a challenging task.
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So, what can be done to solve this?
Well, help desk software can be your business savior and let you manage customer requests in a breeze.
While businesses worldwide use help desk management software to automate processes and organize workflows, it needs to be optimized for getting the maximum benefits. This blog will discuss the 15 best help desk practices that will let you offer best-in-class assistance to your customers.
Essential Help Desk Practices To Improve Customer Support
In order to improve your help desk facilities, you need to understand your current practices and the strategies being followed by your competitors.
1. Streamline Existing Processes
A common issue with employing help desk management software is that businesses think it needs to be built from scratch. As a result, they discard their existing processes and start creating new strategies.
Furthermore, they need to re-train their service team and make them acquainted with new procedures. This leads to a wastage of resources and time.
Moreover, it can even confuse customers who are used to a certain way of putting forward their complaints. So, what is the possible solution for this?
It is suggested that you integrate a web help desk application with your existing system and then streamline your current processes.
This is one of the IT help desk best practices as you no longer need to re-train your agents, and they can devote more time to having quality conversions with your customers.
2. Adopt a Steady Pace of Growth
We all have heard that slow and steady wins the race. But, we often forget it when it comes to running our business. Instead of making massive changes, small improvements in the help desk system can go a long way.
If you make huge changes, it may go for a toss as it will become difficult to handle your existing workload. However, once you are able to handle new and smaller projects, you can move to bigger projects and let agents grow along with the transition.
3. Focus on User Experience
The customer is the king. But, unfortunately, user experience is a help desk practice that is often ignored. The primary aim of any help desk management system is to satisfy customers.
So, you must consider when designing or revamping your help desk system. These include addressing their emotions, attitude and understanding their experience of using your products and services.
The ideal help desk should have an engaging interface, efficient processes, and simple navigation. Besides, you must not forget to collect regular feedback from customers. Accordingly, you can bring in changes and make it customer-centric.
4. Create a New Ticket for Every Customer Interaction
Every customer interaction is essential and having a new ticket for each interaction is important. You can create a new ticket for every in-person conversation, social media message, online request, alert, message, and phone call.
Doing this will help you keep track of open cases and stay up to date with useful information. In addition, when you have the record of all complaints, you will be 2x more proactive in providing customer support. Thus, creating tickets is one of the best help desk practices you must follow.
5. Offer Value to Customers
Delivering exceptional value to customers is one of the top help desk practices you must include in your strategy. The purpose of support interaction is to resolve a particular issue and have deep conversations with customers, and understand the challenges they might be facing.
Another important thing you must do is update your knowledge base and share links to self-help articles. Subsequently, you will be able to have meaningful interactions with your customers and ensure a delightful support experience.
6. Organize Training Sessions
Help desk employees who receive consistent training and are made to engage in career-path planning are more satisfied.
There is always room for improvement in help desk performance and service. So, to instill core business values in your agents and ensure they follow the latest trends and tools, you must organize regular training sessions.
This will help them hone their skills and work on the areas that need improvement. In addition, training them to empathize better with customers and gratifying customers will help you build customer loyalty.
7. Encourage Team Collaboration
86% of service teams note that having a help desk system increases their productivity.
Good team collaboration is important not only for your organization but also for customers. This is one of the help desk practices that will let you expedite the complaint resolution process.
With a comprehensive help desk system, different departments can check the open tickets and work on them to solve issues without any delays.
For example, your finance team can update your customer service team if a customer is eligible for a refund or not. Also, the delivery team can update your customer service team about any expected delays in deliveries.
8. Analyze the Bigger Picture
It will be of utmost value if the help desk team considers the whole value chain rather than focusing on a single process or activity. But, what does this exactly mean?
The concerned agent should think about how a potential issue can impact business and give an all-inclusive solution. The solution provided by the agent must be such that it helps customers achieve their intended outcome.
Source: datapine
9. Focus on Transparency
When your customers are aware of your processes, status of complaint requests, and your systems, they are more likely to trust your organization. In addition, a transparent process can help you build a solid rapport with your existing customers and onboard new ones.
One way to achieve this is to automate updates and keep customers in the loop at all times. Thus, they will know precisely what is happening from time to time. This will not only save the time of agents but will also reduce emails from customers seeking updates.
10. Document Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Having service level agreements software lets you define the quality of both internal and external services. Thus, it is one of the help desk best practices you must incorporate in your business strategies.
Besides, you can use it to track performance against business objectives. It will let you measure the success of services and meet customer expectations with ease. But, it can be difficult if you use raw data. Instead, you can use robust help desk management software to use metrics that let you know how long it takes to fix an issue.
11. Document Processes
Whenever you have a new team member, he/she may face problems in understanding your process. You can rectify problems with the help desk So, one of the best help desk practices you can use to expedite your onboarding process. This will let them help customers in a fast and efficient manner.
To achieve this, you can document the processes and highlight different ways to solve them. When new representatives have access to the best practices, they will serve the customers better.
12. Capture Customer Feedback
Let’s face it; there is no point in revamping your process if customers are not satisfied. After all, you are making the whole effort for them only. To overcome this issue, you must make it a point to capture customer feedback. One way to do this is to share automated survey emails.
You must ask your customers questions like:
- What can we do to improve your experience?
- Was our support representative able to address your queries today?
The answers to these can help you understand how your agents are performing and measure customer satisfaction.
13. Examine Operational Costs
Cost-per-ticket for support teams ranges from $2.93 to $49.69. At the same time, the average ticket cost accounts for $15.56. The average price per minute for handling a ticket is $1.60.
One of the most important help desk practices is to examine your operational outputs and mainly the cost.
So, you will need to find the operational cost of providing help desk practices related to each ticket raised. Once you have an idea, you will be able to decide which issue can be resolved quickly and economically.
Once you have the costs in control, you will be able to achieve your business objectives and keep your customers happy at the same time.
Source: webflow.com
14. Measure Performance
Most support teams measure their performance through customer satisfaction survey results (48%) and the number of tickets resolved (39%)
Capturing the right customer service metrics is one of the IT help desk best practices. For this, you need to target the right key performance indicators (KPIs).
Besides, you will also need to keep track of your ticket volume and keep open and unresolved tickets to a bare minimum. Finally, if you wish to track team performance, you must consider customer satisfaction, average response time, and contact resolution.
15. Choose The Right Service Provider
Be very careful when choosing a service provider for your help desk software. Make sure you check all the features and offerings to crack the best deal. Moreover, you must ensure that your chosen solution offers enough scalability.
A software that aligns with your business goal and has all the integrations and features you need will help you in the short and long run.
Wrapping Up
All said and done, simply knowing about the help desk best practices will not suffice. Your team needs ample time to understand and implement them.
These were some of the help desk best practices every business should implement. You can choose to execute some or all to streamline help desk management.
Are you still searching for the best help desk software? Then, allow us to help you find one!
Chirantan Patel is the Product Manager at Softwaresuggest & Callhippo, an Inc. 275 company that researches and analyzes software to educate, advise, and connect buyers and sellers of business technology.
