Good customer service helps to improve a brand’s ratings and ensure customer loyalty. An important tool to equip your customer support team with is help desk software. It’s a central hub for collecting, managing and providing technical or product assistance to customers.
The primary function of support agents is to respond to requests or complaints and proffer solutions to issues. But there are manual tasks involved that should be automated with software. In this article, we’ll discuss the 6 most important features of help desk software.
Why is a help desk system important?
A helpdesk system is a software that lets customer service teams perform their duties without any stress. For example, a ticketing system can turn support requests into tickets and assign them to agents. It helps to reduce mundane tasks and boost productivity.
More companies should invest in a helpdesk because it helps to stay on top of all customer interactions. You can easily find common problems that customers are facing and use them to create help articles. This can help to create a knowledge base for simple solutions.
A helpdesk stores customer information, ticket data, support conversations, performance metrics and more. You can easily measure the performance of your team and also analyze customer satisfaction metrics. This allows you to detect weak points and improve on them.
What should you look for in a help desk software?
There are different helpdesk software providers out there so you need to select the most appropriate. Your help desk needs to empower support agents so they can work more efficiently. Below are the 6 most important features for helpdesk ticketing software.
1. Integration
There are many applications that businesses rely on for a diverse number of things. You need to integrate your helpdesk system with those applications for easy access to business information. It helps to ensure that you can connect to useful apps inside the helpdesk.
Some integrations include a CRM software, business phone system, e-commerce website, accounting app, or third-party applications like a payment gateway. The ability to integrate with these systems can increase agent productivity and improve your customer service.
2. Omnichannel functionality
When you provide many communication channels, it can be difficult to monitor all of them in real-time. But a helpdesk software serves as a central hub for receiving requests from numerous channels. It collects them and notifies available agents so they can respond quickly.
Your help desk should accommodate older and newer channels such as phone, email, SMS, website contact forms, social media, live chat, etc. It allows customers to start and continue conversations from any channel. This helps to create a positive customer experience.
3. Ticket management
A helpdesk needs to have a ticketing system in order to accurately track, organize, and prioritize customer requests. It helps to personalize conversations, streamline workflows and automate repetitive tasks. It also allows for better collaboration between agents.
Not all helpdesk systems come with a ticketing system so you need to carefully select. It would automatically assign tickets to the most capable agent as well as keep track of the ticket progress from start to finish. It’s an important system for every customer service team.
4. Automation
Every business function is now being automated and optimized with the help of software tools. A helpdesk ticketing software reduces manual tasks and allows support agents to focus on resolving customer issues.
It helps to maximize time and boost productivity levels.
A helpdesk can automatically categorize, tag and route tickets to the relevant agent or department. The system can also send reminders and notifications to agents so they can follow up on outstanding tickets. It also offers a unified view of all customer interactions for visibility.
5. Self-service
Many customers prefer to find solutions on their own rather than wait for an agent to respond. This is mostly because everyone expects information to be present online and readily available for them to access. So it’s a great idea for companies to provide self-service.
There are so many ways to empower your customers and reduce the number of incoming support tickets. You can start by creating a knowledge base that stores help articles or tutorials on how to resolve issues. You can also include FAQs, AI chatbots or a client portal.
6. Reporting and analytics
Customer service doesn’t end when you resolve the issue and close the ticket. You need to analyze and gain insights into support interactions in order to monitor performance and overall productivity. This helps to determine what your support team need to improve on.
A helpdesk should come with analytical dashboards so you can easily visualize your data, identify trends, and make forecasts to inform business decisions. It should be able to analyze data and generate detailed reports. These insights help to refine your customer service.
