Customer satisfaction is an essential part of every business, especially when it comes to customer support. It is an utterly essential element for business growth, yet often overlooked. It is directly related to your business productivity and, eventually, revenue. A helpdesk tool can streamline ticket requests, track purchases, and perform other essential operations such as:
- Automate and prioritize requests
- Track new requests efficiently and accurately
- Manage critical updates about issue resolution
- Offer instant and remote assistance
- Integrate with other tools and systems involves in the support
If your organization is a machine, the helpdesk is the oil needed to run the machine smoothly.
But if your helpdesk is not picked or configured optimally, the overall user experience suffers. Your business’s productivity suffers! In this article, we’re going to look at ways to improve your user experience and get the most out of your customer service software. Let’s get started.
1. Streamline the Ticketing Process
A robust helpdesk tool benefits both the end-user and the support staff. It must have a straightforward method of acknowledging and tracking issues. For example, if a customer has difficulty registering their issue, an agent could do it for them using the helpdesk. For that, customers could create a ticket simply by sending an email or making a phone call.
Use a helpdesk that lets you import and assign tickets automatically based on multiple factors like:
- Which agent is available
- Priority of the issue
- Type of query
Once you have your process streamlined, there’s not much left to do. You only need to create a cohesive helpdesk policy, to make processes efficient and ensure that it is followed. It is necessary for your agents to understand the helpdesk to avoid unnecessary confusion or wasted productivity.
2. Make it Easy to Use
A support ticket software is only as good as the user experience it provides. Make sure you choose a helpdesk that is intuitive, simple, and straightforward. This applies at both ends; the support end and the customer’s end. Your employees may not have the time and patience to deal with a complicated interface when a problem arises.
You can feature relevant information regarding a potential problem through your support ticket software. Label your menu with easily identifiable icons. Make it accessible to employees as well as your end customers. A simple click should be enough to get the ball rolling.
3. Self-Service Features
All great customer service software has one thing in common. They all empower their users to solve their queries on their own. Self-service features (like knowledge base, FAQs, how-to guides, video tutorials, etc.) help you reduce customer support tickets up to a major extent. It also helps you improve customer responsiveness.
A knowledge base is an excellent resource for customers to troubleshoot their problems. This way, your agents can also get rid of repetitive questions and focus on essential queries. A knowledge base can also help your employees. Today’s employees are do-it-yourselfers. Plus, employees can just send relevant links to customers for minor queries.
4. Shared Inbox
No matter what industry niche your business belongs to, collaboration stays at the heart of every support process. Hence, enabling collaboration within your team is important. If your support reps are not communicating with each other effectively, that might lead to chaotic and unnecessary communication. This is why a shared inbox feature in your helpdesk is a must for collaboration. With the help of that, agents could chat and comment within the tickets through a shared inbox. Other collaboration features like collision detection features are a plus too.
5. Omnichannel Communication
If you want to provide a personalized support experience, you might as well have multiple support channels at your disposal. The Omnichannel feature enables you to engage with your customers across channels of their choice and contact you whenever they want. All this from a single interface.
These channels include email, phone, social media, and so on. Understand your customers and identify what channels they want and then leverage those channels to respond readily. This also helps you improve your retention rates, brings down the overall cost, and accelerates your efficiency.
6. Service Level Agreements
Service level agreements refer to dynamic timers that you need to configure and maintain your support timeline. SLA and escalation rules will make your support stick to universal standards and empower your team to ace customer support.
You can set rules pertaining to:
- Due dates
- Response time
- Routing workflows
If you enable automatic hierarchical escalations and enforce issue prioritization, it’ll help you reduce the overall delay. It also keeps the customer involved at every stage of their ticket lifecycle.
7. Ticket Tracking
Waiting for the resolution to an IT problem can be anxious. And tracking helps relieve the anxiety. Ticket tracking is a vital feature for the ease of use of the helpdesk. It gives employees an estimated time of resolution and keeps the key members/stakeholders in the loop. With an estimated completion time, support agents can also focus on other tasks.
8. Unify Everything
If your teams work in multiple silos disconnected from each department, you need to streamline and unify them. Sometimes, your teams will need to work together with other departments (like sales, mobile, marketing, development, and IT teams) in order to create a consistent customer experience and increase engagement. A helpdesk can help you unify everything on a dashboard.
Figure out strategies on how you can:
- Unify touchpoints
- Reduce pain points
- Integrate channels
- Improve and speed up the buying process
9. Know When to Set Limits
A helpdesk tool is most efficient when it is used correctly. Encourage your employees to keep the ticket count to a minimum. Also, encourage your users to use the knowledge base whenever possible. Consider implementing training to discuss the common roadblocks.
So these were a few tips that can help you improve your helpdesk user experience. Follow these steps and improve the helpdesk user experience for your end-users and support staff.
