Help desk: Its Functions, Benefits, Goals & Best Practices

We have always been big fans of Hercules, Wonder Woman, Thor, Batwoman, etc.

Because they win over evil powers.

Well, I see a Help desk no less than a superpower.

Because it legitly can save the organization from a lot of things. Unhappy customers, tangled customer service processes, brand reputations, and there’s more to it.

However, apart from solving customer queries, the role of a Help desk is much deeper and more niche. It creates experiences that build great relationships with customers and impact positively their businesses.

Let’s jump right into details to know more about the role of a Help desk, its benefits, goals and best practices:

What Is a Help Desk?

The major role of the Help desk is to ease off the workload of their customer service teams and allow them to streamline the customer service processes.

When your customers have a query, they want to go to look for the easiest way to connect with your customer service agents.

This is where the role of Help desk plays a vital role. The feature of raising ticket help your customers to connect with you instantly.

It helps the customers to raise tickets regarding their queries/issues and also allows the customer service agents to resolve the tickets swiftly..

A Help desk has various functionalities and benefits that we will explore going forward.

Functions of a Help Desk

Allows Users to Raise a ticket

Ticket Management is a convenient way to organize your customer queries in one place, prioritize, and act on them swiftly. Your emails, Instagram DMs, or Facebook messages might disappear in a pool of a lot of customer queries. However, this is where simply raising a ticket helps the most. It is one of the most basic Help desk functions.

With a Help desk, your customers can raise a ticket related to their queries whenever they want and can also get a quick response, which is a better way to solve customer queries when compared to the traditional form of customer service.

Offers Omnichannel Support

There are 4.59 billion social media users worldwide in 2022, which equates to about 57.5% of the current world population.

It is quite obvious that in the social media age, there are going to be queries coming from multiple social media platforms. So, if you do not create an omnichannel experience for your customers, you might lose them.

Additionally, the number of companies investing in the omnichannel experience has jumped from 20% to more than 80%.

A helpdesk can offer support across all the social media platforms so that your agents have all the areas covered and they do not miss out on a single query. It can also be considered as a 360degree Help desk function.

Measures Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a crucial factor for any business.

An enterprise business that is in the industry for more than 4 to 5 decades or a startup business that has just been started, for both of them, customer satisfaction matters equally.

The biggest question is how to measure or how to know whether your customers are satisfied or not.

The answer is through Help desk software.

Help desk allows you to develop and send surveys to your customers without any hassle, with the help of a built-in feature called “customer satisfaction survey”.

You can also track how your agents or the customer service teams are performing as a whole.

In any case, if there are any issues in your customer service, you can fix them with the feedback that you receive from the survey.

Solves User Queries Quickly

Help desk allows your customer service teams to collaborate effectively.

Customer service agents can make use of functions such as chat within ticket, smart-tickets, sub-tickets, canned responses, etc. to make the response time quicker.

They can also make use of automation to get rid of manual & repetitive tasks to make their work a little bit easy.

All these factors can allow your customer service teams to solve the customer queries quickly and work efficiently.

Offers Advanced Ticket Filtering

As there are thousands of queries flowing through the database, the advanced filtering option makes your customer service team’s life much easier. It helps them sort out the ticket using filters.

This way they can focus on high priority tickets or the tickets that are not resolved but have consumed a lot of their time already.

Using the advanced ticket filtering they can filter high priority tickets or unresolved tickets and focus on them first.

What this function does is, helps in increasing customer satisfaction, as your agents can filter their way through every single ticket and focus on resolving them on time.

It can also improve the productivity of your customer service teams.

Enables Self-service

Self-service has become a prime factor in customer service, as 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a support agent.

Thus, it is a no-brainer for businesses to offer self-service to their customers.

Some of the self-service mediums are knowledge base, FAQs, community/public forums, etc.

Your customers can visit these mediums when they have any query, they need to learn something about your product, etc.

Make Use of Canned Responses

Every day, your customers are going to have thousands of queries.

Among these queries, 70% of them must be similar to each other.

Have you ever thought, how can you save your time and help the customers rapidly in such cases?

Here is one way, you can make use of canned responses.

Canned responses are predefined answers or replies that customer agents can send in response to the tickets that are raised.

These can speed up the process of customer service a little bit as your agents do not get stuck and can focus on much crucial queries/issues.

Automatic Ticket Assignment

Automation is one of the most fascinating Help desk functions. It can not only be used to ease off the workload but can also speed up the customer service process.

With automatic ticket assignment feature, tickets are assigned to the relevant agents based on the parameters.

These parameters are analyzed with the help of previous data of the agent and their performance. So, when the tickets are assigned, it can be predetermined that they are handled well by the agent.

Hence, having such a software with numerous functionalities is always going to have a positive impact on your customers.

Benefits of Using a Help desk

Self-service to Allow Customer Solve Their Own Problems

One of the most crucial Help desk benefits is self-service as it allows customers to solve their problems own their own.

Customer service agents can focus on more important and urgent queries that require their immediate attention.

Self-service not only offers faster solutions to the customers but it also provides them better understanding of the product or of the service for which they are seeking a solution for.

Apart from that, self-service is a 24/7 available option which can be accessed from anywhere in the world, so if we compare it to the traditional way of customer service it is far more beneficial.

Ease Off the Workload

Help desk various features allows businesses to ease off the workload.

We can judge the crucialness of Help desks as around 86% of service teams say having a helpdesk system improves their productivity levels. Additionally, among high growth service teams, 51% are reliant on helpdesk systems.

Help desk has numerous functionalities such as automation, self-service, omnichannel support, etc. that help the customer service department to work effectively.

It simplifies the work process and makes it easy and quick for them to offer the best solutions to their customers.

Enhance the Team’s Efficiency

53% of support teams have seen an increase in support queries since the start of the pandemic. As per this report, we can conclude that there has been an exponential increase in the number of queries post-pandemic.

So, tell me one thing, if the customer service teams do not work efficiently, would it be possible to solve every single query of their customers? It would definitely get tough.

They have to work more efficiently in order to do so, and this is where the Help Desk comes to the rescue.

Help desk offers numerous functions such as parent-child ticketing, linked ticketing, chat within the ticket, etc., which help in increasing the efficiency of the customer service team.

Make Use of Automation to Speed up the Customer Service Process

We as humans have not remained unknown to automation anymore, it is everywhere around us to make our life easy. It has been evolving our lives since decades now.

Businesses have adopted automation to make the customer service process faster and easier for both the customer and the agents as well.

Automation can be used to get rid of manual and certain repetitive tasks, so that customer service agents can focus on other crucial tasks.

There are some automation features that make it easy for the agents to improve their efficiency.

For example, setting automatic ticket priorities, triggering email notifications, identifying certain word/phrases, etc.

All these factors can improve the productivity of the customer service department and allow them to offer better service to their customers.

At the end “enhanced customer service” is the one thing that matters the most.

Streamline Your Communication Process

Help desk plays a vital role in streamlining the communication process. First of all, it makes it easy for the customer to connect with the customer service department by offering various options such as raising tickets, omnichannel support, etc.

If we change our perspective and look from the customer service department’s point of view, there are features that allow enhanced team collaboration, improve work efficiency, streamline the workflow, etc. amongst the customer service department.

Out and out, a Help desk is not only helpful for customers but it is also helpful for the customer service agents, which makes it a must needed software for the businesses.

Best Practices to get Enhanced Results

Select the Right Help Desk Software

There are various Help desk software out there and selecting one among them can be a daunting task.

Aspects such as cost, features, support, security, etc., might vary from one Help desk to other.

But one thing is for sure they all will have certain strengths and weaknesses that will make the selection process tough for you.

But don’t worry.

We have gathered a few factors that might help you choose the right Help desk software.

Below are some of the factors in selecting the Help desk software that perfectly fits your business’s requirements:

• Know Your Budget
• Understand Your Team’s Goals and Expectations
• Know What Features to Look for
• Know Your Customer Expectations
• How Easy the Software is to Use?
• Ask for a Free Trial

Once you have got all the answers and you are satisfied with them. You are ready to take off.

Incorporate Service Level Agreements

A service level agreement (SLA) policy is an agreement between a customer and a service provider. It depends on multiple aspects, such as quality, availability, etc.

There are three major types of SLA agreements: Customer-based SLA, Service-based SLA, and Multi-level SLA.

SLA policy can allow you to set parameters like first response time, ticket assignment time, average response time, average ticket closing time, etc.

It can help your customer service agents to work more efficiently by helping them to handle the customer tickets more carefully.

It also helps you to set your service delivery standards and manage your customer expectations.

Create Canned Responses

Canned responses are predefined answers used as responses to the query of the customers.

There are thousands of queries raised every day by your customers.

Among those, hundreds of queries might be similar to each other and hundreds of them might be different and more crucial as well.

So, tell me, which one should the customer service agent focus on, similar queries or crucial ones? Obviously, the crucial ones.

So, what to do with similar queries that are raised?

For situations like this, canned responses are created.

Customer service agents do not have to waste their valuable time on these similar queries, they have to click a predefined response, and the customer will get the solution.

For example, if a customer has shown interest in learning more about your offerings, your customer service agent can just send him/her a canned response that says,

“Thank you for showing interest in learning more about the features. You can find all of our features here (link).”

Canned responses can also be an exceptional way to improve customer engagement faster.

Use Help Desk Analytics to Work in Your Favor

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all”.

Without any customers, it is impossible for any business to survive.

Not only startups but even business giants who are in the industry for the last 5-6 decades can fall if they are failing to impress their customers.

To avoid such situations, regularly keep on updating strategies and start experimenting to find out what works best for your business.

Analytics can help you in getting insights into the performance of your agents and customer service department. You can track their progress to understand your customer satisfaction better.

In case, if the performance of any of your service agents is not up to the mark you can come to know about it and fix it before it hampers any other customer’s experience.

Thus, having insights related to the previous data can help you in making the necessary changes in your strategies.

Develop a Knowledge Base and FAQs

Creating a knowledge base can be a solution to a lot of customer queries, as 91% of customers say they prefer to use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs.

Knowledge base contains articles, videos that can solve the queries or the problems of the customers easily. It is a hassle-free process, as your customers do not require to connect with anyone to get answers.

FAQs are also one of the best ways to solve the queries of the customers.

Customer refer to FAQs when they want to get the answer related to the most basic queries.

For example,

• Question 1: When will I get my refund back?
• Question 2: How many days will it take to deliver the product?

Creating a knowledge base or FAQs can lower the workload of the customer service team.

As I mentioned earlier, nowadays, even customers want self-service option to be available so that they can solve the issues themselves.

Hence, you as a business should keep in mind to offer self-service to your customers.

Create Help desk Teams

Creating Help desk teams is one more way to improve the team productivity and efficiency.

Creating these teams has simplified the process of solving queries, as specific teams can be assigned to handle specific tasks.

For example, if you run an eCommerce business, to solve queries related to “return and exchange” there must be a particular team and similarly it goes for every other department.

When you allow your customer service agents to solve every query without creating teams, the chances of error might increase, as they would not have the proper knowledge of every department.

But when they are divided in different teams, they get the flow and understand the tasks much better, which reduces the chances of error.

Thus, to offer better customer service you must create Help desk teams.

Let the Team get a Better Understanding of the Help desk

Be it a Help desk or any other product, having the proper knowledge of the product is very important.

Without it, you won’t be able to attain its full advantage.

So, when it comes to Help desk, a product with numerous roles and features, it becomes obvious that the team should have its proper understanding in order to offer the customer with the best possible service.

They would not be able to offer the best service, if they do not know how it works or what its features are.

So, it becomes important for businesses to make sure that their customer service agents get the full understanding of all the Help desk roles and features.

Goals to Achieve with the Help of Help desk Software

Do Not Miss Out on a Single Customer Query

One of the Help desk goals should be to avoid missing out on a single customer query. With the help of omnichannel support and automation, customer service agents can achieve this Help desk goal with ease. It allows them to cover every single customer query across all the platforms and offer the best service possible.

Offer Quicker Solutions to Your Customers

With the help of analytics customer service agents can analyze previous similar queries and find out the solution to the queries of the customers and offer them quicker solutions. Customer agents can also make use of automation, canned responses, smart ticketing tool, etc. to offer quick response to the customer.

Make it Easy for Customers to Get in Touch

With the option of raising tickets and omnichannel support, customers can easily connect with the customer service agents, which is a hectic task when you do it in a traditional way of customer service.

Improve Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

With the built-in customer satisfaction survey functionality, you can create surveys and send them to you customers. The received feedback can help you track your agents or customer service department’s performance.

Improve Efficiency and Productivity of the Team

With the help of canned responses, customer service agents can save their time and reply to customers’ queries in no time. With added functionalities such as ticket filtering, auto-ticket assigning, chatting within tickets, etc. customer service department can improve team collaboration, which can have a positive impact on the overall efficiency and productivity of the team.

Allow DeskXpand to Streamline Your Customer Service Process

DeskXpand is an effective and efficient ticket management system. It is on a mission to put customer service at the center of every business. It offers customers with great customer experience and simplifies the customer service process. After using DeskXpand businesses were able to:

• 35% Reduction in Customer Calls
• 23% Improvement in the Productivity of the Employees
• Achieved the Score of 60% Customer Satisfaction

So, what are you waiting for? Get your free demo today.

Request a free demo today!