A Help Desk is one of those tools that everyone needs but not too many people outside of support think about. But they’re not just for answering basic questions or fielding feature requests. Your Help Desk is a great tool for user retention, research, and acquisition. It’s a direct line to your customers and a fantastic opportunity for everyone in your company to learn from them.
No matter how great your product or service is, it is inevitable that eventually there will be a need for customer support systems. It really doesn’t matter whether they have encountered a small error, are having trouble setting up their account, or if they simply have a recommendation - what matters is that the issue is resolved.
Not a lot of technical importance is placed on a great Help Desk, but in reality, it is one of the most important ways to maximize customer retention and maintain a great image for your business. Whether for simple customer service or a more in-depth ITSM Service Desk, having a customer support system in place is essential for long-term success.
This is the key takeaway - establishing great customer service can set your company up for long-term success and ensure that your most dedicated customers have great things to say about you and understand that you care! While most companies establish this service very early on, it is crucial to have a great Help Desk in place before your business grows to a level where you can’t handle it all on your own.
What is a Help Desk and Why Does Your Company Need One?
At its simplest, A Help Desk is a tool that provides the first point of contact for tracking, prioritizing, and acting on any issues your customers and end-users have.
This is a big task for a single service! There is the potential to receive questions on a myriad of issues ranging from payment issues, profile issues, disputes, and much, much more. While this may sound like a very tall order, there are some very effective tools and strategies that you can employ to organize and effectively handle all of the issues that come your way.
One study actually found that as a whole, companies in the US lose about $62B in revenue each year due to poor customer service. Even further, people who have bad experiences are much more likely to tell more friends about them than positive experiences. So as you can tell, a Help Desk is extremely necessary!
Your Help Desk can do this and more:
Offer a single point of contact
When things don’t work, your customers need to know where to turn. Having a Help Desk means issues are organized and easily addressed.
Quickly and intuitively answer questions
Help Desks should provide answers quickly either through a live agent, chatbot, or self-service.
Support your support team
A good Help Desk also makes it clear what your support team needs to do. It provides workflows and resources that help them do their job effectively.
Help you measure how you’re doing
Lastly, your Help Desk should give you opportunities to measure your support efforts and find out where you hit (or missed) the mark for customers.
How To Pick the Right Helpdesk For Your Company
Whether for ITSM, ITIL, or incident management, customer support services can help you to increase customer retention and improve overall company efficiency.
What makes for a great Help Desk?
A great helpdesk, at its simplest, should be able to organize and address a large volume of requests daily. This requires an efficient workflow and some intelligent management and software to achieve. Some of the most common features of a great Help Desk include:
Email support
Storing, organizing, and prioritizing emails sent to your generic support address and converting them into tickets for your support reps to work through.
FAQs
A resource filled with answers to common questions and best practices that can help to solve issues before they are brought to your attention.
Community Forums
Some companies create forums where users and agents can answer questions and create easily accessible content around specific issues.
Live Chat/Chatbots
Many new Help Desk companies are focused on giving “instant” support through on-page chat boxes. Obviously, the downside of offering instant support is that you need someone manning it 24/7 (or close to it), but chatbots can help to free up this load so your agents can focus on pressing issues.
Try to outline your own support workflow and see what features you’ll need to maintain and streamline it. Think through the different kind of support requests you’ll get: bugs, questions, technical problems, feature requests, partnership requests, etc.
For each scenario map out the process of dealing with them. If you are in the information technology (IT) space, it is important to build a system that aligns business and IT goals. Having an IT Service Management structure in place can be invaluable. IT Service Management (ITSM) is a set of policies, processes, and procedures for managing the implementation, improvement, and support of customer-oriented IT services.
Unlike other IT management practices that focus on hardware, network, or systems, ITSM aims to consistently improve IT customer service in alignment with business goals. Having an ITIL framework established is a very popular method to ensure that businesses can pick and choose operational processes that are the most relevant to their goals.