As your business grows and develops, you’ll need to make an investment into purchasing help desk software. (Unsure of what to look for? Read our guide for more information.) It can be hard to determine when exactly to invest in help desk software. If you invest too late, you’ll face growing pains and missed opportunities. Here are three signs to look for to know when it’s time to purchase help desk software.
1. You constantly have a backlog of support requests
At a certain stage of growth, customer requests outpace what your current team can support within your promised resolution time. At first, you may be able to catch up on the requests. But, once you hit a point where there are conversations happening with customers that span over multiple days or where wait times hit far longer than your goal, it’s time to invest in help desk software. If you ignore this sign, you are at risk of an influx of customer churn.
At this point, you may be weighing two options: whether to invest in software to support your customers or add more staff resources to reply to requests. If you find yourself in that situation, consider that help desk software will help not only your customers, but also your employees. Why? Bringing more staff onboard without technology to help them work efficiently can be a waste of capital. By prioritizing the purchase of help desk software, you’re helping the future of your team in the present.
2. You want more data about your customer service team
The data behind your customer interactions is invaluable to your organization, but you need to have the right software in place to unlock it. If you’re wanting to use more data-driven decision making or want to report customer engagement metrics to the rest of your company, it’s time to invest in help desk software.
Some of the data points you’ll unlock can serve as north star metrics for your organization. These numbers, like average age of ticket, number of requests per customer, and customer sentiment, would be difficult to access without support software. However, with help desk software, you can share insights with a few clicks to reporting features–or even have them saved on a customized widget so they are present whenever someone from your organization logs in. (Read more about how help desk software improves customer service.)
3. You’re adding additional products or features
If you’re expanding other parts of your business, like adding new features to a software or adding a new product line, you should invest in help desk software. More offerings mean more complexity for your support team to manage. This complexity, in turn, means that they will need assistance replying to customer inquiries. Help desk software provides this assistance by smart tagging and AI-enabled features that help route requests to the right team or ticket queue.
Using a help desk software to help streamline support operations when adding new products and services frees up more bandwidth to engage with your customers. This renewed focus can make or break a product launch, especially if your customers are engaged and have questions they’d like answered.
If any of these three situations sounds familiar to you, it’s time to invest in help desk software. When you’re ready, be sure to consider these four features of the best help desk software for small businesses.