Your business is ready to grow, but how do you create the perfect customer service help desk to ensure that when you scale, you don’t lose any customers due to unpleasant or delayed responses and experiences? We have created this concise 3-part guide to help you plan your customer support desk.
You may have a fantastic product or service to sell, but if your customer service is unhelpful, unreliable, or simply difficult to reach, customers will complain, and you will lose custom very quickly as a result. That is one of the primary reasons why investing in customer service is critical to long-term business success.
But what exactly does it mean to provide excellent customer service, and how can you maintain that every customer who contacts your company has a positive experience? We’ve identified several ways to elevate your customer service to the forefront of your industry.
To help you meet the expectations of customers in current times, it’s a good idea to invest in and make full use of your customer service help desk. You’ve probably heard of a help desk if you’ve ever worked on a customer-facing team. Many teams, however, have a help desk but do not use it to its full potential. We look at ways to create the perfect customer service help desk to continuously delight your customers.
What makes a great help desk?
Your company’s success is dependent on the people you hire and their ability to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Your business suffers when they become bogged down by technical issues and IT service desk delays.
A great help desk software will assist you in creating structure for your team.
Instead of an access-for-all in a shared inbox, for example, you can assemble and set priorities to incoming conversations with a great help desk software.
A great help desk will also help you improve your quality of service.
Help desks’ software allows staff members to concentrate on their tasks rather than fretting about finding the right interactions and responses. Most help desks provide in-app saved responses, access to knowledge bases, and automatic ticket assignment.
You can surveys within help desks to understand your customers better
Allowing your customers to tell you how they felt about your interaction is one of the most important ticket handling best practices. While third-party tools can be found to do this when using a personal inbox, the best help desks have the functionality built in.
Automated replies make the work easier
Good help desks include functionality that allows you to automatically or manually route conversations based on the topic of the conversation or where your members of the team think they should be sent. Some even allow customers to prioritise their tickets based on their importance — you can ask them how urgent their conversation is as they fill out your contact form.
You can even manage performance using help desks
All good help desks include analytics that can assist you in detecting data over time. You’ll have access to metrics that you might not have had access to without a dedicated tool. As an example:
- Customer satisfaction score rating (CSAT)
- Response time
- Time to reach resolution
- Number of responses before resolution has been met
- The busiest time of day and week
- The number of responses received by each team member
- Reporting trends over time
- Most commonly used saved responses
- The most frequently sent knowledge base articles
You can also compare metrics to see how one affects the other. For example, as your handle time decreases, you may notice an increase in customer satisfaction. These metrics would not be available in the absence of a dedicated help desk.
What does excellent customer service look like?
Excellent customer service is all about leaving your customer with a delightful experience when they interact with your business. Their queries and questions are answered in their entirety and in a timely manner.
Customer service can look different for various types of businesses. Retail outlet assistants, for example, may provide excellent service by being readily accessible and upbeat. Companies may incorporate strong customer service values into their sales processes, such as personalizing emails or offering self-service options.
Here are some examples of excellent customer service:
- Quick responses to customer queries
- Showing product knowledge and being helpful in explaining the product to customers
- Listening actively to customer complaints and feedback
- Allowing self-service options
- Understanding customer needs and solving issues
- Access to multiple support channels
- Personalizing their experiences
What makes a good customer support team?
Your company’s success is dependent on the people you hire and their ability to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Your business suffers when they become bogged down by technical issues and IT service desk delays.
Leadership can only go so far in ensuring your help desk team’s performance. It is largely determined by the skills and abilities of your team members. The characteristics that make a great help desk employee will vary depending on the type of assistance your team provides. Still , there are some key aspects that are to good look-out for when hiring customer service staff:
They care about the customers
More and more organizations are now prioritizing exceptional customer service skills over technical ability, based on the premise that technical skills can be learned, but customer-focus. The best help desk employees prioritize the customer above all else. They advocate for the needs and desires of customers during internal conversations.
They are fast learners and problem solvers
The majority of tickets that arrive at your help desk will most likely contain some sort of issue that needs to be resolved. As a result, an ideal help desk employee will be enthralled by the prospect of troubleshooting. Best practices for ticket handling require help desk team members to learn as much as they can about an issue before reaching out to a user for more information.
They have amazing personnel skills
Your service desk agents must have excellent interpersonal skills in order to engage with customers in a friendly manner.
As a result, compassion and communication are important qualities to look for in a service desk agent. They will easily be able to empathize with customers. Agents must also be active listeners in order to accurately pinpoint the issue before searching for a solution, as well as clear and concise communicators in order to relay information to customers (and to hand over customer queries to other team members or to share knowledge with them).
A great customer service help desk starts with the best software
Although all help desks are an improvement over a non-dedicated shared inbox, some features distinguish great help desks from good ones. For the best customer service help desks, here are a few things to look for when choosing a new help desk:
1. Easy integration for to meet and exceed customer service excellence
To ensure you’re getting the best in your help desk software, ensure it allows integration across main touch points. That way, you can monitor and respond to all queries in one place. Some of the integrations that will be particularly useful are:
- Knowledge base
- Chatbot integration
- Monitoring of your social media channels
- Contact forms
- Included reporting
2. Self-service enabled through the best help desk software
Self-service is crucially important for most customers and can help empower your support team to focus on things that are a little more high-impact than answering common inquiries. When shopping for a help desk, look for software that streamlines help desk processes such as building documentation and self-service.
3. The interface of the helpdesk will be easy to navigate
It will not matter how many great features a help desk software has if none of them will be used effectively because the interface is difficult to use. You might consider asking the customer service team who will be using the help desk to test it out before picking the right one for you.
Wavity can help if you’re looking for the perfect customer service help desk platform
Do you want to improve your company’s help desk applications so that you have all the tools you need to streamline your customer service department and move your company forward? Provide SaaS help desk tools that will fit seamlessly into their familiar workflow to empower your customer service teams.
Having all of the required tools available to you in one easy-to-access platform allows you to see exactly what’s going on in your service department and ensure your business stays on track to scale. Customer service agents can respond to tickets faster, work more efficiently as a team, stay on top of their progress, and meet KPIs and goals on time. All of this while keeping up with rising customer demand and meeting the growing expectations of global consumers.
Managing a help desk is demanding and your service desk software shouldn’t slow you down. Wavity keeps your team operating efficiently, all at an extremely affordable price.
So, if you’re in the market to purchase the perfect business platform for your company, see how Wavity can help you! Book your free demo here.