Help desk

In today’s customer-centric culture, providing excellent customer service is crucial to keep ahead of the competition, regardless of your industry. Even if your company provides the best quality products or services, poor customer service can damage your image.

Basically, your business is in the hands of your customers as they can freely rate, review, and talk about your solution via social media, review sites, or word-of-mouth. 

So how to deliver exceptional customer service on time? This is possible with a help desk. 

Help desk definition

A help desk is a special software or a team of agents that supports customers with technical issues. 

With help desks, you can keep all customer messages in one place, prioritize your tasks, provide assistance, and ensure effective collaboration with customers. 

It can be as simple as a call center with incoming calls. Or it can be a complex tool offering a unified customer experience across multiple communication channels and keeping track of any support tickets raised. That’s why a help desk is also known as a ticketing system. 

The information gained from tickets, such as tech problems, user preferences, and customer satisfaction, is an excellent source that can be used when dealing with new customer cases. 

Apart from customer service help desks that deal with external customers, there are also other help desk types that manage employee-centric or internal issues, ranging from a passport reset to system failure. 

Why you should use help desk support    

Help desks are the heart of customer support, which directly affects the customer’s satisfaction and feedback on your solutions. 

Here are the reasons your business needs help desk support: 

It improves customer assistance

68% of customers would pay more for the products and services from a company with a strong record of good customer service. A help desk solution is one of the simplest ways to deliver high-quality customer assistance.

It helps organize customers’ requests

Help desks are the perfect place for customer inquiries allowing support teams to work more efficiently. This is where you can prioritize and assign tickets, so team members know what to focus on, and set the time necessary to resolve the issues.

It offers self-service options

About 75% of customers nowadays prefer handling product/service issues on their own, and 90% expect a company to have customer self-service. 

A good help desk should include reliable self-service with FAQs and a knowledge base that lets customers solve common product issues themselves and satisfy their needs. 

Your customer care agents will also benefit as they will focus on more complex problems and won’t lose much time on trivia.

It makes ticket tracking easy

To maintain a healthy atmosphere in your customer care department, you need to track the performance. Help desks software allows you to make reports on efficiency metrics such as customer satisfaction, ticket volume, resolution time, and agent performance. 

With this data, you’ll be able to provide customers with better support and enhance your customer service approach.

Check out the other helpful customer service tools to improve your customer service.

Help desk jobs

With all the advantages that help desks can offer companies of different sizes and industries, it’s people who make customer support great. 

There are various job positions in every help desk team, from the employees responsible for creating and deploying your support software to the agents who handle service tickets. Here are several essential ones:

• A help desk manager supervises the help desk’s daily activities. They are responsible for hiring and educating agents, organizing the support process, and monitoring KPIs, including agents’ performance and customer satisfaction. 
• A help desk agent answers the help desk’s inquiries. These can range from hardware problems to password reset requests and can be sent via phone, email, or a help desk portal. In addition, help desk agents are often in charge of the company’s knowledge base; they write and update content to ease the user experience.
• A help desk team lead assists the help desk manager by mentoring new agents, ensuring that everyone provides outstanding customer service, and making sure that everyone achieves their objectives. Additionally, a team lead keeps an eye on performance and gives management comments on how to make support systems better.

Help desk examples

Here are the best help desk software solutions to make it easier for you to choose the right one for your business.

HubSpot help desk & ticketing software

HubSpot help desk & ticketing is customer service software created to help small and large businesses provide a quality customer service experience. 

It offers ticket automation and escalation to avoid keeping customers waiting. HubSpot also has an embedded knowledge base that covers all common questions about the service to give customers the ability to solve their cases on their own.  

Zendesk help desk software

Zendesk is help desk software with valuable tools for small, medium, and large e-commerce businesses.

It helps facilitate customer support with automation and is particularly useful for its customer portal feature, where users can access their formerly submitted tickets and add further replies. If your customer base is huge, having such a portal is a must-have to keep your customers updated without distracting the team with additional queries.

Happy Fox help desk software 

Happy Fox help desk is a respected tool for customers and company staff that provides excellent ticketing features and an intuitive interface. It offers ticketing management, automation, self-service, and much more. 

One of its most helpful features is the task management tool that allows you to divide the steps to resolve a ticket into tasks. Thus, this software is suitable for companies with a more complex product, where closing a ticket requires several steps.

Zoho Desk help desk 

Zoho Desk solution aims to boost the efficiency of customer support. It offers many tools to quickly resolve customer issues and improve team performance.

Here you can manage your customer communication via calls, email, chat, social media, and your website. Besides, you can automate repetitive tasks, manage complex service processes, and provide built-in self-service such as knowledge base, user community, and AI.

Wrapping it up

The term help desk can be used to describe both the company support team in charge of assisting users and the software that facilitates that assistance. This is an essential component of maintaining happy employees and satisfied customers.

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