The right help desk solution is required to assert your authority as a trusted customer service provider for your business. For your business to scale as an enterprise a help desk should not only enable customer service but should be able to help you build trust and keep the promises you make to your customers.
Compared to our competitor Zendesk, the one area that HappyFox comfortably outperforms it is in terms of SLA capabilities.
Let’s see if we have the same understanding of what SLA means to your business
For a company to have a healthy client engagement, one of the key commitments that have to be adhered to are the Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs define an organization’s performance characteristics and are vital for the customer to place trust in their customer service.
SLA Objectives
Depending upon your business and the services you offer your promises to customers could vary. For example, if you are a SaaS service provider your customers might be more concerned about the uptime and when they contact your support for help they would want you to respond promptly and resolve swiftly. To win customers over your competition you need to understand such customer expectations before executing SLAs. Here are the steps involved in executing your SLA objectives.
1. SLAs for customer support
Now that we know how to setup our SLA objectives let us drill down further to understand where the customer support bottlenecks are and how to transcend them into SLA objectives for customers.
Once your customer raises a ticket her expectation is nothing more than an immediate reply and resolution. But that does not always happen when you have to deal with larger volumes of tickets. While customers are aware of this fact they expect you to keep them informed about how their tickets are funnelled through.
Here are some of the steps you generally take on receiving a support ticket:
- Acknowledge
- Assign
- Request for further information
- Update
- Resolve
To get your processes right your help desk should allow you to track all of the above, to ensure there are no delays during any of the given steps in the process. This also gives you the flexibility to make promises to customers who are very picky about your response time, change of status etc.
For example, if you receive a support ticket on HappyFox, this is what the HappyFox SLA feature offers you.
HappyFox lets you track the five key SLAs so that
- You have good first response time
- Your ticket gets assigned quickly
- Customer responses get responded to in time
- Customer also responds to the agents in time
- Ticket gets resolved before due date
Zendesk’s offering for SLA monitoring is different
This automatically curbs your options to have a complete SLA model. Zendesk allows you to
- Track time taken for assignment
- Time taken for resolution
That’s it. Those are the only two objectives to track. Companies will hardly be able to have a sound control over their support process with only these two options.
On the same note, Zendesk offers barely any filters for your SLAs. The only four filters as shown above are Ticket type, priority, organization and business hours. If you want to apply filters based on the ticket status, customer message or custom fields, you just cannot.
HappyFox, on the other hand has a whole range of filters and conditions(shown below) for you to set exactly the type of SLAs you need.
What makes the SLA model of HappyFox even better is that you can add multiple conditions by using the ‘And’ or ‘Or’, so that you can mix and match and get the most accurate SLA condition you need.
2. Identifying SLA breaches
It is not enough for you to know about SLA breaches just before or after the time lapse. We have seen our customers wanting to check tickets that are about to breach in a week or day or within hours.
With the help of the HappyFox SLA dashboard (in pic), you can flexibly be informed about the tickets that are nearing SLA. For example, you can get the list of tickets expiring in the next 12 days or in less than a second. In fact, you can even be informed of how much time there is left for the ticket to breach.
Zendesk needs business rules for the same
Unfortunately, Zendesk has no SLAs apart from assignment and resolution, which does not even give them the scope to notify agents of such SLAs being breached. Therefore, you will have to manually pump in the extra effort to create custom SLAs for all such issues and wait for notifications in your mailbox.
For example, here is how you can create a response SLA on Zendesk. If you want your agent to be notified in case he hasn’t responded to a ticket in 3 hours, this is what you have to do.
3. The right report for the right SLA
The same issue trickles down to reports as well. Since there are no SLA conditions apart from assign time and resolution time, you cannot draw up metrics for the same.
While on HappyFox, one click is all it takes to create SLA reports. Take a look at this.
All the various SLA options are shown to you. Click the SLA you require, create a time period and bingo, you receive the report in minutes.
Meanwhile, on Zendesk
You have to yet again create a custom report, create more business rules to generate a report, and then view it. Take a look at the Zendesk reports screen.
Why pay exorbitant amounts like $195 for a help desk that still makes you do all the work manually. Make the most of your time and money. Get smart. Be practical.
