A help desk is a virtual support desk or support management platform where customers get their problems solved or have their doubts about the product clarified. Over the years, the help desk has become a staple in every company’s customer support arsenal. Thanks to the help desk, companies today don’t shy away from catering to thousands of customers with thousands of problems to address.
Help desks stand sentinels to the entire organization as they put out small fires every day. But what happens when a help desk grows incompatible with the growing needs of the business or can’t help resolve issues effectively? These inefficiencies can straight-up cost you customers. But you can very well prevent them from happening — with effective help desk management.
Help Desk Management Hacks
Process Advancement Leads to Process Simplification
When it comes to a help desk, focus more on streamlining and simplifying your processes rather than try to “advance” them with complex tools and workflows. Some companies want to forego their entire processes and create new versions or upgraded versions to go with their help desk. They may end up complicating the process more, which is the opposite of what a help desk hopes to achieve.
The primary goal of a help desk is to reduce the chaos and bring order into your existing processes. Your agents are already comfortable with these processes, so it’s only a matter of time before they learn to leverage the benefits a help desk brings. When you receive a lot of support tickets, start with ticket automation for effective ticket management. Don’t dive head-first into complex technologies. A good help desk can help you simplify almost all of your fundamental processes, and naturally maximize your operational efficiency and service delivery. As a thumb rule, see what you can remove and not what you can add.
Help Desk is Not Meant to be a Standalone Tool — Reinforcement is Key
While complex rules and advancements are unnecessary, you do need to upgrade your system wherever needed to make it future-proof. Automation tools like HappyFox Workflows can blend seamlessly with your help desk and automate processes that a basic help desk can’t. Similarly, business intelligence, analytics, CRM knowledge management, and AI-powered self-service are modern-day essentials that will help you sustain your newfound efficiency and growth. Think of these as reinforcements, which will streamline and complement your help desk to perform better. Say you want to be on top of service request escalations. You can automate your service level agreement (SLA) alerts and get notified of any breaches in real-time.
Service providers keep this in mind while designing a help desk solution, and hence the products we find today are extremely flexible to integrations. HappyFox Help Desk, for example, offers external integrations like Aircall and Salesforce as well as integrations with sister products like HappyFox Workflows and HappyFox Business Intelligence.
Slow and Steady Expansion Does the Trick
Growth is the ultimate goal of every business. But if you don’t grow linearly or grow too fast, you will reach the dead-end soon. In fact, customer support is usually the last to grow when a business grows. But how would you cater to your newfound customers with the existing resources? How would you model new business processes into your current help desk settings to handle the additional operational load? You can’t. Marketing and lead acquisition are simple these days, thanks to the increasing availability of free and inexpensive market research tools. Nevertheless, you should learn to grow at a pace where you can sustain your growth in the long run and not falter and crash.
When you plan to grow, plan out all the other aspects of your business as well — customer service, engineering, operations, and your tools and software. Choosing a help desk system is a matter of horses for courses. For small companies, simple shared email inboxes may be sufficient. Medium to large companies need proper, scalable help desks. Enterprises might need a help desk that includes intricate use cases like incident management, change management, IT support and more. Choose a versatile help desk software like HappyFox Help Desk that is compatible with both small and enterprise business settings. Read how small businesses benefit from using HappyFox Help Desk.
Siloed Problem Solving Doesn’t Mean Efficient Problem Solving
If you intend your help desk to shield the entire organization but the support team from customer interactions, it will become tough to make the customer experience everyone’s priority. Customer interactions will stay within the help desk support team, so will the responsibility. While you may think isolating interactions can keep other functions undistracted, in reality, the learnings are equally important to them. You can’t drive efficiency by depriving your team members of the one learning that makes their work easy — customer opinions and feedback.
Anyone who builds a product or service for customers should actively listen to the customers, and incorporate the learnings in their creation. Even if your functions don’t participate, including them in your help desk ticketing operations will expose them to customer problems they should be targeting, in the next product release or the next blog or the next website revamp. The self-service portal of a help desk addresses this problem effectively. It improves collaboration between business users and end-users and it’s also a platform where you can incorporate customer feedback really quickly. Have more questions on a particular topic? You can publish a detailed faq article on your knowledge base tomorrow.
Help Desk Should Be Experience-Oriented Than Resolution-Oriented
A help desk is resolution-oriented. It targets process inefficiencies, operational breaches, problem management, and by doing so, provides customers the experience they deserve. But customer experience is more than problem resolution. The help desk ticket response, wait time, language, personalization, the attention given, all influence how a customer feels at the end of an interaction. Your help desk staff should be aware of how each and every step of the process affects the end-user experience and design products and services around these experiences.
Lastly, you should choose an effective ticketing system that will help you accomplish these goals. Try HappyFox — it ranks higher in most review sites compared to Zendesk and many other popular software suites.
Check out HappyFox’s feature comparison scorecard
HappyFox is highly user-experience-oriented, which would help you reach your vital KPI metrics for customer support as well as IT service management.
Effective Help Desk Management is Half the Journey
With no barriers to service delivery, you can solely focus on generating customer satisfaction and value-adding customer relationships. HappyFox offers an all-inclusive Help Desk software solution with multiple integration offerings. HappyFox Help Desk is also multilingual, helping you cater to overseas customers in over 35 languages.
Book a HappyFox Help Desk demo to get started or check out HappyFox for more features and products to complement your help desk or IT service desk!
