Businesses use help desks to help customers get the most out of their products and services. But they need to make sure if it really does. Not all help desks deliver equally, especially if they are not implemented right. There are certain strategies that can guide you.
Help Desk Implementation Strategies
1. Adopt Omnichannel Operations
Failing to connect customer experiences across functions and platforms leads to customer frustrations. Let’s say a customer has already gone through the sign-up process on Facebook messenger. He just needs to make the payment. Your marketing representative hits him up with a chatbot message “Hello there, I think you might be interested in this plan. You want to know more?” Having to repeat everything will be frustrating for the customer.
On top of that, you have accidentally given the customer a glimpse of your potential customer service mishaps. A help desk allows you to follow an omnichannel strategy to connect customer experiences across time and place. If your omnichannel support is not working well, perhaps you should:
- Make your channels mobile-responsive
- Simplify and integrate knowledge management
- Improve your social media presence
- Lose your old ways of email support and upgrade it to today’s needs
- Promote omnichannel support by centralizing your offerings; for example, you can add a contact now option to your live chat or a social media option to your emails
Connecting experiences
These days when support is not limited to a single channel, omnichannel support becomes all the more essential. Read more.
2. Enable Cross-functional Collaboration
Lack of collaboration or subpar communication causes workplace failures. All functions in a company operate in tandem with each other and they can’t get the baton from A to B all by themselves. They need to pass it on to one another whenever needed in order to reach the destination. Imagine a sales rep offers a new customer an exclusive coupon to avail ten percent discount. The finance team doesn’t know of this and charges the full amount. Naturally, the customer will get frustrated. You had to re-run the process through the stakeholders and solve this.
Still, the damage is already done here. Utilizing the collaboration features of a help desk would’ve helped you here. These features let you communicate across functions within a ticket. You can also integrate the help desk with your chat platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams to further reduce the steps your teams take to contact each other.
Take a HappyFox Help Desk Tour.
3. Adopt Prompt Security Measures
A help desk is a critical area to tighten your security policing. Being the single interface of all customer information, a help desk is obliged to secure and protect the data from potential thefts. Help desks host multiple third-party applications and service providers for extended capabilities. You need to identify any vulnerabilities in the third-party libraries that you use to build your applications. Moreover, access management is extremely important in cloud-based software as you need to eliminate unauthorized access in a multi-user environment.
Commitment to security
At HappyFox, we ensure the safety of our applications with ISO-certified Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our cloud infrastructure partner. Read more about our industry-standard security practices.
4. Implement Data Analytics
Listening to customers is incredibly important. It helps you bring the customer’s voice to the front and design experiences around their needs. The key lies in what you do with your data. Implement business intelligence and reporting tools to translate customer feedback into functional insights. But learn to recognize data that’s worth acting on.
Not using data enough is a bad practice, but what about over-utilizing data? Some businesses tend to overreact to any piece of feedback they receive. Unfortunately, there will always be some issues you can’t do anything about. Since customers talk about their bad experiences more than their good experiences, some issues get stretched out of proportion. You may be tempted to act on every feedback you get, realistic or not. You may also ruin your employee relationships by holding them to superficial standards of customer service. Align your product roadmap to achieve your realistic vision of service delivery.
5. Make the Help Desk Diverse
Being exclusive is the easiest way to lose customers. You should never limit your help desk to intentionally or unintentionally exclude a segment of customers. Some businesses are oblivious to their exclusivity. They may provide a solid self-service portal and knowledge base with up-to-date information, but only in English, thus excluding non-English speaking customers from self-service benefits. Some don’t make their help desk solution mobile-responsive, which could drive away smartphone users from accessing your products.
Providing inclusivity to customers in terms of culture and demographics is a different thing. We are talking about providing the same quality of service to customers and avoiding alienating a population of customers who paid the same price as anyone else. HappyFox Help Desk is a mobile-responsive, multilingual software that can help you cater to a wide range of customers with supreme support quality. The solution is also intuitive for the least tech-savvy end users to get familiar with.
6. Choose the Right Help Desk
If you haven’t updated to a CRM system or you’re still using on-premise help desks, you are probably taking cost-effectiveness too far. Particularly in today’s digital business model, businesses that are early to embrace the changes will thrive while those that don’t lag behind. Your help desk is going to be the single point of contact for all your customer communications. Your ability to connect with customers in an agile and prompt manner will be highly compromised if you are still using spreadsheets and sticky notes. You should be prepared for the kind of support you want to provide, with a help desk armed with versatile and modern capabilities.
Saving costs is important, as you don’t want to burn more than you earn. But you should not save costs at the expense of sub-optimal efficiencies and subpar customer experiences. Choose the right help desk that helps your support team deliver fast and better customer support.
7. Implement Constant Monitoring
A help desk essentially helps you be in control of your support operations. When there is little order to your processes or your customer issues often go out of control, you are not leveraging your help desk properly. For instance, you are not in control when:
- You fail to control negative social media mentions
- You often face service request escalations
- You don’t know where automation opportunities lie
- You have backlogs and you struggle to meet your service level agreements (SLA)
- You can’t move from reactive service to proactive service
A help desk gives your CIOs and executives complete autonomy over customer lifecycle management and project management. Automate the grunt work. Adopt vital KPI metrics. Drive intelligent decisions. With the right applications, a help desk enables constant service improvement.
8. Capture the Brand Persona in Your Help Desk
Remember the last time you read a book and you knew who the author was without seeing the name? Your brand should have the same effect on your customers. Personalize your help desk interactions or your customers will take their attention elsewhere. Help desk software provides you extensive capabilities to automate or reduce manual interactions. While it is a huge time-saving opportunity, you should know when to stop.
You could be mechanizing your interactions until no trace of personalization is left. Every interaction will then sound like an auto-responder to your customers. Thanks to the swath of uncomplicated business and service management tools available today, every business have the opportunity to build curated products and services. Personalized customer engagement becomes the key differentiator that could propel you ahead of your competitors. Train your employees on customer advocacy language and the importance of individualizing customer interactions. Make canned responses personal and tailored to customers. Show customers that you treat them as their own person.
Set your help desk up for success
Businesses naturally focus more on fixing problems rather than preventing them from happening. But a help desk is a critical customer service component — the damage is already done before you begin to address the consequences. Adopt these implementation strategies to set your help desk up for success from day one.
Also, having a help desk that understands customer satisfaction helps. Like HappyFox Help Desk. The solution is developed to serve as your single go-to platform to provide stellar customer service. Schedule a demo with product experts who get just what your business needs.
