How can help desk software supercharge your business?
Maintaining streamlined communication and timely support resolutions can be nerve-wracking with growing customer expectations and demands, especially if you use different tools.
In an era where customer support is imperative, inefficiencies such as delayed responses and lack of visibility into the customer experience can be disastrous to any startup.
Actually, according to recent research by Axio HQ, US businesses lose about $2 trillion annually due to ineffective communication.
This highlights an urgent need to implement efficient tools such as help desk software to increase productivity, streamline communication, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Help desk software can help you achieve your business goals by efficiently delivering quality customer assistance and support.
In this article, I will discuss the help desk software benefits and show you how to get the best out of your software.
Let’s get started.
1. Provide 24/7 Customer Support
Customers expect timely and round-the-clock customer support.
Not all your customers are going to need help during business hours.
This is why your team should be able to answer questions as soon as they come up in real-time every day, especially if you have a global customer base.
Well, providing round-the-clock assistance is possible, but it would require you to hire a more extensive support team, which translates to higher staff costs.
As a small business, this is not ideal for saving money.
While 24/7 support isn’t always necessary, it can help your business retain customers, increase satisfaction, and increase revenue in 2024.
Round-the-clock customer support is one of the help desk software benefits that could transform how you interact with your customers, ensuring real-time communication and faster response time.
In fact, according to a survey by CM, more than 60 percent of the surveyed customers expect 24/7 availability, which can be challenging without the right tools.
Help desks enable your team to be available to customers even when unavailable. Cloud-based help desk software can be accessed from anywhere on mobile phones, PCs, or laptops.
Additionally, with technology such as chatbots that conversational AI backs, customers can always get assistance without necessarily talking to an agent.
Holmes Place is an Israel-based company that provides services in fitness and health. During the pandemic, they needed a solution that could provide 24/7 support.
With Glassix, the company was able to answer about 35% of the club members’ calls through the chatbot, reducing the number of calls customers made.
2. Reduce Tickets With a Knowledge Base
A high number of customer requests can overwhelm your support team.
Sometimes, it can be challenging for your small business to assist with every customer request, especially if they are coming in at a high rate.
Despite this, your customers must get assistance, failure to which they get frustrated, something you do not want to happen.
But let’s be honest: not every request requires a customer to contact support.
A lot of time is wasted resolving minor and repetitive issues that can affect your team’s productivity and delay the resolution of more urgent issues.
Additionally, hiring more call agents to handle the numerous requests may incur costs.
How can help desk software help with this?
With a robust knowledge base filled with resourceful company information and a self-service portal, you can significantly reduce the number of tickets your support team receives.
This benefits your startup and the consumer by ensuring they get immediate and 24/7 customer support.
In fact, according to Vanilla Forums, 77% of the surveyed customers say that they view organizations more positively if they offer self-service support options for customers.
For instance, a customer can refer to the knowledge base to understand how to use a product or get information about the return policy.
Miles & Stockbridge P.C is a company that provides IT technical support to attorneys. The company needed an easy to use software to resolve support requests.
Thanks to Giva’s knowledge base, Miles & Stockbridge P.C was able to increase first contact resolution by 65% and enhance overall customer satisfaction by over 60%.
3. Enhances Collaboration Between Departments
Effective team collaboration is key for small businesses.
Without effective collaborations, you may experience communication difficulties and challenges in completing assignments successfully and providing adequate customer support.
For instance, your call agent should be able to route an IT support request to the IT department for a timely resolution, which can be difficult with disjointed communication.
Additionally, the importance of your team having a common goal cannot be overlooked.
Sometimes, different departments may not have aligned goals, significantly affecting their productivity, motivation, and efficiency.
Research has found that cross-functional collaboration fuels customer experiences.
In fact, according to research by Fierce, inc., 86% of employees cite a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication as the main source of workplace failures.
Collaboration will help your team share knowledge, resources, and expertise to deliver accurate and timely assistance to customer requests. Moreover, call agents can route requests to appropriate departments effectively to ensure customers get the best experience and support.
Help desk software provides collaboration tools that facilitate seamless and real-time interactions. Additionally, they simplify communication by providing an efficient channel to eliminate information overload.
Family Fund Business Services is an end-to-end fulfillment service that works with several organizations. The company needed a centralized and easy-to-use system for their team to collaborate and use for their daily workflow.
They sort Halo Service Desk as their solution, which provides a cost-effective platform for easier cross-team collaboration.
4. Automate Manual Tasks
Timely responses and request resolution are critical to the success of your startup.
However, manually handling customer support issues in 2024 can be sluggish and time-consuming, let alone backbreaking.
This is not to mention that it takes up more time and can deviate your agents from focusing on more urgent issues.
In fact, Zapier’s report states that 94% of the surveyed U.S. knowledge workers spend some portion of the day performing repetitive, time-consuming work, including manual tasks.
These statistics highlight the need for an efficient solution that will help save time while reducing your agents’ workload.
Among the best help desk software benefits is the ability to automate manual tasks. Automation guarantees streamlined workflows while ensuring accuracy and limited errors.
Additionally, with help desk automation, you can easily automate workflows, set up processes for knowledge base creation, automatically route tickets, and expedite communication using chatbots.
It is worth mentioning that some help desk software has customizable chatbots paired with conversational AI that can detect customers’ sentiments to assist with basic requests.
Ultimately, automation features speed up operations and help your small business deliver prompt assistance and enhance customer experience.
Brastel is a telecommunication company with multiple branches servicing both individuals and businesses. The company realized that its traditional call center was getting outdated and needed to find an efficient solution to help customers stay in touch.
With HelpDesk, Brastel set up 20 automated workflows and reduced handling time per ticket by up to 39%.
5. Tracks Performance and Key Help Desk Metrics
Data can help you enhance customer support.
Measuring your call agents’ performances is as essential as any other key aspect of your business. Without insight into your agents’ performance, it can be difficult to tell whether your business is headed in the right direction.
Actually, according to a report by Harvard Business Review, 72% of the respondents said they thought their performance would improve if their managers would provide corrective feedback.
This figure shows that a lack of proper performance tracking can impede improvement, affecting customer experience and your company’s growth.
Additionally, you may end up spending resources and time on activities that aren’t productive.
Fortunately, the best help desk software can accurately track the performance of every agent and provide insight to help you make data-driven decisions.
Help desk solutions can do this by monitoring KPIs and critical data metrics such as response time, agent utilization rate, and resolution time.
Metrics collected by your help desk can offer vital insight into the effectiveness of your agents’ work, areas that would benefit from more end-user training and other information that helps you enhance the services you offer to customers.
For instance, knowing the accurate resolution and response times will help you make changes to expedite the process and ensure you deliver the best customer experience.
Tutlo, an e-learning platform, assists students in getting an online English language immersion by speaking to native speakers. It is, therefore, critical for the company to get meeting analytics to enhance training.
Through Demodesk, the company was able to know meetings were successful with the help of precise and reliable analytics.
Conclusion
Customer experience is critical to the success of modern small businesses.
It is clear from numerous research that prioritizing CX can supercharge your business by ensuring customer satisfaction and setting you apart from your competitors.
Actually, according to a Watermark Consulting analysis, customer experience leaders generated a total cumulative return that was 3.4 times greater than that of the customer experience laggards.
An efficient customer support solution is the best partner to help you achieve these goals.
Help desk software benefits such as automation, performance tracking, and collaboration, to name a few, can help you enhance the experience for your customers, save time, and reduce operational costs.
Additionally, with powerful integrations such as live chat and AI, your team can deliver a 360-degree customer experience.
However, before running to purchase a help desk solution, ensure you consider several factors such as features, budget, and integration capabilities, to ensure you get the best of the help desk software benefits.
Also published here.