Customer support, as we all know, has grown exponentially in the business world. The impact that it had on the business trends is still there. As a result, almost every business invests in providing the best customer support. It is the first priority of the CEOs of all the leading companies.
According to Jeff Bezos, founder, and CEO of Amazon.com,
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
and similarly, as Tony Hsieh, Founder, and CEO of Zappos says (source),
We take most of the money that we could have spent on paid advertising and instead put it back into the customer experience. Then we let the customers be our marketing.
As you all can see, customer support is indeed an important aspect of any business. You need to take extra care that your customers are happy and satisfied. And for this HelpDesks are the best helping tools.
This article will cover all the things you need to know about Helpdesk Ticketing Systems. With all the frequently asked questions answered, this article will help you understand helpdesks better. Also, after reading this article, you will be able to choose the best ticketing tool to help you grow a healthy relationship with your customers.
The Helpdesk FAQs that we will be covering are:
- What is a helpdesk ticketing system?
- What tasks can it perform?
- Is a helpdesk right for me?
- When to start using a helpdesk ticketing system?
- How can it help my business and my team?
- How to choose the right helpdesk?
Now let’s get on with the answers to these questions.
What is a helpdesk ticketing system?
According to Wikipedia,
A help desk is a resource intended to provide the customer or end user with information and support related to a company’s or institution’s products and services.
Also, a ticketing system or the issue tracking system is a software that gathers, tracks, prioritize and solves issues.
So, combining these definitions, the helpdesk ticketing system is an automated business resource which helps customers by solving their issues or queries about a product or the company.
It also helps support agents to interact with the customers, possible customers or even a normal person who just wants some information about the company or their products.
What are the tasks performed by a helpdesk ticketing system?
A helpdesk ticket system can perform a number of tasks. These tasks are performed after the customers have submitted their issues and before they get answers to their questions. But at the elementary level, these are some tasks performed by a helpdesk system:
1. Customer Request Gathering
A ticketing system works on the principle of gathering customer issues from a dedicated support Email account. Almost every company has a dedicated support email id. The customers write their issues or questions and they send them to this email id.
A ticketing system gathers all those emails from the mailbox and represents those emails as tickets. Customer support agents can view these tickets on a single interface which is easy to access.
2. Request categorisation
After gathering tickets begins the task of categorizing them based on parameters such as the name of the product, branch name, departments etc. This process makes it easy for support agents to manage a huge number of requests easily and efficiently.
These categories can be specified by the user or the customers too. By defining a category a helpdesk system makes sure the customer’s requests fall under these categories accurately and automatically.
By performing this task, the support agents receive well-categorized customer issues to resolve. This makes a support agent’s work easy and less time-consuming.
3. Request Prioritization
One of the most important functions of a helpdesk ticketing system is prioritizing the customer request. Most of the companies prefer to attend those people who want to know about their product, separately from their existing customers. They see those people as future customers. Also, by doing this, the support agents can focus more on solving issues of the existing customers.
Sometimes a company can have a very important client. By setting custom priorities, they can ensure that the client gets a special treatment.
Besides, all the junior level staff members will be able to work on the less priority support tickets.
4. Assigning Tickets to Support Agents
Categorising and prioritising support tickets is done so that the support agents won’t face any difficulties in sorting them out. But until these tickets are assigned to them, how will they resolve them?
A helpdesk ticket system makes sure each ticket is automatically, yet accurately, assigned to the support agent. The assigning is normally done on the basis of product or department associated with the support agent.
This not only ensures a quick response from support agents but an accurate one too.
5. Notify Customers
While all the above-mentioned activities are happening, a helpdesk doesn’t let customers wait for a response. It sends timely notifications to the customers.
From the moment customers submit a request, they start receiving notifications. These notifications are about any activity performed on their requests, such as status change or a reply.
And after support agents successfully resolve customer’s issue, the helpdesk sends a notification stating that the request is resolved successfully.
So mainly a helpdesk ticketing system performs these tasks. It can perform a number of other tasks too but those tasks depend on business to business.
Is a helpdesk system right for me?
Helpdesk ticket systems are not the only way to provide support. Other ways to provide support to the customers include Email, live chat, voice calls, messaging apps, etc. In such a scenario, the decision to go for a helpdesk system may seem difficult.
There are a number of factors which determines whether switching to a helpdesk system is the best option for you. These factors are:
1. Cost
With more focus on customer support, every company wants to invest in the ways to provide the best customer experience. But they want a smart investment too. Thanks to the helpdesk ticketing systems like WSDesk which provide the best way to deal with customers and give them an outstanding experience, at a reasonable cost.
2. Reliability
The advancing technology has made helpdesks more accurate than ever. With Artificial Intelligence and Automation, helpdesks are more reliable than humans.
Also unlike humans, these tools are not affected by emotions, time-zones or physical tiredness. These qualities make helpdesks both reliable and efficient.
3. Ease of use
Adapting to a new way can be a bit hard for the first few days. But once adapted to helpdesks, the support agents will feel there is not much to do manually. All they have to do is write the solutions, and automation will take care of the rest of the tasks.
And in some cases, automation will even provide answers on their behalf.
4. Volume of requests
The number of requests or to be specific, the number of customers hold the key to choosing the right tool for customer support. For instance, handling customer support for 5000 customers, with a daily average of about 200 support requests, using email is a tiring task.
But for a helpdesk, managing 5 tickets and 5000 tickets is one and the same thing.
5. Number of support agents
The number of support agents is also a reason many companies prefer using helpdesks. The efficiency of a helpdesk increases exponentially with the number of support agents.
But this doesn’t mean it can’t perform the same way with fewer support agents. In fact, if a company wants to invest less on manual labor and more on tools, a helpdesk is the best choice.
6. Number of channels for support
Emails cannot cover a multi-channel customer support. It will include emails from social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. and other sources such as email accounts, forums, chat services, etc.
But for a helpdesk system, it’s just another feature that it can handle multi-channel support. It will not only handle requests, it will gather, organise, categorise and assign them to the respective support agents automatically.
You need to consider your business case and then these factors to decide whether helpdesks are the right choice for you.
When to start using a helpdesk ticketing system?
Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.
– William Shakespeare
The answer to this question is as soon as possible.
I understand being a startup there won’t be much to do at the beginning. But in most of the cases, businesses opt for helpdesk ticketing systems when it is already too late.
The brand name depends on the customer satisfaction. If the customer’s impression of the company or its product is not too well, then there is not much that you can do.
But if you opt for the helpdesks early on, there are lots of chances that customers will eventually increase. As a result, support requests will increase too.
At that point, all the support agents will already be adapted to the helpdesk and its functionality. It will not only make it easier for support agents to deal with hundreds of customer requests but will provide your customers with an outstanding and fast service.
How can a helpdesk ticketing system help my business and my support team?
Working with a helpdesk, there are a lot of benefits. Be it the business or the employees, a helpdesk is well-suited for both of them.
Some of the benefits of the helpdesk ticketing system are:
1. Cost-Effective
As discussed above, working with a helpdesk ticketing system is very cost effective. Helpdesks not only decreases the investment but also makes business owners invest smarter.
With helpdesks, business owners can invest less on the quantity of the support agent and more on the quality and other additional tools for support staff.
2. Automated system
Being an automated system has its own perks, especially in customer support. It increases the accuracy of the system and makes it more reliable than human resources.
Automation also makes the system self-evolving. A helpdesk doesn’t need to train continuously. All it needs is a configuration for the first time and it evolves with time.
3. 24*7 Available
Customer requests can come at any time. It doesn’t depend on time-zones or working shifts. Thankfully, helpdesks are configured to either resolve or acknowledge customers automatically at any moment.
With helpdesks, the first response time can be decreased from days to just hours or sometimes minutes.
4. Multitasker
As discussed earlier, helpdesk ticketing systems can perform tasks such as ticket gathering, categorising, prioritising, assigning and notifying the customers about the solution to their requests.
With all these tasks performed only by the helpdesks, support agents can now focus on the customer interaction. Being the most important task of the customer support, human resource can be trusted with this task easily.
5. Performance analysis
With unbiased performance reports, helpdesks prove to be very efficient in tracking the performance of both the support team as well as individual support agents.
It generates periodic reports, which can be customised on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, which helps companies to make strategies to involve more customers with them. It also ensures whether the current customers are getting an outstanding experience or not.
6. Knowledgebase
An efficient helpdesk ticketing system makes full use of knowledge bases. If configured accurately, it can lead to a fully automated support system, which will automatically suggest answers from the knowledgebase.
In most of the cases, a helpdesk also helps to build a knowledge base more accurately. It records answers to customer queries and stores them as a customer based knowledge base.
7. Customer feedback surveys
Helpdesks provide an easy way to analyse the customer satisfaction. With the help of customer feedback surveys, customers can put forward their issues regarding their experience with support staff.
It also helps in analysing customer expectations and current customer trends. This, in turn, helps in making a strong strategy to tackle productivity issues for customer support.
So these were some benefits of a helpdesk ticketing system that helps both the business and customer support team to increase productivity and customer engagement.
How to choose the right helpdesk?
Choosing a helpdesk is easy enough. There are a number of helpdesk ticketing systems available today. But the difficult task is choosing a helpdesk that will suit your business needs.
Here are some factors based on which you can decide which helpdesk to go with:
1. Budget
Your budget plays a very important role in the selection of a helpdesk for your business. Today there are a number of free as well as paid helpdesk systems available.
Free helpdesk ticketing systems, in most of the cases, provide limited functionality. These functionalities can be expanded by paying a decent amount based on the needs of the support staff.
When it comes to paid systems, some have subscriptions, which means there will be some charges that you will have to pay periodically. Others have one-time payment options. Based on your budget you can decide which helpdesk system to choose.
2. Scale of business
The number of customers, products, support agents and customer requests you receive helps you determine the scale of your business.
There are a lot of helpdesk systems available for small-scale businesses that may not prove helpful for a large scale business. Same goes for the helpdesk systems made to serve large-scale businesses.
So, while choosing the right helpdesk system for your business, this factor is the most important to consider.
3. Preference
The choice of a helpdesk system also depends on the customer and support team’s preference. Customer’s and support agent’s comfort can play an important role in deciding the right helpdesk system for your company.
Based on the preferences of both customer and support staff, the right helpdesk would be the one with easy usability and accuracy.
4. Web-based
In today’s era of business, customer queries and their solutions should not be tied to one system. Customers demand solutions to their issues anytime and anywhere. Hence, a web-based customer support solution makes it possible to attend customers on the go.
5. Social media integration
One of the fast-growing trends in business is the use of social media to provide customer support. Today almost every person uses some kind of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Hence, it would be a plus point for a helpdesk system to support social media integration. This will allow customers to get support directly from their social media accounts.
So these were some frequently asked questions related to helpdesk ticketing system, along with their answers. I hope these answers will prove helpful in understanding the concept of helpdesks and their need in the current business scenario.
Further, based on the answers and the understanding of your business case, you can choose the right helpdesk for your company.
If you want to know more about helpdesks, you can ask your questions in the comments section below. We will try to answer your questions and may even publish them in this article.
You can read more about the challenges faced by the customer support team and support agents. Or you can click here to read some customer support tips and tricks.
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