How important are your customers to your company? If your company isn’t using a help desk solution yet, then you’re seriously missing a piece of the puzzle in serving your customers in the best possible way. Consider the help desk tool a piece which will make raising tickets for customers so much simpler and for your support team to settle them within minutes – all in one place. And we’re not referring to emails, which you’re probably relying on to resolve customer tickets currently – We’re talking about help desks – a completely reliable and efficient solution for companies to excel in customer queries. Are you wondering: “What is an IT help desk anyway?”
It’s as simple as this: If you’re serious about keeping your customers happy, and providing exceptional service, then you need to invest in a help desk solution.
Consider a help desk as a customer support solution tool that’s a game-changer for businesses of all sizes – it’s just a matter of integrating it to your existing tech stack to see the real benefits that come as part and parcel. And when is best time to invest in a help desk tool, you might wonder? We recommend installing help desk software as soon as you begin processing customer transactions. Why? Because help desks will help you reduce customer churn by 5% which can increase profits by 25% to 95%, according to Bain and Company.
That’s a significant amount of money, and a robust help desk software can help make it happen.
Not convinced you need to invest in a help desk yet?
Hear us out. We’ll tell you exactly what you’re missing out on, including benefits, features of a help desk and how to choose the right one for you.
What Is A Help Desk And Why Do You Need One?
In a nutshell, a help desk is a tool that helps businesses respond to customers and support them more quickly and effectively by helping to organize customer communication. Using a help desk enables your support team to provide your customers with the best possible service experience.
Customer facing teams may find themselves having several individuals from within that team interacting and resolving queries for different customers at the same time.
When this occurs across multiple email accounts with different people, it becomes difficult to minimize duplicated conversations, understand the full context, and know who the customer has already interacted with at your company.
Some of the basic functions for which businesses use a help desk are as follows:
- Customer requests are compiled as support tickets on a single interface.
- Organizing and automating the flow of support tickets to your support team.
- Assigning the tickets to customer service representatives for resolution.
- Keeping track of a request’s status, both in terms of ownership and ticket duration.
A helpdesk software creates order. It removes chaos. It does this by keeping your ticketing system tidy and provides your agents with relevant customer data that enables them to thrive in their roles.
What Are The Benefits Of A Help Desk Solution?
A help desk has numerous benefits for your business. Firstly, your IT help desk can give your company an advantage in a variety of ways, from cost savings and scalability to improvements to the technology you use every day.
Help desks include features that provide context and insight into customer interactions. They also provide features that allow you to benchmark your support team’s performance, ensuring that your team is truly efficient in assisting and delighting customers. Helpdesk tools are essential for successfully supporting a customer base and providing seamless customer service.
Once you’ve resolved a complicated technical issue in a matter of minutes, you’ll understand the value of help desks in the business world. Nowadays, help desks come with proactive automations and highly customizable workflows, which means a feature-rich help desk software like Wavity’s will speed up ticket resolution.
A help desk is the best place to start if you want to improve your customer service experience. Implementing a help desk can help in a variety of ways, as listed in the below graphic:
Is There A Difference Between Help Desk And Service Desk?
Understanding the difference between an IT help desk and a service desk will help you gauge which one is right for you.
IT help desks are mainly used for tactical reasons, such as resolving urgent technical issues and events. Help desks can be integrated into larger service desks or run independently. The ultimate goal of the help desk is to respond to user requests as quickly as possible.
The attributes of a help desk support system includes, a single point of contact (SPOC) IT support, incident tracking, problem management and resolution, service level agreements (SLAs and self-service options for customers.
Whereas an IT service desk has a wider scope of operations than a help desk and serves as a single point of contact between a service provider and its users. A service desk considers overall business needs rather than problem resolution. Service desks handle incidents, service requests, and user communications. The average service desk will include a help desk component, with the overall goal of improving IT processes and business efficiency.
The distinction between service desk and help desk support is that service desks also include full integration with other IT service management processes, assemble service level management agreements, actively integrate asset management protocols, and provide critical information from the configuration management and problem management sectors.
Successful businesses may not require both help desk and service desk services, but both systems provide critical support. A help desk can meet all tactical needs and provide business users with immediate IT support to resolve critical issues and may be ideal for smaller companies that do not require a broader service desk option. Implementing effective help desk contact support leads to more productive business practices that aid in the growth of business operations.
Capabilities Of A Help Desk
Most companies use IT help desks to create, manage, process, and resolve tickets.The following workflow is how a typical help desk management software handles customer inquiries:
Step 1 – A customer creates a ticket in the help desk management software to report an issue.
Step 2 – The ticket is then forwarded to the help desk team via email, push notifications, or SMS.
Step 3 – Following that, based on the team’s rules, the ticket is either automatically assigned to a technician or manually selected by one based on skill set and availability.
Step 4 – The ticket processing stage follows, during which the technician assigned to the ticket will attempt to resolve the issue. The technician could:
- Interact with the user by responding to and updating the ticket.
- For more information, attach files to the query.
- Transfer the ticket to another team.
Step 5 – Once the problem has been resolved, the technician notifies the end user and marks it as resolved or closed.
Step 6 – Depending on the nature of the ticket, the issue and its resolution may be published to the knowledge base to assist future technicians in troubleshooting similar issues.
Essential Components Of A Help Desk
The help desk software generally favors issues by category, nature, level of criticality, and other factors, allowing technicians to multitask. A help desk platform’s core function, ticket management, assists in sorting customer interactions based on demographics, date, and urgency. You can easily speed up the case resolution process by automating ticket management.
Deploying the right help desk management solution that works for you is a key necessity for building a strong help desk. The right help desk solution will not only allow you to deal with large ticket volumes effortlessly, but it will also assist you in reducing your overall IT costs.
How To Choose The Best Help Desk Platform For Your Business
With countless numbers of helpdesk systems to pick from, determining which one will best meet your needs can be difficult. Making a list of your must-have and nice-to-have features is beneficial. Remember the specific problem you’re attempting to solve or the goal you want to achieve. Here are some suggestions to think about as you look for the best help desk software for your business:
1. CONSIDER THE COST
Regardless of the size or nature of your company, you’ll have a budget set aside for implementing a new tool. When evaluating a help desk solution, consider the costs involved both upfront and over time. For example, while $100/month/agent seems sustainable when you only have two or three representatives, will the pricing still be valid when you scale to a 50-people staff?
2. CONSIDER YOUR MUST-HAVE FEATURES FROM A HELP DESK PERSPECTIVE
Examine your list of must-have and nice-to-have features. If one of your must-have features isn’t exactly as you’d like it to be in a help desk you’re considering, it’s best to choose a different tool.
3. CONSIDER THE CUSTOMIZABLE FEATURES AVAILABLE VIA THE HELP DESK
Your company is unique, and your help desk software should reflect that. Look for help desk software that can be customized to put your company in the spotlight. Look for software that allows for customization. You should be able to customize your brand’s colors and logo at the very least. Aside from that, you should be able to customize your help desk software. You shouldn’t have to spend hours editing HTML or putting your limited development resources to use to write code in your software.
4. CONSIDER HOW EASY IT WILL BE IMPLEMENT AND USE
Your agent team may be constantly changing. New team members must quickly learn their way around the help desk and begin assisting customers. It is critical that the tool be as simple and straightforward as possible, rather than confusing your agents with a complicated user interface.
5. CONSIDER WHICH APPS IT CAN INTEGRATE WITH
Your company may use tools that, when integrated with your help desk, save time and make it easier for your team to handle tickets. An app integration will connect two services and make communication between them seamless and simple. Integration of your help desk and JIRA, for example, would help manage engineering escalations if your development team tracks everything in JIRA. If you frequently use Zoom for video calls, it may be useful to have a way to launch it directly from your helpdesk’s interface.
The Wavity help desk integrates with the following:
- Google Chrome
- Google Drive
- Okta
- Google Teams
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Google Calendar
- And much more!
Looking For The Perfect Business Platform For Your Company? See How Wavity Can Help!
If you’re looking for the perfect and fully-customizable solution in your help desk tool for your business, you can book a free demo with Wavity.
With our help, you will see how the right help desk solution can accurately collect data, reduce back-and-forth communications, product better SLAs, allow for seamless team collaboration, view analytics to measure the KPIs that matter the most to you, take away the pressure of needing to code and so much more.