As businesses grow, leaders need to decide what strategies will drive more revenue for an organization. Often, entrepreneurs think about how to increase leads or sales, but those shouldn’t be the only options considered. Instead, business leaders should think about how to streamline and improve customer support as a revenue opportunity.
One way to increase revenue is to reduce churn. It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s cheaper for businesses to retain current customers than get new ones. And customer service is critical to customer sentiment and the decision to continue using a product or service.
Improving customer service in a cost-effective and scalable way is possible with the assistance of help desk software. Here are three reasons why help desk software improves customer service and bottom-line business performance.
1. Accurately Measure Support Requests
One of the greatest challenges in managing a customer service function is measuring how many phone calls, emails, or live chats your team receives in a time period. Without a help desk software, this can take hours or days to compile manually. With software, not only do you not have to do math, but you can get real-time measurements of how many requests are solved, pending, or in the queue.
These measurements support revenue-based goals for several reasons. First, analytics of the number of requests received by a support agent or team help for resource planning. You’ll be able to know when new hires are needed, rather than bringing people on board too early or late.
If your team regularly has no tickets in their queue, it may mean that your support agents can be redeployed to other projects. By contrast, if there are always pending questions in the queue, it can be a sign that you need to hire more team members or re-train your current ones to become more efficient.
2. Improve Response Times
Response times are critical to ensuring that customer satisfaction remains high and that your customers don’t churn. Recent studies have shown that earning a net new customer can cost five times as much as retaining one. So, responding faster can have serious dividends on revenue and expenses by reducing customer churn.
Help desk software helps agents be more effective in responding to help requests. It can help with cross-team collaboration and categorization, and even hold snippets and templates to respond to FAQs. Plus, software can help provide a first-touch response automatically, reducing perceived wait time.
3. Easily Report Trends
Because help desk software helps categorize support queries, it also makes it easier to report on trends that your customer service team is getting. These trends should be passed to your product or operations teams to ensure they are reconciled with future company plans. In essence, these trends are real-time customer sentiment feedback about opportunities to improve.
For example, if you consistently get questions about a product or feature, it can be a sign that something needs improvement. Instead of paying for user surveys or research, you can crowdsource information and feedback from customers naturally. You’ll also have access to this data in real-time, allowing you to make mission-critical decisions that impact revenue in real-time.
Implementing help desk software can help both your customer service team and company be more efficient. This efficiency has large implications on your revenue–customers that are served quickly are more likely to be retained. Plus, looking at metrics around customer support engagements illuminated by help desk software can predict where problems may lay with your product or service.
And the benefits of help desk software are available for businesses of all sizes. With the right features, help desk software can help organizations from big to small harness the power of customer data. If you’re ready to onboard with an affordable help desk software, sign up for a free trial of Wavity’s Help and Service Desk solution.