Top 11 Help Desk Best Practices | #customersupport #supporticket

A help desk software is designed to streamline customer conversations from across channels into one view, keep track of service requests, and resolve customer issues efficiently. Hence, it’s important for you to choose the right help desk software and implement the best practices to make the most of your investment. 

With help desk software, it becomes easier to delight your customers and keep your agents happy. But are you satisfied with your help desk service provider? Have you missed responding to certain customer queries lately? Has your help desk team been responding quickly and efficiently?

If you’re looking for answers and want to improve your relationship with your customers and agents, we’ve compiled a list of top 11 help desk best practices to navigate through the challenges of managing your ticketing system.

What are the top help desk best practices you should implement?

#1 Choose the right help desk software

In order to choose the right help desk software, you need to take into account the nature of your business, the communication channels being used by your customers, and the usability and price of the help desk software. A help desk software helps keep your ticketing system clean and provides your customer support agents with relevant customer data that empowers them to succeed at their job. We recommend that you explore your options, compare features, read up reviews and then decide which help desk software fits your business workflows better.

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#2 Ensure a single, seamless customer journey

No matter which channel of communication is chosen by your customers to reach out to you, deploy an omnichannel help desk software that can take into account every stream of interaction and provide a unified record to offer instant context for your agents, and a seamless experience for your customer. Ensure that your help desk is the single point of contact for your customers and agents. 

With Freshdesk Omnichannel, you can deliver a consistent customer experience so that customers won’t have to repeat themselves and agents have full context of their customers’ needs, no matter how the request comes in. You should even set up workflows to support customers efficiently across email, phone, chat, messaging, social media, and more. Make sure your help desk is regularly updated to handle queries from new channels.

#3 Create help desk groups

You can organize your help desk agents into different groups to help them focus on certain types of customer issues. You can set the visibility such that agents can only see the tickets assigned to their group. This will simplify the workflow for help desk management systems and allow your help desk staff to work efficiently. 

For example, in an e-commerce setup, you can create a group named “Returns and Exchanges” and assign tickets containing the words “return” or “different size” to this group by using automation rules.

#4 Leverage help desk automation

Imagine coming to work every day to find all new customer enquiries neatly prioritized, organized and assigned to the right agents. Automations enable your help desk team to run on autopilot. By scanning through every enquiry as soon as customers contact you, you can automate ticket assignment based on an agent’s skill and workload, and leverage AI to categorize, prioritize, and route incoming tickets so that agents can focus on solving customer issues instead. With an easy-to-set-up automation functionality, Freshdesk helps you stay on top of updates being made to tickets and triggers notifications and alerts to agents immediately.

#5 Incorporate Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Setting up SLAs underlines the minimum expected requirements for service delivery. They’re like a deadline within which your team is expected to respond and resolve tickets. You can either have a single SLA policy for all tickets or have different SLA policies for different types of tickets. As an example, you can have a shorter SLA target for tickets from social media or VIP customers. For every SLA policy, you can set up reminders and configure an escalation hierarchy to notify the right people in case of an SLA breach.

#6 Build an extensive knowledge base and FAQs

Offering a customer self-service portal is a great strategy for all customer service teams because it allows the customer to help themselves – something both customers and growing support teams love. You can leverage Freshdesk’s multilingual knowledge base that supports 42 languages and makes it easy to run a global support operation. A basic self-service portal consists of three parts: a collection of knowledge base articles, a place to view, update and submit tickets and a community forum. 

A knowledge base should contain all relevant information about your product or service including a getting started guide, FAQs, how-to articles, and even troubleshooting information if things go wrong. A help desk knowledge base can free up agent bandwidth by deflecting repetitive questions, enabling agents to use the time saved to take on more questions, especially the complex ones. 

You can also build a private or internal knowledge base that agents can use to quickly pull up relevant answers, view customer support and company policies, and learn about new features or upgrades. An internal knowledge base is also a great resource for training and onboarding newly recruited customer support agents.

#7 Create canned responses and templates

Canned responses are the best way to extend customer support, especially if your help desk team is receiving many tickets from customers who are all expressing common issues. By empowering your team to create and use a canned response template within your help desk, you can lower response time and make life easier for your agents to have quick replies handy. Start by analyzing customer interactions and create an effective catalog of canned response templates. This will help you simplify the customer service workflow and improve customer satisfaction.

#8 Use real-time reporting

You can use real-time reporting dashboards to monitor your help desk’s performance and KPIs. With customisable team dashboards, supervisors of specific teams can focus on the required metrics to keep tabs on their teams’ performances, leverage historical data to spot patterns, notice overall trends and provide better insights to the teams to improve their productivity.

Real time information also gives you an overview of your help desk system and all the important metrics associated with creating and resolving tickets. This includes the number of tickets created, resolved or reopened as well as the help desk average response time, resolution time and SLA metrics. Analyze your business and team performance with the new interactive filters within Freshdesk. You can even drag & drop, search and change filters on your customized dashboard.

You can make data accessible to everyone so that your agents can prioritize tickets, get updates on the go and senior stakeholders can keep tabs on team metrics. Real-time reporting helps you identify customer issues faster and reach support targets sooner.

Additional resource: Your Ultimate Guide to Help Desk Performance Metrics

#9 Enable third-party integrations

Integrate your help desk software with third-party apps(such as Shopify, Salesforce, Whatsapp) to improve data flow between applications, improve agent efficiency or even just add context to tickets within your help desk. Some apps would be available free of cost while you would be charged for a few apps, based on the complexity of the app and feature availability.

By integrating your help desk with apps, you will be able to leverage the combined power of a robust help desk management software and modern apps that in turn improve your customer support. App integration will also eliminate the need to toggle between two different tabs or windows.

#10 Train your help desk team

It’s important that you enable your team members to make the most of your help desk so they can effectively manage high ticket volumes and record a higher resolution rate. While a person may learn the product inside and out, and receive training on how to interact with customers, knowing how to make the most of your help desk is an essential part of customer support. You may need to collaborate with a vendor who understands the challenges of your business landscape to realize the true potential of your customer support tool. Training your help desk team will help your agents learn about help desk best practices, explore useful features and their shortcuts, and develop a high level of comfort in using the help desk on a daily basis.

#11 Perform customer satisfaction surveys

Once you deploy the right help desk software, you can easily gather feedback and measure customer satisfaction levels by using customer satisfaction surveys. Only if you have quantifiable data on how well your customers like your product or service, will you be able to make meaningful enhancements to their end-user experience.

For help desks like Freshdesk, administrators can choose to send survey links with all emails or restrict this ability to specific cases. You can view and reference any aspect of customer interactions, loop in concerned teams into the conversation, follow up on updates, and effortlessly get back to the respondents after their feedback has been addressed.

Conclusion

Help desk onboarding is an integral part of customer support. In addition to learning about your products/ services, company policies, and processes, these help desk best practices would act as a guide for service reps to support customer interaction. All you need to do is deploy the right help desk and work closely with a help desk partner that understands your business needs, and helps you extend your help desk as your business scales. You also need to ensure that your help desk can offer capabilities to assist you as new trends take over.

Explore why Freshdesk is the right help desk for your business- Explore help desk features.