When Southwest Airlines responded with a creative tone to one of their customers through Twitter, it caught the attention of a large number of Twitter users. When one customer posted their question in the form of a poem, the brand’s support team provided an answer to match. Southwest Airlines usually takes pride in its reputation for excellent customer service. Their customer service enabled through social media comes across as something really fun to read and experience.
Adding some personalized experience to support interactions can go a long way in establishing brand loyalty. Plus, it is just plain fun on the support end. Brightening a customer’s day is more than worth a few extra seconds of effort. But, providing this experience is not as simple and smooth as it may look on Twitter. At least not without proper tools and tech in place. You need a process that can help you with everything from identifying customer pain points to responding to them as quickly as possible. For example, the above-mentioned customer tweet (customer effort) would have gone in vain if the company would not have been able to reply instantly.
Helpdesk software is a growing feature that is commonly found on websites to help users resolve their queries. However, helpdesk software cannot just be viewed as a functional component of tech support. While it is there to help, you need to make sure it does. Helpdesk solutions should be seen as another channel to deliver an exceptional customer experience to retain and win customers. And hence it is important to know everything about helpdesk management software before you begin picking one.
In this article, I will walk you through the know-hows of helpdesk management software that helps B2B and B2C brands deliver an exceptional customer experience.
What Is Helpdesk Software?
Helpdesk software is a one-stop contact point that provides centralized information and helpdesk management software to handle a brand’s internal and external queries. A helpdesk management software enables the companies to resolve customer grievances faster and efficiently. They can simply do this by automating the complaint resolution process with helpdesk management software.
Types of Helpdesk Software
There can be multiple ways of categorizing the helpdesk management software considering various parameters. For example:
- By their deployment
- The size of business
- The type of target users
- The customer support function
- The source code accessibility
Here are four common types of helpdesks:
1. Web Helpdesk
Web helpdesks are cloud-hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) where the company can rent the solution based on a subscription. This way, they can save on the cost and scale up quickly whenever they need.
2. On-premise Helpdesk
When companies own and host the software and have complete control over the helpdesk, it is solely responsible for its maintenance and functioning.
3. Enterprise Helpdesk
Enterprise helpdesk does not just have the standard features of a helpdesk. It goes beyond addressing customer queries with faster resolution rates. It also includes features improving overall support efficiency.
DeskXpand is an intuitive, automated helpdesk software designed to overcome all the latest enterprise challenges. Take a personalized demo today.
4. Open Source Helpdesk
Brands won’t need a user license or permission to access the source codes in an open-source helpdesk.
What are the Business Benefits of Helpdesk Software?
You must be wondering, why is helpdesk software so important? Here’s why:
The biggest benefit of helpdesks is almost zero to minimal downtime. No one likes it when the system fails, and the issue resolution is put on hold, whether it is the customer or employee. Helpdesk software has a positive impact on multiple faces like customer satisfaction, increased agent productivity, and operational/business benefits.
1. Customer Satisfaction
Everyone wants their query to be resolved quickly with minimal effort. Helpdesk software can help you delight your customers by ensuring first contact resolution (FCR). You can keep the customers informed by sending out timely updates about the status of their complaints. Moreover, helpdesk software makes it easier for the customers to reach out to you.
2. Agent Productivity
The most significant benefit of using helpdesk software is agent productivity. It helps you automate repetitive tasks so that your agents can focus on difficult queries that matter. Through a knowledge base, customers can search and resolve queries on their own, and agents are spared from answering minor questions repeatedly.
3. Business Operations
Helpdesk solutions help you streamline business operations to meet SLAs and prioritize specific actions. You need to empower the supervisor with intuitive graphs and data points and then monitor its functioning. The supervisor/manager gets to have a 360-degree view of the operations and can make informed decisions based on that data.
4. Scalability
It is always preferable to turn to a helpdesk software than hire and train a new workforce. Helpdesk software makes it easier to create, sort, assign tickets as per the expertise. This contributes to business growth and improves customer support functions.
Industry-Specific Use Cases of Helpdesk Software
Multiple businesses mistake customer support as a cost-centric problem and hence end up tightening their team’s spending. This makes them move their customer support offshore. This leads to drastic results like unhappy customers, high employee turnover rate, and PR debacles galore. If you look at it correctly, excellent customer support is a revenue generator. It gives a cohesive CX that aligns with an organization’s purpose irrespective of the industry niche.
Following are some well-known industry-specific use cases of helpdesk software:
I. Retail and Ecommerce
Sources: eMarketer, and ACS
Ecommerce businesses tend to face problems at every point of their services. They’re used to receiving issues like missed queries, long response time, managing customer data, and maintaining support requests at high volumes. Ecommerce-specific helpdesk software can change this drastically.
Helpdesk software can help you:
- Streamline queries through a single dedicated inbox
- Manage queries from multiple channels
- Monitor all queries from a single place
- Decide who deals with the query
- Align order fulfillment with customer expectations
II. Travel and Hospitality
Travel is a volatile and dynamic industry. It is pretty competitive too. During the past few years, due to the massive changes in technology, the support vertical of the travel industry has seen quite a shift. Some use cases of helpdesk software in the travel and hospitality industry are mentioned below:
- Say goodbye to the conventional manual process of query booking
- Self-service helps solve repetitive booking queries
- Track customer history and communication seamlessly
- Web admin panel for centralized planning
III. Software and IT
Studies show that a standard IT problem occupies a major share of the agent’s time. An IT helpdesk solution empowers individuals to find answers quickly. Besides, people expect resolution at lightning speed, and helpdesk software helps you deliver just this. Some use cases include:
- Decrease the overall wait-time for customers
- Eases the ticketing process with the automation features
- Define agent roles, permissions, and privileges
- Provide instant solutions through the knowledge base and other self-service features
Start delivering frictionless and proactive customer service with excellent helpdesk tools.
IV. Manufacturing Industry
I know it sounds unusual to think about manufacturing business and customer support together. Manufacturing companies usually have to manage clients from across the globe. Helpdesk software can be deployed at various levels to streamline processes and reduce costs. Here are some use cases:
- Help serve a personalized experience
- Enables 24 X 7 support in multiple languages
- Organize and integrate communication through multiple channels
- Keep your customers and their staff informed with the latest information
- Create performance reports, and manage resources accordingly
V. Healthcare
In the healthcare industry, patients are always looking for top-grade care. The best care is the one that covers quality care along with focussing on providing timely assistance. Patients are looking for quality healthcare with easy procedures and efficient systems. Here’s how a helpdesk can help in the healthcare sector:
- Eases all the simple day-to-day operations
- Query management in order to streamline patient inquiries
- Easy and accessible self-service options
- Patient history management helps gain complete context before the treatments begin
VI. Education
Students juggle multiple roles in schools and universities. The institutions they attend are extremely complex, with academic services, administrative functions, requests, and other activities that need to function like clockwork. Here are some benefits:
Consolidated knowledge, services, and information.
- Helpdesks save time as it eliminates manual and repetitive tasks
- It helps communicate new announcements instantly
- It helps you prioritize tickets as per impact and urgency
- It helps you gain insight into how well your team is performing and whether the end-users are satisfied or not
So these were the industry benefits and use-cases of helpdesk software. Now, let us look at the significant features before you begin picking an ideal helpdesk software for your business.
Features Of a Helpdesk Software
From the beginning of the resolution journey, helpdesk systems will help you create a ticket for every customer interaction and then assign, transfer, and merge them for faster resolution. Robust and intelligent ticketing features will help prioritize issues and expedite action based on the severity of the problem. Whether it is an internal complaint or an external one, never lose out on an opportunity to resolve the query up to the complainant’s satisfaction. Here are some must-have features of helpdesk software:
1. Omnichannel Support
Nowadays customers don’t want to contact the company through traditional ways like phone and fax. Brands need to use multiple channels to resolve customer issues in order to meet them where they go. An ideal helpdesk software supports multiple channels and will fetch queries from all possible interactions. Customers expect brands to be present on the channels of their preference. This includes:
Google finds 85% of digital consumers start the purchasing workflow on one device and finish it on another.
By leveraging an omnichannel feature, your company can deliver a seamless CX and maximize customer satisfaction (CSAT). An omnichannel approach enables you to:
- Ace overall support performance
- Provide quick customer care
- Provide real-time support through channels
- Get in-depth insights for customer profiles
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