Okay, let’s get it out. Implementing the best help desk practices for your business results in satisfied customers, improved agent productivity, better customer service metrics, a great brand reputation and a loyal customer base!
Customer support is one of the most crucial aspects of a business today. Fortunately, businesses have understood this in the last couple of years and started taking effective measures to scale their customer service.
Companies in the growth phase have reported their priority goals as improving customer experience and operational efficiency. And implementing the help desk practices can help you achieve both with ease!
So, in this article, we’ll be talking about the best help desk practices you should put into practice for your business.
That said, let’s get started.
10 Best Practices for Help Desk Support
Before we start looking at the help desk best practices, let’s quickly understand what a help desk software is.
“A helpdesk software is a tool that allows businesses to streamline their customer support. Agents can manage all the customer queries from one place. With a helpdesk software in place, you can scale your customer support standards – quick resolutions, improved agent productivity and offer the best customer support experiences every single time.”
So, that’s a helpdesk software for you and its benefits. Let’s look at the first best practice for help desk support.
1. Choosing the Right Help Desk Support Software
It all starts with choosing the right help desk support software. No matter what help desk practices you try to implement, it isn’t going to help your business out if you aren’t choosing the best helpdesk software.
Choosing the right help desk software can go a long way in helping you scale your customer support. Here are some of the factors you should consider when choosing a help desk software,
- Does your help desk software integrate all your customer support channels in one place?
- Does it provide automation and ticket routing options?
- Is it easy to implement and use?
- Is there a dedicated customer support team to help you out with any and all sort of issues you face?
- Is there a demo/free trial session available to help you understand the product?
- Does it fit into your company’s budget?
The above-mentioned questions can help you choose the best help desk support software for your business.
2. Connected, One Inbox Approach
On a scale of 1-10, we’d be rating this help desk best practice all the way to 10 (doesn’t mean others are less important).
Customers are on all platforms and places today. You cannot expect them to get in touch with your business on channels you prefer them to. They get in touch with you via social media, email, chat and more.
When customers reach out to you via different channels, you need to give them the best possible experiences. This can start with not asking customers to repeat their problem all over again (since they might have already explained it on a different channel).
To avoid this, you need to make sure that your help desk is a single point of contact for both your customers and agents. You can do this by deploying an omnichannel helpdesk software.
With an omnichannel helpdesk in place, your support team can monitor and respond to all customer queries from one single place without having to switch tabs – email, chat, social, messaging and more.
Your agents can also use the shared inbox to collaborate on tickets, view customer conversation history across channels and offer the best possible solutions to customers.
So make sure to bring in the one inbox approach into your customer support – helps with quicker response times and improves agent productivity.
3. Enable Agent Collaboration
This is another help desk best practice. Agent collaboration is more of an agent empowering process where you give them the opportunity to collaborate and work together on customer tickets.
What happens here is, that when your agents start working together on tickets, they will be able to come up with better resolutions for customers.
Agents should also be able to set the status of a ticket – whether it’s open, resolved, or being worked on. This helps multiple agents from trying to resolve the same ticket.
Simplify360’s omnichannel helpdesk software allows agents to seamlessly collaborate and resolve tickets with the shared inbox making your support process streamlined at all times.
4. Auto-tagging & Ticket Escalation
What if all your customers’ tickets are tagged based on priority & sentiment and assigned to the right agent? Think of the manual effort and hours the process could save!
Your customer support team can identify and solve high-priority tickets first ensuring customers with critical issues are taken care of at the earliest possible.
With Simplify360, you can set automation workflows where customer queries can automatically be tagged based on the nature and the sentiment of the tickets (thanks to the built-in AI). With this best practice for help desk support implemented, you can take care of customer support on autopilot!
5. Introduce Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Introducing Service Level Agreements can help you maintain order and set the expectations required of your help desk team. Most companies say that incorporating service level agreements are one of the help desk best practices they constantly focus on.
You can implement SLAs like,
- Minimum tickets to be solved in a specific time period
- Minimum CSAT score for a resolved ticket
- The Turn Around Time for replies and more.
Introducing such SLAs can help improve the efficiency of your help desk team.
6. In-depth Knowledge Base and FAQs Section
Having a knowledge base can be super helpful for both your customers and agents. Customers do not have to wait in queues to get in touch with a support agent. They can simply go through the knowledge base or FAQs section, find what they need and resolve it on their own.
Statistics say that 81% of all customers would want to try to resolve issues themselves before getting in touch with a live agent. It’s what they prefer. And you need to make sure you have a good knowledge base in place. This could also increase your CSAT score and allow the agents to take care of more complex issues.
On the other hand, having an internal knowledge base can prove to be useful for help desk agents. They can be familiar with the process and company policies and be at their best when offering solutions to customers. An internal knowledge base can also help new agents who join your company.
7. Have Canned Responses & Templates In Place
It’s common for your support agents to receive the same kind of support queries every now and then. What’s also common is your support agents manually typing the same answer repeatedly over and over again. This could kill the productivity of your support agents and consume a lot of manual effort.
What could be done instead is to have canned responses and standard templates for such scenarios. Your agents can simply choose from the canned responses deck and send out responses on the go – quicker response times and better agent productivity.
You can get started by looking at the customer interactions, find out which are the most common queries and come up with responses for the same.
8. Send Out Customer Satisfaction Surveys
It’s mandatory that you know what your customers think about your business/services. This helps you make informed decisions and change your strategy accordingly. Sending out surveys to customers once a month or when a query is resolved can help you know their opinion and understand what can be made better within your customer support process.
With Simplify360, you can send automated customer surveys when a particular action is completed. This helps you stay in the know and become a customer-centric company.
Speaking of customer satisfaction surveys, here are 25 CSAT questions you should use in your next survey.
9. Monitor Performance & Train Your Help Desk Agents
In order to deliver the best customer support, you need to make sure your help desk agents are at their best. Constantly monitoring the important service metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT), Average First Response Time and Ticket Backlog can help you understand the performance of our help desk team.
Identifying the challenges your helpdesk team is facing and taking steps to resolve the same can significantly improve the metrics. Also, train your help desk team and make sure they follow the best practices for help desk support. Making them learn how to empathize with customers and helping them get familiar with the company policies and basic stuff like keyboard shortcuts and other help desk related stuff can help you improve your help desk team performance.
10. Hire the Right Talent
A large portion of how the overall nature of your customer support is based on the talent you hire. When it comes to customer service, it is important that you hire the right talent. Make sure you find the below-mentioned qualities in the help desk agents you are about to hire,
- Delivers respect to your customers
- Active listening skills
- Ability to empathize with customers
- A positive and patient attitude
- Determined to make customers happy
Finding agents with such qualities for your help desk can help you offer the best customer experience every time.
Final Few Words
Following the best practices for help desk support can improve your overall customer support standards leading to happier and more loyal customers. This could improve sales and retention figures significantly.
Improving your help desk starts with deploying the right help desk software and working closely with a partner who understands the importance of delivering great customer experiences every day.
Simplify360 is trusted by over 5000+ global businesses to take care of their customer support. With an AI-powered, omnichannel customer support platform, we streamline support for businesses across channels and offer other services like review management, social listening and more.
You can schedule a FREE demo here.
So, now that we’ve covered the best practices for help desk support you should be following, it’s time you start implementing them. Because every customer and the experience you offer them matters for your business growth!