The meaning of Help desk
A help desk is a centralised team within a corporation that organises talks using software to service employees or customers on a wide scale.
What exactly does a help desk do?
Many businesses have their definition of a help desk that is influenced by the purpose of the help desk.
A help desk’s primary aim is to provide IT support to external clients or internal customers (workers) that require assistance.
However, other firms use it to refer to customer support, customer service, or customer advocacy team in a broader sense.
A help desk could also refer to the software that a customer uses when seeking assistance.
Help desk and a service desk difference
Some businesses refer to their help desk as a service desk rather than a help desk. Others say that the distinction between a help desk and a service desk is that the latter is a progression of the former, reflecting a new focus on providing fast, customised support to end-users. What matters is the kind of service you get from your support team, not what you call them.
What is the significance of a help desk?
Companies of all sizes and types can benefit from a help desk, from international corporations that assist millions of other businesses in various languages to small consumer-facing businesses that need to respond to customer concerns promptly without recruiting an army of support people.
While there are many advantages to having a help desk, these are three of the most important:
Customer satisfaction is increased.
The most obvious benefit of a help desk is satisfied clients who obtain quick and easy solutions to their concerns.
A help desk can solve problems, save a customer, and increase customer loyalty.
From Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020, below are a few statistics that shed light on the commercial impact of customer service:
- When determining which company to buy from, 60 percent of customers stated having a rapid response to an inquiry is vital.
- Customer service, even more than the actual product or service providing, is a key trait that helps customers feel loyal to a brand, according to 57 percent of customers.
- After just one terrible customer encounter, about half of customers indicate they would move to a competitor. When more than one unfavourable encounter occurs, the percentage rises to 80 percent.
Enhances employee happiness
While it makes good financial sense to focus on the demands of external customers, improving the support experience for your employees—your internal customers—can be just as beneficial.
Indeed, a positive staff experience is linked to a positive customer experience. According to Gartner’s research, nearly two-thirds of employees believe that their company’s inability to consistently excel in customer experience is due to excessive effort.
It makes sense: when employees have to climb a ladder to get help, they are taking time away from meeting their customers’ requirements.
Allows a company to grow and scale more effectively.
Customers and employees who are happy are critical to a company’s long-term success.
If they don’t feel supported, they won’t stay loyal for long, and losing clients makes growth much more difficult. A help desk enables a business to expand and scale in response to the needs of its internal and external customers.
There are seven characteristics of an excellent help desk.
An excellent help desk consists of two layers.
Your help desk agents are on the front lines, speaking directly with consumers, but the organisation must provide them with the tools they require to accomplish their jobs effectively.
At both levels, success begins with the implementation of a few important components:
The right people
The individuals that work at a support desk are the secret sauce. Both human and technological abilities are required for an effective help desk team.
Hire people who have a customer-centric, empathic mindset and can provide excellent interpersonal customer service.
A robust ticketing system is required.
You’ll need technology that helps your people succeed.
Support tickets are interactive records that allow a support team to track progress on client requests, communicate on complicated issues with numerous agents, and provide a contextual perspective of each customer’s service experience—and a ticket management system connects it all.
An omnichannel ticketing system ensures that a help desk team can track, manage, prioritise, organise, reply to, and resolve every ticket, regardless of the source of the conversation.
A good ticketing system enables a company to reach customers where they are, whether it’s through live chat, messaging, email, a customer portal, or over the phone.
What is the procedure for creating a help desk ticket?
With help desk software, businesses can convert client discussions into support tickets. When talks turn into tickets, support teams can do the following:
- From the same office, respond to customers across several channels.
- Advanced capabilities like triggers, automation, and workflows help you track, manage, and prioritise interactions at scale.
- Integrate their help desk with internal communication technologies like email and Slack to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration.
- Integrate discussions with third-party software, such as CRM, marketing automation, or payment processors.
- Agents should be assigned discussions depending on their expertise, such as product focus or language.
- Make use of important customer information gleaned through interactions.
A powerful problem tracker
An issue tracker is a crucial tool for an IT help desk since it allows it to efficiently record issues and errors that clients encounter with the software. This allows the support agent, engineer, and management to track the issue until it is rectified, as well as provide users with timely status updates.
Email triggers, for example, can keep staff informed while an IT team handles internal customer demands.
Self-service
Customers can use a knowledge base, community forum, or AI-powered technology like Answer Bot to get answers on their own, making self-service a logical partner to a help desk.
It’s critical to assist clients before they need to contact you.
An internal knowledge management system can also help your help desk personnel maintain consistency in processes and troubleshooting guides.
Analytics
A help desk can offer you a plethora of information on your customers.
However, this is only achievable if your help desk system includes a simple analytics tool. This provides help desk managers with detailed information on everything from their teams’ performance to client happiness. When shared across the company, it might reveal information such as consumer pain points and product areas in need of improvement.
Feedback from customers
Every help desk engagement requires customer input. Help desk software can incorporate feedback into the process by allowing a support team to automatically contact clients after they’ve resolved an issue to assess their performance.
Help desk personnel may even forecast client happiness before they take a survey using AI.
Apps, integrations, and automation
There are no two help desks alike.
A support desk employee can modify their work environment through automation, apps, and integrations. This enables tasks such as assigning an agent to a conversation based on their expertise, closing tickets after a set period of time, and populating tickets with predetermined responses known as macros to be automated.
Collaboration is made easier by integrating your help desk system with internal technologies like Slack. If you’re a multinational company, your help desk will almost certainly need to handle translation apps.
What is the Best Help Desk Software for Your company?
Customer (or employee) experience might be hampered by inefficient technologies such as pooled inboxes and spreadsheets.
All of the tools and components stated above are included in the correct help desk system, which provides a support team with everything they need to give fast, personalised support.
While the type of help desk that is appropriate for your company will be determined by the unique demands of your team and customers, there are a few crucial considerations to make when selecting a help desk solution.
Grosspietsch recommends that your support team opt for help desk software that:
- Integrates with your existing company systems and is simple to set up, allowing you to focus on your customers rather than on system administration.
- Allows your workers to work from any location without having to create, support, or operate their own data center. Cloud-based help desks have the advantage of operating and storing data on remote servers, providing businesses greater flexibility in how and where they employ the service. This is especially critical when dealing with customers in a crisis when teams must frequently switch to a remote work environment.
- Scales up and down in response to consumer demand. “Choosing an open platform that allows you to modify rapidly and go wherever your customers go next has never been more important,” said Grosspietsch. “The fundamental criteria for getting down to the business of assisting people are initial time-to-value and continual time-to-value.” The perfect help desk solution is adaptable to any workflow and powerful enough to manage even the most complex company while remaining flexible enough to scale at any speed.
Choosing an open platform that allows you to modify rapidly and go wherever your customers go next is critical.
An efficient help desk creates the groundwork for a positive customer experience, whether internal or external. a company assesses what a help desk means to them and equips its help desk staff with the appropriate tools, it can begin providing the kind of service that leads to customer pleasure and loyalty.
About us
DAC Services and Solutions is part of an international group, leader in Multilingual Call Center and Multilingual BPO. DAC Services and Solutions has more than 10 years of experience, our employees speak many languages and cover many countries, we are available non-stop around the year and through our flexible pricing system, our prices are competitive and cater to any business type.