Customers will always submit inquiries to your business and you’ll need a way to manage the tickets you receive as part of customer support. You need the right support software to help you assist customers when they contact your business and keep their tickets organized with all the extra features such as tagging and prioritization.
Once you grow past a few customer inquiries you’ll start to lose track of customers getting in touch with your business. When your team starts to hire more agents, you’ll also want to think about upgrading your tech stack. It’s no good wrestling with a traditional email inbox and hoping that it does the trick.
Your customer support team needs the right tools in order to operate efficiently in the background helping your customers. You might not have heard of specific customer support tools including a help desk.
What is a customer support help desk?
A customer support help desk is a ticketing system that logs incoming customer inquiries with a unique ticket ID. It usually has a central dashboard where you can see all your open and closed tickets.
It allows teams of agents to collaborate on customer tickets with various features such as assignment, prioritization and tagging. Collision detection prevents more than one agent from working on a customer ticket.
A help desk usually deals with customer tickets as emails which are collected in the help desk, although some offer extra channels such as live chat and social media. This helps you keep track of all the back-and-forth messages that are exchanged during a typical inquiry, and access important details like conversation history and customer information.
What is a help desk used for?
A help desk is used for dealing with customer inquiries that are too numerous for a typical email inbox. Help desks provide extra features that make dealing with customer inquiries easier.
A help desk is used to support customers with products and services relating to your business. Customers typically run into problems with your product and need troubleshooting help, or they have basic inquiries that they need assistance with. They might even just have a simple question about your business.
A help desk connects customer support agents with your customers. A help desk translates customer inquiries into support tickets which your agents can then work on to solve customer problems.
Why you need a customer support help desk
When your support inquiries reach a certain volume you’ll want to start thinking about a customer support help desk. Having a team of agents means you’ll almost certainly want a help desk to help them collaborate and solve customer inquiries.
A customer support help desk is for solving customer support inquiries. So when you start to hear from customers you’ll need a customer support help desk. You need to use it to keep track of customer inquiries and log when they are solved.
Without a customer support help desk your tickets will be hard to manage and keep track of. You won’t be able to manage your inquiries as tickets and agents will be stepping on each other’s toes as they attempt to solve inquiries.
Benefits of a customer support help desk
Makes emails easier to manage
As we’ve mentioned, when you have hundreds of emails landing in your inbox, a help desk makes managing them all so much easier. You have access to important features for prioritization, tagging and assignment that means you’ve gained a leg up over a traditional inbox. A huge influx of emails means that a help desk is going to help you manage volume and uncover efficiencies you never knew were possible.
Facilitates collaboration between agents
Due to some handy features of the help desk, far better collaboration is achievable between agents when you think outside the traditional inbox. Assignment means you can assign particular tickets to particular agents, so everyone knows what they’re working on. Collision detection shows your agents when someone is working on a ticket, preventing duplication. Intelligent routing sends a ticket to the right agent with the best expertise so you always have your finest minds working on a ticket.
Streamlines customer communication
When a help desk is handling the emails, customer communication is streamlined because your agents aren’t getting confused in the back end. A customer sends off an email and it arrives in the help desk, ready to be picked up by the next available agent instead of getting lost in the inbox. Status tells you whether the ticket is open, pending or closed, so agents can keep track of tickets easily in the help desk.
Offers analytics to help with team management
Improve your understanding of the team’s workload with intelligent analytics that tells you when your busiest times are, and which agents are shouldering the biggest workloads. Analytics can give you SLAs so you can understand what your average resolution time is, and work to improve your customer service metrics based on real data.
Improves customer service
A help desk enables far better customer service as it offers you the right tools to help you deal with incoming customer emails. Smoother, more efficient and helpful service is within reach as you adopt a help desk, allowing you to focus on customer needs and provide a better overall service experience. Customer support is elevated with a help desk as agents have the right tools in the back end to facilitate a better customer experience.
Features of a customer support help desk
- Assignment – assign tickets to the particular agent that should work on it
- Tagging – tag your customer tickets with appropriately labels to help with categorization
- Routing – route tickets to the most appropriate agent automatically
- Analytics – metrics and data points to help you analyze customer service performance
- Prioritization – prioritizing customer tickets as high, medium or low depending on urgency
- Internal collaboration – features like commenting and tagging other team members
- Customer contacts – relevant customer information like name and phone number recorded in the system
- Canned responses – frequently used replies can be saved and inserted into emails
- AI features – auto-suggestions for replies and generative AI helping write responses is a more recent feature of help desks
Great examples of a help desk software
Groove
Groove is an intuitive shared inbox that offers all you need for effective customer support. It offers all the usual features for collaboration such as conversation assignment, collision detection, private internal notes, and mentions and notifications so you can keep everyone in the loop.
What makes Groove standout is the inclusion of live chat which you can install on any website to put team members in instant contact with your customers. This live chat software offers round robin assignment to spread the workload among team members, unattended message logic to prompt agents to address a conversation, email continuation for when customers drop offline and alerts and notifications to ensure no chat gets missed.
Groove also offers a knowledge base that provides 24/7 help to your customers. Everyone in your team can access the knowledge base to write help articles. Customize the branding of your knowledge base to fit in with your company.
Help Scout
Help Scout is a shared inbox for your customer support team that you can learn in a single day. Help Scout includes AI to help you write your customer support responses and summarize your conversations. Previous conversations and app activity are displayed right next to the response so your team always knows where it’s at.
Help Scout includes a self-service knowledge base to give customers answers to all their questions, which can be embedded into your website or app with Beacon. You can even embed specific pages where you anticipate customers needing help. Help Scout’s no-code builder gets you up and running in no time, with the ability to customize your help site to fit your brand.
Real-time support with live chat is a feature of Help Scout. Embed on your website to chat with your customers and access your chats from the shared inbox to keep all your messages together. Proactively message your customers with pop-ups from live chat to let them know about new features or promotions.
HappyFox
HappyFox is primarily an email-based ticketing system that organizes emails into tickets. Agents can access these tickets alongside customer details and assign them to the right agent as well as prioritize them based on urgency. Teams can easily collaborate on tickets with internal notes and ticket forwarding.
HappyFox comes with simple knowledge base software which is multilingual in 14 different languages. Customize the branding to suit your company. Set your knowledge base up for search, embed it in your website, or keep it internal for knowledge management.
Use HappyFox to send customer satisfaction surveys to find out how customers really feel about you. Control when to trigger surveys using intelligent automation, or send your surveys manually.
Conclusion
Every business with more than a few customers needs a customer support help desk. You have access to a plethora of features that make managing customer support tickets much easier and streamlines the customer experience. When a customer has a question or problem, it gets submitted to the help desk and agents can get to work on solving the issue.
Without a customer support help desk, you’ll find that tickets get lost and agents are duplicating work as everyone tries to solve an issue at once. A customer support help desk is much more professional by logging inquiries as tickets and tracking when they are solved.
There are numerous help desk options out there including Help Scout, Groove, and HappyFox. They each provide helpful features such as knowledge base and live chat to take your customer support to the next level, as well as all the traditional features you’d expect to help make managing your customer tickets a breeze.
