The landscape of customer service experiences has changed significantly over the years. With the addition of new technology like AI and virtual reality, the efforts you make as a business for customer experience really matter and are exponential in their results.
Businesses need to keep up with customer expectations. When you’re able to exceed their expectations, you generate loyalty in your customers and that’s important to nurture.
Help desk software is a reliable type of technology that manages customer expectations wherever they are in the sales funnel. As of 2024, the global help desk software market is projected to exceed a whopping $11 billion in value, which means it must be benefiting businesses across the globe.
Utilizing help desk software for the purpose of improving customer experience is beneficial to invest in, and this guide will explain why.
Table of contents
- Why customer service really matters for your business
- How to level up your customer experience with help desk software
- 1. Provide agent training for better interactions
- 2. Choose the right help desk software
- 3. Improve first contact and resolution times
- 4. Focus on delivering omnichannel experiences
- 5. Track and optimize performance
- 6. Provide a knowledge hub for self-service
- The benefits of utilizing help desk software
Why customer service matters for your business
Why are customer service and customer experience important for your business? From a reputation standpoint, a glistening reputation is better than a negative one.
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Offering quality products and services is a given, but often enough customer service falls down the priority pile. Your company’s reputation relies on how well you serve your customers. If you’re not looking after them beyond the point of sale, then they might not return again.
With excellent customer experience, it contributes to your brand’s reliability and trust in the company.
Nowadays, jobseekers are looking to work for companies that are well-respected within the public eye. A study found that 50% of candidates said they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation, even if they were offered a pay increase.
Seeing a company care deeply for its customers is a more attractive prospect for some job seekers than the salary – and that’s saying something.
How to level up your customer experience with help desk software
Help desk software is a great way of managing the demands of your customers. Whether a business is struggling with the sheer volume of customers needing help, or simply looking to improve the existing services in place, help desk software is worth leveraging.
- Provide agent training for better interactions
Your customer service agents are the first point of contact for many customers, meaning how they conduct themselves is going to influence customer satisfaction greatly.
To ensure customer agents are making the most out of the help desk software, it’s essential that you provide ample training. Support agents need to be knowledgeable and responsive in order to meet the needs of the customer.
Look at what training tools you’re able to provide to your agents, as well as utilizing the resources available through the help desk software itself.
- Choose the right help desk software
Just like a lot of technology available for businesses and individuals alike, choosing the right software provider is paramount.
As part of your technology stack, help desk software tools will make your employee’s job easier, as well as improve the efficiency of your customer service support.
In order to choose the right help desk software, it’s important to consider the following:
- What’s your budget?
- Will it scale and adapt to your business growth?
- What standout features make the help desk software better?
- What integrations are available?
These are some good starting points to help make comparisons between the help desk software options available.
- Improve first contact and resolution times
The rate at which your customers receive a response through the help desk is critical. When agents are both proactive and reactive, it will only improve the satisfaction of the customer’s first contact with your business.
That means having enough agents available and working at any given time is essential. As well as ensuring communication is happening throughout your customer support teams. That’s where an employee scheduler is likely to be influential as it helps ensure enough staff are on hand to improve first contact and resolution times.
- Focus on delivering omnichannel experiences
Not every customer is going to prefer communicating through the exact same channel, which is why you should look to deliver omnichannel experiences where possible.
A responsive help desk software should provide you with the capability to expand beyond just one or two channels when interacting with your customers. From live chat to email, social media, and more. A help desk software collates all of the support requests that come in from these channels so that they’re easily manageable for your agents to process.
Your agents are also able to help the customer through their preferred channel, which is only going to improve their customer experience with the business.
- Track and optimize performance
To make sure the efforts of your customer agents and support staff are paying off, it’s essential to track and monitor your performance. By monitoring it, you’re able to see what’s working and what isn’t. From there, you’re able to optimize your performance in order to get better output for the work put in.
According to one study, 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experiences alone. Therefore it’s critical to pay attention to how well your help desk operations are doing when comparing it to key metrics.
Help desk software helps to leverage that support experience. There are a number of metrics that you are able to monitor. These include:
- Average resolution time
- Ticket volume
- Agent occupancy and satisfaction
- Customer satisfaction
These are all metrics that help keep track of your customer experience and make meaningful data-driven decisions as a result.
- Provide a knowledge hub for self-service
As part of the help desk software you put in place, customer agents and team members within the help desk department are able to contribute content that aids customers with commonly asked questions.
Whether that type of content is a video demo, text guide, or infographics, they help customers resolve their issues independently and without the resources of your agents.
The benefits of utilizing help desk software
Help desk software is an effective piece of technology that is worth utilizing as a company. Regardless of the company’s size, help desk software is beneficial in many ways.
Helps streamline processes and workflows
Focus and attention on your customer experience and services might be limited because there’s a large volume of queries and/or not enough customer agents on hand. It could also be down to not having a system in place, to begin with to handle all of the communications.
A responsive help desk software helps streamline your processes and workflows in order to deliver better efficiency when dealing with your customers.
Ensures compliance
The way we handle data as a business nowadays is incredibly important. There are a number of policies and regulations that have come into law all over the globe to do with data privacy and security.
From GDPR to more niche policies, it’s essential that your business ensures compliance is present when dealing with data and customers in general. Help desk software helps to maintain compliance and set the standards required by the rules that govern your customer’s territory or territories.
Reduces workload
It’s always a benefit to help lighten the workload of your employees. You may only have a limited amount of staff members helping on the help desk, so using those resources effectively is key.
Help desk software helps to reduce the workload through the use of self-service guides, as well as collating communications from multiple channels for easier navigation.
Improves the security of your network
A help desk software is useful for tightening your network’s security. When you’re managing your customer services through multiple channels, there is a higher risk of compromise to security and your customer’s personal data.
There’s an increasing problem within cybersecurity, whereby more businesses are falling victim to cybercrime. It’s therefore crucial to find a help desk software that strengthens your business activities and customer interactions. A failure to protect customer data often results in reputational and financial damage.
Improves employee and customer experience
The most obvious benefit of investing in help desk software is that it improves both employee and customer experience.
A secure and responsive help desk software is a must-have if you’re looking to improve your customer experience. If you’re struggling with customer interactions and haven’t deployed a help desk software yet, then it’s worth making the investment. Look at what help desk softwares is available and which one meets your company’s needs.
