IT Helpdesk Heroes: Simple Ways to Offer Customer Service People Can’t Stop Talking About

Customers form their opinion of a company in three important ways — through their experience with staff while making initial inquiries before and during a sale, their experience with the product or service itself, and the ease with which they get to solve problems that appear after the sale. Both before sales and after, then, it’s the efficient customer service part that helps customers get on well with a company.

Far too many businesses make serious mistakes planning and executing their customer service, however. Rather than invest in improved customer experience, they choose, instead, to throw themselves into offering a better product. This can be a mistake. Four out of five people have ended a relationship with a business at some point, primarily as a result of a poor helpdesk experience. To small- and medium-sized businesses all over the country, disappointed their customers ends up costing losses worth $85 billion.

It makes a great deal of sense for any company to look at their helpdesk, and make sure that they get it right. In most cases, this means choosing automation.

For any business that isn’t familiar with it, here’s why helpdesk automation is indispensable and is the most important path to improvement.

Is helpdesk automation really important?

The only helpdesk automation that many businesses care about is the self-service kind that sends callers down interactive mazes of recorded messages. The need for automation in the form of helpdesk software, automation that counts, is simply overlooked.

Helpdesk software is an inexpensive aid to customer service personnel, that helps with complaint tracking, among other things. Yet, vast numbers of small and medium businesses continue to rely on simple email, spreadsheets and even pen and paper. It’s easy to see why the manual route can make for poor results. Among other problems, it can lead to delays and lost complaints.

Software can help businesses contact customers

In the past, phone and email were the only ways that customers expected to be contacted. These days, they need a plethora of options — everything from text and chats to social media. It is simply not possible to reach out to customers in these ways without live help software.

Sometimes, there simply isn’t enough internal communication

Everyone can recall dozens of customer service experiences where they received contradictory information from different reps during different calls. In these circumstances, reps tend to ask customers calling in for the name of the rep that they first spoke to.

It can be an extreme irritant to customers to be asked for the name of a rep. This kind of challenge is best avoided through the deployment of helpdesk software. Such software allows centralization and even collaboration among different workers. Mix-ups reflect poorly on a company, and should never happen.

Measuring helpdesk performance

With any task, it’s constant evaluation that helps improve performance. It’s important to create the right metrics, repeatedly measure by them, and then improve. It’s actually one of the biggest selling points of helpdesk software, the way in which they aid in such measurement and improvement.

In many companies, for example, such evaluation exercises help identify ways in which an interface may be improved for quicker access. According to SysAid’s helpdesk software, the customization feature available in the most recent software products allows businesses to experiment with different efficient interfaces to improve performance.

You need to engage your customer service personnel better

Customer service tends to be a noticeably monotonous job. Helpdesk staff need assistance to stay focused. Gamification is a big part of software design today and aims specifically at these problems. Not only is it important for businesses to invest in helpdesk software, it’s important that they look for gamification features that help make the job more interesting to employees. There could be points given, badges, prizes, the ability to make more money and so on. Gamification can be vital to employee engagement, and, ultimately, to customer satisfaction.

It’s important to give personnel a hand sometimes

The latest helpdesk software products come with AI chatbots that help agents become more efficient at what they do. They may be able to send answers to customers with simple questions, and type stock greetings when beginning chat interactions with customers among other things. Helpdesk personnel truly become more efficient with chat bots. These tend to only be available on helpdesk software.

Software presents businesses with an easy, low investment way to correctly improve customer service. In this day and age, there is no reason to hold out.