Optimal Helpdesk Management: Key Factors for Success

The days where the product or service was king and customers felt like they were lucky just to have one are gone. Born out of the fire of the digital sales revolution is the power of customisation and personalisation: The customer is in charge and needs to feel taken care of throughout every step of the sales process.

Thus, communication has never been more important for companies, particularly at the stages just before and right after a purchase is made. Customers want to communicate in their preferred method, at the time of their choosing, and do so with knowledgeable resources that can answer their questions quickly and correctly without having to wait on hold for 10 minutes.

In this article, we’ll highlight a pair of linchpins in effective company-customer communication: the help desk and the service desk. Key takeaways will include the differences between them, how vital they are for customer satisfaction, and how technology has rapidly changed these two vital components, allowing companies to employ AI and automation to greatly grow their offerings and keep customers informed and happy.

Understanding Helpdesks and Service Desks

Helpdesk and Service Desk are two customer service terms that get used interchangeably all the time, but the differences between them are crucial to understanding how to optimise each for maximum customer service.
We can best understand the difference by considering a request that most of us have had to make a time or two – our cable TV isn’t working.

When we call that 1-800 number, go to the company website, or use the app, our first query of what we need will direct us to the helpdesk. This is where a customer service representative is going to listen to our problem and try to give us some quick-tip solutions to solve it on our end. They might do a brief check on our system remotely if they have that capability, but their main goal is to walk us through simple steps to get our problem solved. For the purpose of our cable TV issue, we’ll likely be asked to make sure the TV is plugged in, turn it off and on, check the connections, or more recently, restart the Internet router that powers most content devices in our home.

While we occasionally get exasperated as customers having to go through these steps when we’re convinced there is a bigger problem, the helpdesk exists to knock out the most common, least invasive problems that end-users have. The helpdesk representatives wouldn’t ask people if their remote control had dead batteries unless they had witnessed it happen hundreds upon hundreds of times before.

The helpdesk exists to cut costs and save time on both ends. If a customer is able to fix the problem themselves, they receive instant gratification and go back to using the product/service immediately, without having to engage the company further and potentially pay money to have it done. The company doesn’t have to reclassify the call further into its company and doesn’t have to come out to the customer’s house, or have them bring or mail in the malfunctioning item/service. It’s a quick, nearly painless option that keeps customers loyal and keeps brand loyalty high.

Of course, there are plenty of times when the helpdesk can’t solve the problem, and that’s when the company has to pass the customer on to the service desk. The service desk exists to take on more complex problems that will require the company’s direct intervention. It means there is a problem in the business’s infrastructure that has let this problem happen or let an inferior product be sold. The company now has to rapidly deploy a solution that will repair or replace the customer’s broken/damaged/malfunctioning product or service.

Good communication is absolutely vital for both desks for many reasons. Chief among them is the fact that the person has already paid for the product or service and is now experiencing difficulties with it. The fastest way to lose repeat business is to not be able to help a customer when they experience a malfunction. The case could be made that communication is even more vital for the service desk, because being escalated to that side of the company means whatever is not functioning cannot be fixed immediately. Being able to adequately convey to the customer that help is coming and give precise times and dates along with assurances of guaranteed satisfaction are vital.

Everything needs to be functioning at the top of its ability on the helpdesk and service desk. Long wait times and uninformed responses make for very difficult relationships.

The rapid advancement of technology has made it possible for the helpdesk and service desks to be much more capable in helping customers in the most efficient, informed ways. Being able to seamlessly collate a customer’s information across multiple channels and being able to use AI and chatbots to engage customers on initial queries are among the more impressive capabilities currently on offer.

Key Factors for Optimal Management

We’re way past the days of calling a 1-800 number and hearing that our wait time is 27 minutes for the next available operator. Much as the paradigm shift has occurred from the product to the customer, so has the flow of information for customer service.

Customers want to get instant information, talk to someone immediately when they have an issue, and be able to use whatever platform is most comfortable for them. They expect their information to be transferred seamlessly from one channel to the next and never have to explain the same problem twice.

Customer satisfaction is the single-most important goal of all helpdesk and service desk management. If it isn’t earned by these interactions, not only are you losing a customer for life, but you’re also feeling the wrath of their disappointment in the form of organic referrals and their reviews of your company.

A satisfied customer is a company’s best friend; one who feels they are being treated unfairly or ignored is the company’s worst enemy. To ensure they stay on the positive side of the interaction, there are multiple steps that companies can take to insure their service and helpdesks are operating at the top of their game 24/7.

The first of those is to ensure that all employees who work with both desks are part of a continuous workflow where they can access the latest information about the customer and their issue at any point, and that said information is updated in real-time. There is nothing more exasperating for a customer than to get transferred to yet another CSR agent and have to repeat the entire story you told someone else yesterday because no new notes were added to your file.

The second step is to ensure that all employees of both desks are extremely efficient at their tasks, meaning they have proven that they know the ins and outs of how to interact with customers and how to perform their jobs well. If a customer gets on a message exchange with a CSR, but has to wait long stretches of time while the CS looks up everything they don’t have an immediate answer for, or can’t figure out where their job duties are and someone else’s begin, they are failing in this endeavor. While we aren’t trying to rush our customers, we can think of the process as a flowchart where if an employee knows they cannot solve the customer’s problem, they identify this immediately and move them to the next option as swiftly as possible.

The third step involves using automation to quickly expedite parts of the customer service process that do not require human assistance. For example, answering the call, asking for a name and/or account number are all tasks that can easily be handled by a chatbot. Ditto using AI to ask customers to describe their problems in a few words, allowing natural language processing algorithms to identify the likely issue and swiftly route the call or message to the proper department.

We’ve touched on it earlier, but all of these things are key components of omnichannel customer service. When we approach the helpdesk and service desk from the omnichannel method, we are combining all of the customer’s interactions with our company into one big data set that follows them as they move from our social media page to our website to our phone line and back through.

Omnichannel Customer Service Software

The weightiest comparison to be made for using omnichannel customer service software is to imagine having one conversation with the same customer service representative over the course of several days via several different forms of communication.

Pull back on that for a minute to consider how you might solve a problem with a friend or family member. You might start the discussion in person at 8 a.m., continue it throughout the day via phone calls, texts, and emails, and talk again at night over dinner. The form of communication is constantly changing, but the knowledge of the situation that both parties have never does.

The omnichannel customer service software solution gives the company and its customers that same ability to keep extending conversations from one platform to the next without ever losing sight of what was said, when it was said, and how it bears relevance on the current issue. Not only that, but it delivers the same level of high-quality service across all channels, meaning a company can cater to each customer’s specific way that they like to communicate the best.

The constant flow of information also means that no one channel is reliant on another channel to help the customer. In the early days of social media and services like texting, these channels were limited in what they could actually do, often serving as little more than one-way information providers. Customers could sign up to get texts, emails, or social media messages with new information and updates from the company, but could not hold anything approaching a real conversation.

Now if a customer calls the company on their way to work but isn’t able to get the issue resolved before they get to the office, they are equally able to continue the dialogue via text message or an app’s messenger service without losing a single syllable of the previous conversation.

This is the best possible way for the customer to feel like they are having a 1:1 conversation with a single CSR dedicated solely to helping solve their issue and as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Best Practices for Managing Helpdesks and Service Desks

Your helpdesk and your service desk are the company’s first line of defense when dealing with customers, and have the sometimes difficult task of dealing with customers who are upset or unhappy about a problem with their product or service. The need to be as close to perfect as possible is omnipresent for these CSR-driven business units.

These best practices can greatly improve your customer service experience.

1. Effective communication

Regardless of what channel your communication takes place on, it’s essential that your agents make the customer feel heard, appreciated, and satisfied with the results of the exchange.

This starts from the very beginning of the conversation, with a professional, pleasant greeting, eagerness to help solve the problem, and explanation of each step, and the reassurance that the problem will be resolved by the end of the call – with the caveat that it might involve scheduling some sort of repair appointment.

Active listening is an essential trait that insists agents always give the customer their full attention when they are speaking; in order to repeat their pain points back to them and ensure it is a conversation, not a competition to speak.

2. Efficient ticket management

A poorly run ticket system can leave customers feeling helpless and alone. Filling out a lengthy form that conveys all of their information and concerns and getting a random number that says your request will be handled at some future unknown time is the bane of a customer’s confidence in a company.

When ticketing is used, the helpdesk or the service desk must provide constant updates via the customer’s preferred method of communication to ensure that the customer feels they are being kept ‘in the loop’.

Updating them by text or email that their message has been received, has been, and when it will be answered are all vital components that keep a customer from tumbling into despair and anger when they are struggling to get a product or service to work, and can’t solve the issue on their own.

3. Collaboration

We all know the drill. You call the helpdesk and they run through the standard textbook operation of every possible solution why your spreadsheet won’t print. Twenty minutes later, they are finally ready to transfer you to the service desk. The first question when you get rerouted? It’s often “Hi, what seems to be the problem?”

The omnichannel approach eliminates this gap in customer service with the equal sharing of information, but the staff that populates the helpdesk and service desk – and every point in between – must still be excellent communicators and seek to actively help each other help the customers.

4. Constant Improvement

No matter how much training a person gets before they begin manning either the helpdesk or the service desk, there are a litany of things that only on-the-job experience can prepare one for. Desk management must incorporate feedback for agents in the form of KPIs, regular performance evaluations, open forums for Q&A, and the ability to develop their own best practices.

This keeps employees feeling like they are a part of an improved solution and not trapped in a scripted role that might not always work.

Conclusion

The efficient functionality of service desks and helpdesks has never been more vital to companies than right now. The expectations of customers have reached an all-time high when it comes to a streamlined experience that avoids traditional obstacles like taking place over more than one day or more than one platform.

Outstanding customer service is one of the few remaining niches where one company can showcase its definitive advantages over another, and make one-time customers into customers for life.

Helpdesks and service desks can lead this effort by incorporating best practices including great communication with the customer, collaborating well between different desks and teams, and incorporating omnichannel customer service software to provide a seamless transition from one form of communication to the next.

The omnichannel solution allows customers to use any form of communication they want and receive the same top-flight service and solutions.