In this competitive world, closing a deal is not the end goal. Customer retention and customer satisfaction are some of the most essential factors in the ultimate success of a business.
Organizations should keep improving their customer service strategy to provide excellent customer support to existing clients and satisfy them each time they interact with your brand.
That’s why help desk software is needed to solve all your customer service problems and support you in improving customer satisfaction.
On-Premise Helpdesk or SaaS, if you are confused about which one is better, then you have come to the right place. Today, we will discuss how to get the best help desk software for your business and why it is essential.
Why Use Help Desk Software
Ideal help desk software helps businesses serve their customers better and more effectively. Here are some of the reasons why you should choose and implement good help desk software:
Streamlined Communication
A help desk software helps you create a solid communication medium with customers and other employees. It creates a solid structure where it is directed to the right employee, depending on the complexity of the issues. When a customer’s issue is assigned, the employee can check the old conversations or purchase history to solve it effectively.
The helpdesk software can integrate various communication mediums, such as email, social media, etc, to receive and send messages to customers. Chatbots and pre-written replies are great for common queries but lack a personal touch regarding complex issues. The helpdesk software streamlines communication and helps businesses build good customer connections.
Improved Response Times
Help desk software will notify the right team or employee whenever a customer submits a query. It allows scheduling the pre-written reply as soon as the query is submitted to let the customer know that the business has started working to solve their issue.
After assigning the query, customer service employees can connect one-to-one over the preferred communication medium and solve it as soon as possible. The software allows internal collaboration features to seek expertise or advice and work on the issue. It thus helps to improve response time and increase customer satisfaction.
Multi-Channel Support
In this digital age, staying connected with customers on all digital channels, be it email, social media, website, etc., has become essential. It allows customers to get in touch on all channels per their preference, increasing customer engagement, trust, and loyalty.
A helpdesk software offers multi-channel support integrating with email platforms, phone, call, social media platforms, etc. Whenever a customer tries to get in touch with the brand via any channel, it is automatically added as a ticket and assigned to the right employee.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Customers always want their problems solved faster as they have purchased your products and services. Even a potential lead can have a query that, if not solved effectively, can result in losing a future customer.
With help desk software, you can serve your customers faster and more effectively and keep them updated about their tickets from start to end. The right technology can help your business increase customer satisfaction.
Improved Team Collaboration
With help desk software, all the internal teams can see the status of each ticket and who is working on what. It helps teams to collaborate using one single platform and work together to solve the query faster. Businesses should choose simple help desk software to allow cross-team collaboration without any complexity.
This allows businesses to ensure the right ticket is assigned to the right employee and requests are resolved completely. It allows managers to track the progress and performance of employees.
Analytics and Reporting
The best help desk software provides insightful analytics and key metrics to track the customer support team’s performance. It provides reports to analyze the current customer support strategy and how it can be improved. It helps businesses to track and manage the effectiveness of their ticket resolution, responses, and more.
It allows you to troubleshoot why a particular issue takes too long to be solved, how it can be improved, etc. Tracking and analyzing will help you to identify patterns and customer behavior and improve customer support strategy.
Increased Efficiency and Productivity
The customer support team has to do various repetitive tasks, which, if automated by help desk software, can be done faster and with fewer errors. It saves time for more priority tasks, thus increasing efficiency and productivity. Some of these tasks are sending messages whenever a customer submits a query, assigning a query to the right employee, etc.
Most of these tasks consume time and cause delays in solving the issue, which can result in decreased customer satisfaction. That is where help desk software speeds up the process by streamlining workflows and automating repetitive tasks.
Cost-Effective Solution
A help desk software is a cost-effective solution to increase customer satisfaction and solve customer issues faster. Most of the customer service manual tasks take time and are repetitive. These tasks, if done by employees, not only take time but more employees as well.
A helpdesk software helps to save time, which employees can use for priority tasks that can only be done by them. Less resources means less money invested in implementing just this software.
Internal Knowledge Base
A help desk platform allows a one-in-all knowledge base platform that employees from the customer service team can leverage. It contains resources for customer queries like ticket numbers, old chat histories, employees assigned in the past, etc.
It makes it easier for anyone on the team to refer easily. Some help desk software also contains guides and courses on how to use the software and solve queries faster, as well as tips and tricks to improve your overall customer service performance.
General tips on selecting the best Help Desk Tools
Here are the steps to follow before choosing the right help desk tool for your organization:
- The first step is understanding customer service needs and creating an effective strategy. Define what excellent customer service means: getting a 5-star rating or getting more repeat customers.
- The next step towards selecting the perfect helpdesk solution is understanding your customer expectations and aligning them with your needs.
- Identify the type of help desk software your business needs. The help desk software can be web-based, on-premise, enterprise or open-source.
- Ask these questions before choosing your helpdesk software:
- How many users do you need?
- What’s the rating and review of the platform?
- How is their customer service?
- How many communication channels do they provide?
- What metrics do they provide for analyzing and reporting?
- Consider checking the core features of the tools you have shortlisted; some of the features that a helpdesk tool must have are:
- Team collaboration
- Issue tracking
- Live chat
- Reports and analytics
- Find tools to scale the platform as your business grows and gets more customers.
- Finally, the tool’s pricing plan should match your budget.
Help Desk Tools Recommended by Geekflare
Following are some of the best helpdesk SaaS platforms for your business:
#1. Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM and helpdesk software that helps businesses deliver faster and smarter customer service. It is an easy-to-use, one-stop solution for marketing, sales, customer service, and IT teams.
Key Features:
- Salesforce Help Desk helps automate redundant work and increases productivity by up to 47%.
- It allows real-time conversation with customers on multiple channels to solve issues faster.
- The software allows for streamlining customer issues and queries to the right employee.
- It allows customizing the platform as per the needs of business and customer service requirements.
Salesforce also provides free training resources to train employees to learn valuable skills and be pros at Salesforce.
#2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk provides cloud-based solutions to businesses to provide the most effective customer service support. It enables smart automation to streamline workflows and get things done faster. It helps companies to increase customer engagement and customer satisfaction.
Key Features:
- Freshdesk provides omnichannel help desk support such as email, chat, phone, website, and social media support.
- It allows teams to collaborate and leverage the platform in real-time.
- The platform is powered by Artificial Intelligence and provides chatbot functionality.
- It allows integration with Freshsale, Freshrelease, and PageDuty.
Freshdesk is a modern and easy-to-use software providing advanced workflow automation and is available as a mobile application.
#3. Jira
Jira provides a reliable and robust helpdesk platform, allowing customers to use a user-friendly and intuitive UI to submit requests or report any issue. It supports automating redundant tasks and helping employees work efficiently.
Key Features:
- The platform provides an intuitive user interface for customers to communicate or submit an issue.
- It allows customers to submit requests through their email.
- It allows customizing and creating an employee helpdesk dashboard.
- It provides various metrics like CAST (Collecting Customer Satisfaction) to measure the success of the customer service team.
- The platform also supports streamlining IT support workflows.
The advances in Jira service-level management are powerful and customized. The platform provides real-time collaboration with customers and other team members.
FAQs
Here are some of the benefits of a helpdesk software:
It helps streamline your customer service processes and workflows.
It reduces workload by automating redundant tasks and allowing employees to focus on more important work.
The software enables organizations to keep the standard consistent and ensure compliance.
A help desk tool can help your business monitor and improve the IT security of your network.
It helps businesses increase customer engagement and improve customer satisfaction and retention.
Here are the critical differences between the help desk and IT support:
Helpdesks focus on solving customer issues and increasing customer satisfaction. While IT support solves advanced queries from customers and internal teams that require technical expertise.
Helpdesk employees work with customers who are not happy or facing any issue with a product or service. IT support employees work with customers facing technical issues.
The main purpose of the help desk is to provide excellent customer support and be their first point of contact for anything they need.
Helpdesk software helps businesses solve issues and queries as soon as possible. It allows interacting with customers through multiple channels in real-time and managing them. The tool gives reports and analytics to improve customer support strategy and increase conversion rates.
The objective of the help desk system is to:
Provide excellent customer support service
Solve customer issues faster
Omnichannel support
Increase customer engagement and satisfaction
Wrapping Up
Choosing the best help desk software for your business can seem easy, but it can be more complicated than you think. Customers expect excellent customer service from a business, impacting customer engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Your business and team deserve the right tool and perfect solution to empower your customer service.
The tools mentioned in the article are some of the most popular and highly rated helpdesk platforms. You can review their features, match them with your business needs, and choose the best suits you.