After establishing customer support as a channel offering for your business, inevitably you come to wonder what help desk best practices you should be following to guide your service desk team towards success.
Well first off, congratulations on setting up a support team for your business—that is already a big step in the right direction for building a customer-first business.
Now, whether you’ve already purchased and set up help desk software, or you’re on the hunt for the best all-in-one customer support tool for your unique business needs, here is an unbiased look at which best practices you should implement better serve your customers and increase customer satisfaction.
The point of using help desk software is, well, to provide help and assistance to those that need it.
So whether it’s your internal IT team using the service desk to manage support tickets, or it’s an external facing mailbox where your customers can reach you when they have questions, it is critical to set customer service procedures that you and your team members will follow when using the tool.
To lay out your customer service processes, think of what next step you want taken after a new ticket has been opened. Ask yourself the following questions:
Now that you’ve got a sense of what your process might evolve into, use help desk workflows to bring this process to life. At DoneDone, we use a very simple workflow to facilitate our customer service process.
We have three statuses: Open, Pending, Solved. We also have four priority settings: Low, Medium, High and Critical. Tickets move between all three of each, depending on the inquiry.
Here’s an example:
This simple-yet-sturdy works for us—but what’s great is that our customers can customize their own customer support workflow, to suit their needs. We suggest starting simple (like the one above) and iteratively improving your workflow over time as you adjust to the process and learn more about what your clients need.
Once you’ve established a solid customer support process and flow, your goal should be to improve efficiency over time to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. The only way to do this is by analyzing your customer support data. That includes data related to your support tickets and team performance.
Even if you’re not super data-savvy, your service desk solution should make understanding your customer service metrics as simple as possible. I mean, what’s the point of purchasing a help desk if it makes life more complicated, right?
Use your help desk to view and access key customer service metrics, like:
It’s no secret that internal team collaboration is critical to business success. So why are so many businesses still using one tool to manage projects, and another to manage their support?
Often, customer feedback arrives via the service desk, which is likely very relevant to helping you improve business processes, products, and services. Yet, many businesses suffer from the clunkiness of trying to pass customer feedback over to the appropriate team or stakeholder so that it provides true value and informs how your business evolves.
If the tools don’t talk to each other natively, it’s likely that teams aren’t collaborating as optimally as they could be.
That’s why combining your help desk and project management solutions into one is vital. With a solution that offers both under one roof, customer service teams can tag, prioritize and link relevant customer support tickets to ongoing internal projects. That puts your customers (and their insights) at the heart of your business.
When you’re beginning to set up a help desk solution for your business, start with simplicity and then scale up from there. Help desk best practices can guide you along the way, and so can service desk software that makes serving your customers easy and intuitive.
DoneDone’s all-in-one collaboration platform makes life simple for customer support teams. See why hundreds of companies trust us for handling interactions with teams and customers. Give it a try today.