Your company is growing, and your customer service department is handling more and more calls all of the time. Help desk software seems like a big investment of both time and energy. Is it worth it? When should you consider upgrading your customer support process? Here are seven indications it might be time for you to purchase a help desk software system.
- Your help desk call volume is increasing.
Your call volume is up, which is a good thing because it means you have more customers. But, your customer service agents are having trouble handling all of the calls in a timely manner. By automating the ticketing process, help desk software can save your employees a significant amount of the time they are now spending just filling out documentation. As a result, they will be able resolve more tickets in the same amount of time.
- Your tickets are becoming more complex.
As your products evolve, you may find that many tickets require more than first-line customer service support. Accordingly, a lot of your employees’ time is spent hunting down other employees, transferring calls, and listening to customers repeat the details of their problems. Help desk software systems can streamline this process by tracking ticket information (thus eliminating the need for customers to explain everything again) and providing automatic escalation so you can ensure that each ticket is delivered to the employee best able to resolve it.
- You are starting to offer multichannel support.
Companies can no longer limit their support to over the phone. Customers want to be able to contact organizations directly via email, social media, online chat, and more. But offering multichannel support brings with it the additional administrative burden of trying to keep everything together. Help desk software can alleviate this burden by tracking all customer interactions in a centralized, easily searchable database.
- You want to improve customer relationships.
Your customers have many other choices. You can distinguish yourself from the competition by providing excellent customer relationship management. Using help desk software results in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring that all issues are attended to and resolved as promptly as possible.
- You want to standardize ticket response procedures.
You can save a lot of time and money, as well as ensure that tickets are resolved consistently, by standardizing your response procedures. Help desk software can help you accomplish this through features such as drop-down menus for sending pre-written messages.
- You want to track more information about your customers.
New tools and technologies are making it possible for even small companies to realize the benefits of big data. However, in order to do any meaningful data mining, you first need to have a solid collection of customer information. Help desk software can help facilitate data collection and storage, as well as generate reports and analytics using that data.
- You are building an organizational knowledge base.
Help desk software can collect and track not only your customer interactions, but the knowledge resources your customer service agents use on a regular basis as well. If your knowledge base is expanding, or you are building one for the first time, the software can help you organize your resources into a format that is easy for agents to access and use.
Even small companies are starting realize the advantages of using help desk software to automate their ticketing process. If any of these nine situations represents the current state of your organization, it’s time to put exploring help desk software on your to-do list. The time and money you save, and the increased level of customer satisfaction you experience, will be worth it.
Author Bio: David Miller is an educational researcher who has several years of experience in the field of teaching, online testing and training. He is associated with prestigious universities and many leading educational research organizations. Currently, he is pursuing research in online knowledgebase software and is also a contributing author with ProProfs.