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HELP DESK SOFTWARE

A help desk software enables customer care operators to keep track of customer requests and deal with their issues. For a software to be considered a help desk it needs to consist of at least 3 elements: ticket management, automation suite, and have a reporting capability.

One of the most common questions we receive when we tell potential customers we are a helpdesk software: “Is that like a CRM?” It can be a tricky question to answer, but this breakdown will help you understand how helpdesks work with CRMs and the three distinct ways companies use them.
A customer service platform that covers your customer touchpoints email, phone, chat, social media, and so on and pulls each of them into your helpdesk as a ticket (or case). A helpdesk is a hub for communicating with your customers. From there, it’s your task to resolve and respond to each ticket in your system.

Beyond that, there are many ways you can use a helpdesk, from the simple to the sophisticated.
Here are the 3 major ways businesses are using helpdesks:

As a traditional support desk
The first helpdesks were designed for functionality, in-and-out style.
Traditional support was designed to be reactive: to track and fix issues as customers reported them to get them back up and running. End of interaction. That translates into a very simple use case:

Customers are reporting bugs and incidents at the same time:
Log incidents in a queue, fix/ forward them and mark as resolved.

The traditional helpdesk has one other useful benefit: it helps support teams maintain a service level agreement (SLA). An SLA is a contract between a service provider (the support team) and the customer that defines the level of service expected from the support team. It ensures you’re responding to each ticket by a certain deadline. The helpdesk can process the number of incidents reported along with response times over a month (or a year).

This is the most common and obvious use for a helpdesk for businesses whose customer support needs are relatively static.

As a service desk
The service desk was the first time both support and businesses had a single view of their customers.

The service desk supports not just tickets, but workflows. Like an operations center, the service desk keeps an entire organization humming along. It powers the workflows of any team, which means an HR team can engage with candidates while the IT team handles support requests. The service desk solves many of the problems organizations face as they scale and their operations become increasingly complex:

Getting cc’ed on too many emails without context:
The service desk gives you customer history and past behaviors.

Repeatedly answering the same inquiries:
The service desk lets you pull in templated answers to pull together a quick response.

Manually redirecting or assigning each ticket:
The service desk lets you automatically filter and forward certain inquiries to the right person or team. For example, you should be able to send all technical inquiries straight to your technical support.

Account managers are out of the loop about why customers are contacting support:
The service desk can be set up to CC the account manager whenever a customer gets in touch with support.

The service desk also usually includes a knowledge base, which serves as a searchable user manual, with how-to and explanatory articles, usually written to help customers troubleshoot and fix problems themselves.

A service desk is still limited though, and very reactive. It takes something to trigger a workflow a customer submitting a ticket, a subscription set to expire, a newly made contact, and so on. The service desk helps businesses tie customer service into their overall strategic goals.

As an all company customer service platform

This is the idea behind an increasingly support-driven marketplace. The rise of the subscription based economy where customers can instantly jump ship and move on to a competitor has turned the tables on reactive customer service. A reactive business waits for customers to request support. A proactive business has a success and enablement plan from Day 1, working on questions like “why” and “how”.

Leads and potential customers are dropping off instead of converting or buying
Identify and contact disengaged customers and offer to set up a session to help them use the product.

Customers who tweet for help are asked to send an email, resulting in multiple tickets and inconsistencies
All communication falls into a single inbox, so teams view incoming messages consistently regardless of channel.

Customers aren’t implementing the newest features available to them
Identify and personally reach out to customers who have fallen behind to help them update or upgrade.

Customers are not renewing their subscriptions or moving off.
Identify and personally reach out to customers who have fallen behind to help them update or upgrade.

These companies are venturing out from technology driven to process driven customer relationships.

Shared team inboxes help teams across the business collaborate from the same hub, accessing the same single customer history. With all conversations in one place, there are no department silos.

For the first time, your customers don’t need to flag a problem to get your attention. Your support team can send an outbound message without creating a ticket. You can just check in with customers every so often to engage them.

You might have sales, support and dev working together to enable a customer. You might use shared team inboxes to onboard and initiate them into their product or service.

 
How does help desk software work?
When a customer has a query or complaint, they can contact the business in any number of ways, including phone, email, live chat, and social media.

Help desk software enables customer service teams to answer queries and complaints quickly and accurately regardless of what channel the customer uses.

Customers can also help themselves
This self-service option is usually in the form of a knowledge base with articles to answer frequently asked questions or provide troubleshooting guidelines.

It can also be in the form of live chat, where customers are initially interacting with an AI system, known as a ‘chatbot’. The help desk software can resolve many of the frequently asked questions through the chatbot before a customer service agent needs to step in.

If an issue can’t be resolved via self help and the customer connects with the business directly, help desk software will create a “ticket” or open a file on that customer.

Customer service agents can focus on complex cases
Help desk employees use the software to methodically process and resolve these tickets for internal or external customers. It then routes and escalates those tickets as needed to assist help desk employees in addressing customer concerns.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of what a help desk ticket process looks like:

 
Ticket Creation: A user creates a ticket via phone, email, live chat, and social media. The help desk software will automatically create a ticket or open a case on the user.

Help Desk Activation: The customer service team or help desk is notified of a new ticket. A member of the team will claim responsibility for the ticket or be assigned to it automatically, depending on the way the customer made contact. For example, a call will be instantly transferred and assigned, but an email may be more manual depending on the system.

Ticket Resolution and Team Interaction: The ticket is updated by the customer service team member based on the information provided by the customer.

If this is a call or live interaction, the customer service member can take notes directly in the ticket from the call, use the help desk software to get answers to predictable questions (e.g “How do I reset my product?” or “How do I return a faulty item?”) or flag product issues to other teams.

They can also tag other team members on the ticket if it needs to be escalated or requires a specialist response.

CRM Integration and Additional Sales Opportunities: If the help desk software is based on an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, it will be able to match pre-existing information the business has on the customer such as: previous calls made, purchases, and interactions with this new touchpoint.

This can help give the customer service team member more information on the customer that could help resolve their issue. It can also identify potential upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

Ticket Closure and Contact Renewal: Once the issue or query is resolved, the person in charge of the ticket will close it. However, all that information collected should stay within the help desk software or CRM as updated contact information for use in future queries and interactions.