Understanding how customers feel about you and what they really need is critical to small business success. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult than ever during the coronavirus pandemic. That’s why you need to gather this data whenever and wherever you interact with your customer base; a key place that many companies overlook is your help desk software.
Not only does a typical help desk interaction solve a customer’s problem, but it also gathers first-hand data on product pain points, customer attitude, demographic data, and more. Making sure your help desk not only gathers this information but is able to share it with other office apps, especially your customer relationship management (CRM) system for sales and your business intelligence (Bi) stores for integration with other analytics. That means thinking about a number of different factors if you’re looking at choosing a new, or maybe even your first, help desk platform today. We’ve compiled the five tips below to help.
Know Your Budget
Sure, this is a basic consideration, but one that’s worth a very close look. Just because your business is a small one doesn’t mean you need to skimp on a customer support solution, especially in these days of outsourcing and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. There are many SaaS help desk solutions that are both reasonably priced and feature-rich, and choosing the right one is important since this is a key customer-facing touchpoint. Many small businesses give help desks short shrift thinking a “real solution’ is too expensive, so they make do with a phone and a dedicated email address. That might get you through a few interactions, but it doesn’t provide several of the key benefits that a dedicated help desk platform can, including not just smart ticket management, but especially data gathering and sharing as well as integration with other third-party software your business might be using.
The formal way of calculating your help desk budget is to build a metric, called total cost per ticket or total cost per incident. This is basically what you’re spending on every customer call, and you can figure out the number by dividing help desk operating expenses by total ticket volume during any given time slice. Operating expenses should include staff costs and facilities costs, including not only your software costs but your channel costs (voice over IP (VoIP) phone or video conferencing solution, for example), too.
Once you’ve got an idea of what you’re already spending, map that to your favorite help desk solution. Be aware that the way in which cloud-based help desk software is priced can be confusing, as help desk vendors can bill for their software on a monthly or annual basis. Their different pricing plans also often depend upon the number of users or agents per year. For example, Freshdesk offers a SaaS solution that begins at $15 per agent per month. Its sister product, Freshservice, is free for up to three agents and up to 100 assets or users but has a different set of features. So, study pricing plans carefully to make sure you’re paying only for what you need.
On-Premises or Cloud Service?
There are two basic types of help desk software deployments: (1) on-premises software that you install locally on a server you’d need to purchase separately and (2) SaaS solutions that are hosted in the cloud and managed for you. These days, the vast majority of small businesses will opt for a cloud solution because the cost and flexibility benefits are simply too great, especially during the pandemic. However, there are instances where an on-premises solution is the better way to go, and there are pros and cons either way.
On-premises installations don’t just require a separate hardware investment (the server), they also require an IT professional to manage them long-term. On the other hand, cloud-based software requires a working Internet connection (a serious question now that many of your help desk reps are looking at hybrid work long-term, which multiplies the number of internet connections you need to keep running) and, if you store your data on off-premises servers, there are data safety and governance worries.
If you feel absolutely more secure about keeping your data in-house, then on-premises help desk software is the better choice for you. However, data in the cloud tends to be managed more securely and by dedicated security professionals because the service provider is able to take advantage of economies of scale, so your data is probably safer there than you think. In general, we’d consider SaaS solutions to be the best option for SMBs because they can be cheaper, easier to use, and don’t require you to install or maintain them on your own server.
Also, if your employees or customer service agents use mobile devices such as smartphones to access customer information, SaaS help desk solutions offering cross-platform support for mobile devices (Android or iOS) would be a good choice. Our Editors’ Choice winners in the help desk space as well as smaller players like Gorgias and Zoho Desk are among the many SaaS help desk solutions that offer smartphone apps for agents.
What Does Ticket Management Look Like?
Many businesses think ticket management is ticket management and let the software’s constraints steer them. Given the sheer number of solutions available these days, that’s not your best move. Different platforms manage tickets differently and most give you several options beneath that umbrella especially once you consider integrating the help desk with third-party software, like a BI or reporting tool. So sit down with your current help desk administrators and map out not just the current ticketing process, but its pain points and their suggestions, too.
Ticket management features should let you set priorities, categories, assignments, and track status changes. Most do exactly that, but how they do it is the trick. You’re looking for something that’ll work most effectively for your organization. So be sure to sign up for the free trial services most SaaS vendors offer or download the free evaluation versions of on-premises software and try them out for a few weeks before making a final decision. The way different software interfaces are designed and the emphasis placed on one feature set over another can vary greatly between software makers, which can make your techs either love it or hate it.
For example, tickets can be initiated in help desk software in several ways. One way is directly within the system by users or staff. A second way is by having emails that are sent to a designated address converted automatically into tickets, which is something Jira Service Desk offers. A third way tickets can be initiated is via social media accounts such as Facebook or Twitter. For example, HappyFox and Cayzu both allow Twitter mentions or direct messages to be automatically converted into tickets that you can manage immediately. Zendesk is help desk software that offers ticket creation via both email and social media.
Dig Into the Knowledge Base
Think of knowledge bases as repositories for oft-used information. If a particular problem is presented to your agents more than once, placing its description and solution in a knowledge base means other agents have a fast path to a right answer or, if you expose your knowledge base to the public, your customers and users can find the answer for themselves and solve their problem without making a help desk call.
Knowledge bases come in many forms. Small ones could simply be Word docs or spreadsheets. Large ones are databases backing websites full of answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). Most help desk software will offer some kind of knowledge base. Depending upon the software, your customers or employees can access the knowledge base 24/7 from your website, pull it up on their preferred mobile device, or search it via a social networking connection, like Facebook or Twitter. Whatever form this access takes, it should let them find answers to their questions without having to create a ticket. Some help desk software, like HappyFox, even support segregated internal and external knowledge base systems, which makes it easy for you to maintain an internal source of information that is available only to your staff.
With some software, customers can mark or rate answers they find particularly helpful. That’s great because it helps you identify knowledge base topics you should add, and it also lets you know how your customers like to receive that information. Theoretically, the more comprehensive your knowledge base, the fewer customer service calls you’ll receive about troublesome topics. Both ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and Zendesk Support are help desk platforms that offer thorough knowledge base capabilities, though you’ll need to go to some effort to set them up.
Setting up your initial knowledge base will be a combination of your product or IT environment’s documentation and some discussion with on-staff technicians. Just compile an initial list of the most common problems users or customers might encounter, then add the relevant documentation for each one. No documentation? Create it.
Once you’ve turned those issues into documents with clear instructions, you can enter them into the knowledge base. From there, simply do regular tracking via your service desk platform of problems users or customers are calling about the most. Once you’ve got those, you can build new knowledge base articles directly from the trouble ticket information your help desk technicians are filing with every call and resolution.
Look Carefully At Integration
Third-party software integration is one of the most important capabilities your help desk system absolutely has to provide. Customer-facing service desks are giant collection nets for all kinds of data from technical information on product issues to customer demographics. This can be critical for the rest of the business so you can’t afford to let it languish in the service desk alone.
Many companies like to go even further on data collection by using every call to ask some marketing questions. That might be effective, but for a customer that’s already irate, it can be an additional pain point. A less painful way is for customer service reps to record data as they go while also being presented with customer data from other systems that might help them. Doing that means integrating your software.
Many help desk players already have pre-built integrations to other software that’s also a customer touchpoint. E-commerce suites, CRM, and even point of sale (POS) all collect data that might be useful to a help desk dealing with a customer and vice versa. Check out what third-party integrations your service desk has out of the box, what you’ll need to build yourself, and how much extra that’ll cost.
Top Help Desk Players
Check out our help desk rounduphelp desk roundup for more reviews of leading service desk services.
Integration can mean any number of things for the user. From a shared dashboard where everyone appears to be logging into one system to a simple data exchange process that runs in the background keeping data not only current but constantly available between different software systems. Deciding which way to go can be a semi-lengthy process, but the result is a faster, more efficient help desk that not only shares its data with other systems but imports data from them as well. You paid for all that information, you might as well use it.
