Often, when arranging customer support, businesses don’t pay attention to the importance of help desk tools.
We decided to give an exhaustive answer to why one should order an IT service help desk and at the same time talk about the advantages and disadvantages of this solution.
What is a help desk?
A help desk is a special program for automating the processes of technical support, service, and customer service, including field service, as well as employees (internal applicants) of the company.
Help desk class systems help to increase the efficiency of a service company or department: whether it is an IT service that resolves requests for a non-working printer in the office or field engineers servicing various equipment and facilities.
Why does my company need a helpdesk system?
In order for a company to bring in more money, you need to sell more and spend less.
But if you dig deeper in relation to the service business, then financial success depends on the following four areas of work:
- attracting customers, that is, new sales;
- retention of current customers – exclusion or minimization of leaving to competitors, outflow;
- increasing income per client, the so-called increase in the “average check”;
- reducing maintenance costs, including increasing the efficiency of internal processes.
All four areas must be dealt with simultaneously, maintaining a balance.
The solution to one problem should not negatively affect another. For example, you can reduce maintenance costs by drastically reducing quality. In this case, the costs will fall, but all existing customers are very likely to leave you. This alignment is more likely to be of interest to your competitors.
All of the above areas of work, with the exception of new sales, are closely intertwined with the key business process of the company – working with client requests. That is why their automation should be built around the application accounting automation system – around the help desk system
The higher the maturity of a business, the more serious and conscious the requirements it makes for the tools used in work – in particular, to help desk solutions. And with increasing maturity, the requirements for automation tools also begin to show industry specifics.
Core functions
The main functions for help desk systems of the “customer support” class are:
- registration of applications (through any possible channels of interaction: email, user account, phone, chat, web form, and social networks);
- interaction with applicants on registered applications through all channels of interaction, for example, correspondence, responses in social networks, etc.;
- functions that optimize work with a large flow of identical tickets and minimize the registration of tickets: template responses, built-in knowledge base, etc.;
- loyalty tools such as surveys.
Everything else is rather a consequence of the described functions and the essence of the tasks being solved.
The leaders of companies have a great responsibility, so the task is to simplify and optimize their work as much as possible. By implementing Help Desk into your company’s IT system, you make its work much more efficient.
You simplify your communication with customers and take over most of the organizational activities within your enterprise with just one service.