Help desk systems are the core of any customer service department today. And as servicing quality depends on the specified applications, the success of any company also comes down to them. After all, according to Forbes, 96% of consumers worldwide decide on a brand based on the class of its and, consequently, service.
Even businesses with excellent customer support software occasionally face consumer service issues. That may be because they conducted bad-quality data migration when moving to applications they currently employ. This is why it’s better to use only services offered by reputable IT companies (like Help Desk Migration) to transfer information to new customer support systems. But yet, most difficulties are related to the customer service process. So, let’s discuss the main causes and smart solutions to such problems.
Reasons for Help Desk Workflow Breaks
Primarily, it’s worth noting that your employees may not be qualified enough. Thus, they can make mistakes regularly. And as modern customer servicing implies the fast performance of numerous different operations, even the smallest error may cause significant downtime. Consequently, your customers receive late responses. McKinsey, in turn, claims 40% of consumers expect companies to answer during the first hour. So, you may lose almost half of your regular customers due to slow customer support.
Qualitative software may help entrepreneurs improve corporate help desk workflows by creating comprehensive knowledge bases for their employees. This way, you save time as well as power, on conducting training by yourself and conserve funds on educating workers by third-party specialists.
Overload of Consultation Departments
Nowadays, plenty of customer service agents still fulfill many operations manually. This is relevant even for companies that have customer support software. Too much manual work frequently leads to an increase in error probability. After all, live customer service reps tend to get tired. That’s especially true if they overwork every day. Consequently, the help desk workflow generally becomes worse in such cases.
You can automate numerous routine processes by properly customizing customer service applications. However, the apps should have all the necessary features to be as helpful for your business as possible. Customer support software is able to operate 24/7 sans effectiveness decreasing and may be easily scaled if support agents suddenly start obtaining more tickets. This assists in maintaining the high quality of your customer service.
Non-Compliance With the SLA
Help desk applications allow tracking the duration of different customer issues’ resolutions. This way, business owners and managers can set SLAs with more accurate terms. As a result, you’ll always meet consumers’ expectations. Oberlo, in turn, says that 81% of customers consider positive customer service experience an essential reason to make further purchases from a brand. So, your enterprise becomes more profitable in this case.
How to Improve Your Help Desk Workflow?
First, experts recommend coming up with a strong yet realistic SLA. As mentioned above, you should create such conditions based on the statistical information obtained from your customer support system. SLA has to contain the following terms:
- descriptions of the roles of different members of a customer service department;
- explanations on how requests are captured and shared among support agents;
- clear turnaround times for solving different consumer problems.
SLAs shouldn’t be too complex. Otherwise, your employees may be confused. Entrepreneurs also need to check if there are ambiguous provisions in the agreement. Such statements, if any, should be reformulated.
Automation of Routine Operations
The following processes, as part of a help desk workflow, can be robotized using customer service software:
- sending notifications and emails;
- process of requests’ assignment;
- sharing emails for ticket rating.
The mentioned automated features help a lot to achieve greater results when working in a time-pressured environment. You may get further information on this subject, e.g., by contacting managers at help-desk-migration.com.
Enhancement of the Ticket Escalation Process
Customer service is a team effort. Of course, your support agents should have certain basic knowledge to escape breaking the workflow. But agents still can’t know everything. That’s particularly relevant for young specialists. Thus, it may be necessary to reassign a ticket to an employee with corresponding skills. This is called functional escalation. Furthermore, some customer issues may be quite specific. Here, team managers’ approval, or at least attention, can be necessary. That’s called hierarchical escalation.
It doesn’t matter what type of reassignment your agents employ as long as the problem is solved. But yet, you should constantly improve the described process. Experts advise entrepreneurs to follow the subsequent recommendations to enhance their escalation structure:
- solve the tickets that have already been escalated first;
- avoid unnecessary requests’ reassignments;
- analyze the causes of ticket escalations and try to find solutions to escape such cases in the future.
At last, if you have mainly hierarchical escalations, encourage regular contact among specialists of different levels. This improves mutual understanding amongst your consulting team members. As a result, the ticket resolution rate decreases.
Systematically Update Existing Knowledge Bases
Customer service employees occasionally face uncommon problems. Of course, such issues are solved eventually. But typically, unknown difficulties are considered one-in-a-million and forgotten soon. This way, the unique experience that some particular support reps receive is just lost. Experts recommend detecting such cases and adding the instances to your knowledge base, making them available for all team members to learn from.
As a part of the described approach, new information constantly appears in manuals. So, knowledge bases should have a clear structure in this case. Otherwise, new details will be added randomly, and your support agents won’t be able to find the necessary data after some time quickly. In addition, make sure that customer support specialists can share links to the needed info. This essentially simplifies communications among agents. Finally, take systematic feedback from your employees on corporate knowledge base quality.
Wrapping Up
Business owners should improve their help desk workflow to increase the effectiveness of their customer service. The enhancement process implies, for instance, the following things:
- customization of email templates;
- collective creation and team roles’ assignment;
- adding a branding touch.
Finally, you should regularly update existing knowledge bases with cases of unfamiliar customer problems and their solutions.