Why you need a help desk for customer support

In the land of customer support, a quick resolution time with a seamless experience is our bread and butter. Questions and issues are going to come up with your product or service; that’s a given. It’s why we’re here! How those questions and issues are handled determines whether your customers leave feeling satisfied or not. When done right, customer support can set you apart from your competitors. This is where having a help desk for customer support, like DoneDone, comes into play.

Upgrade your customer support inbox

A customer support team needs to be an organized, well-oiled machine to gracefully handle all incoming inquiries from customers. The first step is having a dedicated inbox for your customers. Using a help desk like DoneDone allows you to take that inbox to the next level by incorporating process workflows, automation, and collaboration available to your entire team.

When selecting a help desk, here are the key functions you will need to help create an organized and streamlined customer support experience for your customers and your team.

1. Auto-response and assignment for incoming tickets
2. Private collaboration on tickets by team members
3. Tag, prioritize, and set due dates for tickets
4. Custom ticket workflows
5. Saved replies for common inquiries

How a good help desk should function

Let’s see how these key functions playout in the real world. A ticket is submitted by one of our largest customers, who has a question about using a new feature.

• The customer has already received an automatic response letting them know we’re looking into the ticket and will respond shortly.
• The ticket has been automatically assigned to Elly, the Customer Support Manager. Elly reviews the ticket and since this is our largest customer sets the priority to “High”, the workflow status to “Pending”, and a due date for resolution.
• Elly is unsure of how to respond to the question so she begins to collaborate with a teammate inside of the support ticket, privately.
• Now that Elly understands, she responds to the customer and closes out the ticket.
• Elly realizes this question will likely be a recurring one so creates a saved reply - a canned response that the entire team can use in the future. A tag is also created to keep track of the number of customers with the same question.

As you can see, using a help desk allows a customer support team, like Elly’s, to instantly respond and react to a customer inquiry without missing a step (bread and butter!). A help desk, like DoneDone, also helps to nurture a proactive mindset with your team in being able to easily identify and quantify recurring issues and customer feedback that can be shared internally to improve your product/service and customer processes. Which leads us to our next topic…

Customer & team data at your fingertips

So, you have a process in place to handle your customers’ issues, questions, and feedback, and it seems to be working well. That’s great, but how do you know it’s really working? You would need to have data to back that up, right? Right! This is a huge benefit in using a help desk for customer support. You have all of the customer and team data you will need to continually improve the customer experience at your company.

Team productivity

Tracking team metrics provides a manager with a wealth of insight into how their team is performing, as well as the efficiency of the processes/workflows in place. The metrics you should be tracking overall and on a per-employee basis include:

• Number of tickets received
• Number of tickets resolved
• First response time
• Resolution time

With this data, you can gain insight into team performance and workload. Using a help desk with a tagging feature can help you drill down into this data even further to discover specific issues or tasks that are causing bottlenecks or breakdowns in your workflows.

Customer insights

Of course, tracking transactional customer data, like the number of tickets submitted and when they were submitted, is important and can help with team management. However, the customer data you can pull from the actual conversations you have with customers is the insight that can help propel your team and product forward. The tricky part is easily capturing and quantifying those conversations into meaningful and actionable insight.

This is another reason why having a help desk for customer support is so important! Using features like DoneDone’s tagging, you can track and report on recurring inquiries, requests, and issues to discover customer trends that help the product management and development teams understand the customer point-of-view while backing it up with quantifiable data.  

A simple help desk for customer support

DoneDone accomplishes everything you need for an efficient help desk operation with our Outreach service tier. Simply set up DoneDone Mailboxes and start answering customer questions today. Ready to take your customer support team to the next level? Get started today for free.