Are you in the process of choosing a help desk software solution? When you’re trying to aid your customers and improve their overall experience with your service, making the right choice when it comes to help desks is incredibly important. After all, there’s no option that’s universally the best for each company. Instead, everyone has to find the solution that provides the most value to your team. With that in mind, we’ll take a look at some of the things to have in mind while choosing this solution.
Type of Support
Every kind of customer base has its own specific requirements that they expect; these will guide you in choosing a help desk software solution. For instance, do your customers like communicating via email? Are they tech-savvy enough to use self-service software tools?
Also, how quickly must the feedback be provided? If you want to become a brand that has a good reputation in the digital world, you need to think about all of this. You’ll need a different help desk software solution if you’re going to be answering queries within a single hour, especially compared to companies that provide answers on a daily or weekly basis.
Type of Experience
If you’re going to increase your operational efficiency by choosing a help desk software solution, you will need to view the task at hand from a variety of angles. For example, it’s good to take a look at the process from the perspective of your customers; what do you think the ideal interaction with customer support looks like for them?
Will they have to use an online platform, or is email interaction enough? And do they need the option of using multiple communication channels to contact your customer support?
Your Team
It’s not just about the experience that your customers will have while interacting with your help desk software solution; it’s about the experience that your employees will have as well. Sure, seeing as it’s work software, you can’t expect your staff to fall in love with it, but they will heavily rely on it and constantly use it, day in and day out. So, if you want to streamline and improve your customer support, you should try choosing a help desk software solution that your employees are satisfied with as well.
While everyone has different ideas on what that entails, it mostly means software that anyone can learn to use easily, with an attractive UI and clearly laid out features.
What Should Change?
If you’re looking for new help desk software solutions, one thing is certain — you’re not satisfied with the way things are currently organized in your company’s customer support team. Of course, many companies just use a shared Gmail account before they end up choosing a help desk software solution, but you could be migrating from one software solution to another as well. In that situation, you need to ask yourself — how will the new software define the customer experience? What should change compared to the old way of doing things?
The best way to do this is to take a look at specific activities of your customer support staff, and see if the current methods are truly the most efficient way of resolving specific issues. And is this truly the only way of achieving the wanted result? If not, then are the alternatives more viable?
You need to sketch out a sort of “algorithm” for customer support — a series of steps and questions about the process that you and your staff need to ponder before choosing a help desk software solution. To compare different solutions, you’ll have to come up with measurable metrics; these will be vital for making an objective decision.
Essential Features
At the end of the day, every customer support team has its priorities; some aspects of a help desk software solution are simply less important than others. This is not set in stone, and varies from company to company.
That’s why your team needs to find out which features are necessary, and which would simply be neat to have as an option. You can achieve this by telling your customer support staff to make a list of every work task that they complete on a daily basis. After that, you can make a joint effort to sort these into essential and non-essential tasks. That’s what will guide you in choosing a help desk software solution.
The best rule of thumb here is that the essential software features are those that are necessary for your team to create the customer experience that you’ve set out to provide. Consequently, the non-essential features are those you can simply live without, and still maintain the same level of efficiency and productivity in your team.
If you focus on the truly crucial features, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of menial work that your staff has to do in order to complete each task. Still, while you’re categorizing software features, there are a couple of secondary questions that you need to ask yourself as well.
For instance, does a particular software suite fit into the legal compliance requirements which your company has to fulfill, such as data privacy regulations? Also, is there any separate software that does a better job with a particular task than your help desk software suite? Finally, you should consider technical challenges as well, like accessibility and data format compatibility. If you need to connect other services and products to your help desk software solutions, is this a possibility?