At a digital marketing agency, the manager was facing an insurmountable challenge of attending to client requests and follow-ups leading to a lot of slip through. By using a ticketing system on a helpdesk software he could easily trace the tickets, follow up till closure and the customer satisfaction rate grew to 77% from 43%!

A B2B company found that most questions on the helpdesk pertained to a single aspect of their product. They could generate such a report based on the helpdesk software, they subscribed to. Once they realized that their support staff was in an overdrive due to a certain feature they gave a feedback to the product development department and the issue was resolved. Here again, the customer satisfaction rate grew by 35%.

Recently, a large electronic retail business house introduced chat support on its website and integrated it with a helpdesk management system whereby each chat automatically raised a ticket. Again the customer satisfaction rate grew by 112%.

Providing excellent support is critical for businesses that want to build loyalty and achieve their sales objectives. Happy customers play an integral role in the success of any business. This is why improving the lifetime value (LTV) of customers should be a key strategy for your business.

One of the ways of increasing the lifetime value of your customers is by addressing their concerns in an efficient and timely manner. This is where help Desk Management Software comes in.

Help Desk Management Software Terminology

Majority of help desk systems work in a simple manner. Before we get to know how they work, it’s important to understand these three terminologies:

1. Ticket
   This refers to a support request submitted to the software by a user. A “ticket” could be anything that the user would like to know, e.g. a feature request, question, problem or even a “thank you” message. Generally, help desk management systems convert emails sent by users into tickets. A reply to a previous message is added to the initial ticket. A new email message is added to the ticket schedule.
2. Category
   A category refers to a cluster of tickets that are related to a particular subject. For example, your tickets can be categorized based on the departments that are supposed to handle them, e.g. technical support, sales, billing, general inquiries, etc.
3. Technician
   Also known as an “agent” or a “tech”, this is a person who handles tickets in the company. The agent answers the tickets created by users.

Why Use Help Desk Management Software

Helpdesk management software can benefit your business in the following ways:

• Ensure All Tickets Are Answered
  Helpdesk management software will ensure all tickets are answered. The software can be customized to send notifications on incoming or unresolved tickets.
• Build a Knowledge Base
  You can categorize tickets to find out which questions are most popular with customers and organize them into an FAQ. The FAQ page can be posted on your website knowledge base section, which can help with your content marketing efforts as well as significantly reduce incoming tickets.
• Focus on Important Tasks
  A help desk management solution will help your team focus on more important tasks. For example, routine and repetitive tasks such as administrative compliance and FAQs can be automated and, in turn, leave your agents to handle more critical tickets.
• Address Service Level Agreements
  You can customize the help desk system to route different SLAs tickets to their respective workflow. Therefore, users in each SLA type will get the appropriate customer service.
• Accurate Ticket Resolutions
  Tickets that come through the help desk can be categorized and routed to the relevant departments. For example, agents can route billing questions to the billing department for a more accurate response.
• Faster Ticket Resolution
  Help desk software enables your techs to solve customer problems faster and more accurately through quickly accessing product specs, routing to in-house experts and collaboration with other agents. Moreover, the tickets can be categorized by priority or escalated to ensure that the most critical issues are resolved urgently.

How Does Help Desk Management Software Work?

The typical life cycle of a help desk ticket is as follows:

1. A user sends an email to the help desk or logs into a web-based help desk management software app to send the message. The message is received in the help desk monitored mailbox
2. The ticket is transferred to the specific mailbox category based on the user’s selection
3. Your customer service team is notified of a new ticket by email, push notifications on phone, SMS or other methods
4. An agent takes a particular ticket, usually the first ones to be received. By choosing a particular ticket, other agents will not also waste time on the same ticket
5. The agent and the user interact in various ways, including:
   • Updating the ticket and posting replies
   • Attaching files
   • Optionally adding other people to the discussion
   The interaction is done on the help desk web interface. However, the user has an option to post replies through the web interface or via email
6. When the issue raised by a user is resolved, the tech will close the ticket
7. Depending on your business preferences, the ticket may be posted on the company’s knowledge base section

Choosing Help Desk Management Software

You need to research thoroughly to find the ideal help desk management software for your business. Here are some things to keep in mind when evaluating different software:

a) Collaboration Tools
Get help desk Management Software that allows collaboration between agents, departments, and customers. Agents may need to work with each other when handling difficult tickets. Sometimes, agents may need to tap the resources of other departments or input from users to further improve a product.

b) Customization Options
The software should complement your basic workflows. For example, you may want a software solution that allows you to brand the interface or that has multiple templates. The last thing you want is for customers to feel unimportant by sending general messages.

c) The capability of the System
The software should have a robust management feature that can perform a wide range of tasks such as canceling, closing, routing, resending, scaling, assigning and reassigning tickets. Other features you should look for include tagging and filtering options. The more functionality that the help desk system has, the better the control you will have over different incidents.

d) Size of the Database
If you are serving thousands of customers, choose a help desk system with a huge database that can handle the interactions expected. The database should also be able to store historical tickets for future references.

The above is an overview of how help desk management software solutions work and why you should have one for your business.

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