7 Key Help Desk Best Practices to Foster Top-quality Troubleshooting Support that Enhances the Customer Experience

In today’s digitally-enhanced world, global customers have lofty customer service (CS)/technical Support (TS) quality expectations; according to Callnovo Contact Center’s article on white-glove customer service (i.e. rising above customers’ expectations by prioritizing needs, genuinely caring for their satisfaction/success, tailoring their experiences, and solving concerns/issues before they become a reality):

“CS that goes beyond customer expectations is crucial to improving customer retention numbers, leading to fortification of a stronger brand reputation — securing global sales success.”

Top-tier CS/TS that affords top-quality Troubleshooting Support is, henceforth, direly-important to brand growth/global market success; a major component in such quality engagement is the ability to successfully-manage your global customers’/end-users’ troubleshooting issues/support tickets as they come — meaning your global corporation should have in-place a strategic help desk/service Desk strategy with multilingual, omnichannel service support available to handle the high service demand and afford the best customer experiences (CX).

Considering the above, let’s look at a detailed guide on 7 key, well-rounded help desk best practices to foster top-quality troubleshooting support, enhancing customer experiences; we’ll touch on:

• what help desks/service desks are,
• help desk support advantages, and
• 7 help desk best practices.

Help/Service/Support Desks: a Viable Explanation

Your global business undoubtedly has a multitude of customers/end-users that clamor for your attention; if your business is go-global, this couldn’t be so clear. While it’s overwhelming to handle as many customer issues/service tickets on a monthly basis as Desmodus rotundus (vampire) bats in a dark cave — an eerie sight — such a number of troubleshooting tickets is actually a great sign, as it means you have a large, global customer base that has trusted in your business for… business. According to Callnovo’s article onhow to improve customer retention via top-tier customer service:

“strong customer retention increases global market competition, ensuring vital long-term sales benefits, bringing improved ROI and customer loyalty growth.”

As such, a help desk/service desk strategy is vital to managing such a high number of support tickets. Essentially, you can streamline customer communication and answer consumer enquiries in an efficient, timely manner, meaning you can offer ideal customer experiences every time — without missing customer engagement opportunities. Furthermore, a help desk/service desk support strategy offers the capability to gain context/insights into CX, allowing you to track your service desk team’s performance — as well as understand customer trends more effectively.

Support Desk Implementation Advantages

Help desk support — coupled with prominent multilingual, omnichannel support services — offers attractive benefits; with a well-implemented support desk strategy, your brand can enjoy the following benefits and many more:

Complete insight into the Bigger Picture

Help desk support ensures your business brings together customer interactions into one place so you can understand/see the wider context of customer relationships; as such, you’ll understand what customers contacted you in the past about — as well as see what solutions have been offered at present, giving your team insight into what conversations have taken place throughout the customer journey so your service reps can understand where customers are coming from if they’ve had multiple issues.

Team Productivity Enhancement

Rather than manually-sorting through many customer emails, a viable service desk strategy increases productivity by leaps-and-bounds — as you’ll automate many menial tasks, such as ticket assigning and other workflows — all so your service team increases its efficiency in handling customer requests. Likewise, you can link your help desk with an internal knowledge base that proportions common solutions to customer requests, helping your team to respond quickly while ensuring consistent resolution — no matter who handles each ticket.

Performance Insight Leveraging

Beneficial help desk software comes with analytics that aid you in measuring individual/team performance; helping you to gather key insight. With analytics, your help desk support team can build better efficiency and understand trends/patterns. As such, ensure you gather customer feedback to optimize service operations.

7 Vital Help Desk Best Practices

Backpacking on the above-mentioned, let’s take a look at 7 stellar help desk best practices that’ll help your business afford superb customer-centric service, guaranteeing quality customer engagement, leading to fantastic CX.

1st Tip: Help Desk Metrics

Help desk metrics are vital to understanding team performance — as they ensure transparency within operations, leading to customer service delivery improvement. As such, it’s important to measure:

• first contact resolution,
• ticket volume,
• first response time,
• average time to resolution, and
• customer satisfaction score.

By measuring service desk metrics, you’ll gain insight into the way your system is used, allowing you to understand your team’s customer request response effectivity. Ticket volume helps you appreciate how many requests come in periodically; you can then compare that with first response time to monitor your team’s response efficiency. Likewise, the customer satisfaction score tells you how well agents are meeting customer expectations. By efficiently monitoring these metrics, you’ll know whether hiring more agents is necessary to superb service delivery.

2nd Tip: Service Desk Ticket System

An efficient ticket system is vital; if new tickets sit idle for an extended time period, (1) your team won’t know who should be dealing with them, and (2) customers/end users will need to wait longer for issue resolution. Firstly, an explicit prioritization process for new customer tickets needs implemented so tickets can be assigned correctly and solutions can be fostered quickly; proactively categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets to avoid a backlog. With proper help desk software, you can tag tickets, assess all tickets’ statuses, and interact internally between team members all within one place.

3rd Tip: Support Desk Password Reset

Customers forget their passwords; as a troubleshooting team, you need to help them reset passwords in a secure, risk-free manner, evading the risk that customers’ passwords fall into the wrong hands, leading to data breaches. To minimize such risk, ensure that temporary passwords are unique to each user. Provide passwords that meet AES256 encryption or equivalent standards. Additionally, when responding to password reset requests over email, validate that consumers requesting password changes aren’t hackers by alerting users when password changes are requested, including a way to contact the service desk in case such requests are malicious. After verifying the password reset requests’ credibility, send one-time password reset links so users can change their own passwords, ensuring each link has an expiration time as an added layer of security.

4th Tip: Help desk Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

SLAs clearly demonstrate the service quality levels your team should aim for. As such, your support team can engage a baseline percentage of tickets within a specific timeframe and meet other essential conditions that help you to run your brand successfully. With clear SLAs, you can manage your troubleshooting support team’s effectiveness and provide customers with an assurance as to when they can expect effective replies/solutions. Ensure SLAs are realistic — and, beware of factors that impede meeting SLAs effectively. The best practice is to reduce the number of support personnel per ticket to foster seamless contact resolution.

5th Tip: Service Desk Management

You should start with current processes; don’t impose a new infrastructure on top of your old one — because you’ll have to train your team again, familiarizing them with new procedures — wasting time/energy. A new system could also cause confusion amongst your customers which are already adjusted to the old process. The best practice is to merge your troubleshooting desk with a current system, using it to increase your process flow efficiency. Additionally, make sure subtle changes are made each time to avoid implementing huge, disruptive changes that are hard to adjust to.

6th Tip: Support Desk Documentation

As Callnovo mentioned in “A Detailed Guide to Seamless Omnichannel Experiences:” reliable self-service improves the overall brand image because it ensures you offer enhanced communication, allowing customer to have rapid access to info. — meaning tailoring experiences are proportioned, saving time & resources; in consideration, customers would rather help themselves out to evade waiting for customer support. It’s important to implement a self-service portal so customers can resolve their own inquiries. Furthermore, using an internal knowledge base to document repeat solutions can help your team to greatly-benefit from time savings by preventing your service teams from having to create customer solutions from scratch; an internal knowledge base ensures they have access to the most effective solutions to customer issues, ensuring delivery of a higher service standard.

7th Tip: Help Desk Workflow

Service desk workflows when implemented properly foster successful-automation of processes, saving time & raising productivity levels. Workflows should be used for manual tasks, allowing you to cut the time you could otherwise spend on dealing with customer queries. As such, remember that a workflow is a set of rules applied to a mailbox automatically-affects the assignment, priority, tag, or status of customer conversations — hence, you should name your workflow in a way that your team will remember its purpose — as you may end up with multiple workflows depending on your needs. Setup workflows by adding new ones to your preferred help desk system; choose the right trigger conditions — for example, you may want the workflow to run when certain words are present in your incoming support emails’ subject lines. Multiple conditions can be linked together via “AND” and/or “OR” blocks.

Callnovo’s Stellar Help Desk Outsourcing Solutions

To compliment the above-mentioned help desk best practices guide, Callnovo Contact Center — having worked with 1,200+ global corporations/Fortune 500 companies for 17+ years — can support you with top-quality outsourced troubleshooting/help desk support solutions, ensuring top-tier troubleshooting support that enhances CX, leading to a permanently-increasing competitive drive in your specific market niche(s).

Callnovo offers the following advantages and more:

• Always-available Service — maximizing on customer satisfaction/CX by continually meeting customers’ needs without limits.
• Omnichannel Support — ensuring accessible, rapid multiple-channel contact solutions, leading to enhanced CX, influencing long-term customer brand ambassadorship/customer loyalty.
• Native Language Support — ensuring customers’ needs are efficiently-met, conforming to cultural expectations, improving customer loyalty.
• High-quality Expertise — ensuring quality help desk support — as their personnel are skilled in:
  interpersonal communication skills,
  logical thinking skills,
  product/troubleshooting service experience,
• and a range of hard skills/niche service knowledge — like:
  appliances,
  applications,
  B2B software,
  cloud-based software,
  consumer electronics,
  IPTV systems,
  app support,
  security monitoring,
  smart devices, and
  many more.

Conclusion

With the above guide to help desk strategy implementation — including the mentioned best practices to ensuring top-quality troubleshooting support — your corporation can foster superb customer engagement that greatly-enhances CX, turning your customers/end-users into long-term brand ambassadors. For support, Callnovo Contact Center offers comprehensive outsourced multilingual, omnichannel service desk support solutions to help you successfully-meet consumers’ high service expectations, increasing your long-term global sales success.