In many companies, the Help Desk is essentially a “face” for the customer (whether the applicant is internal or external). This role assigns three key responsibilities to the helpdesk, which we will talk about today.
In an increasingly competitive environment, your employees and customers are more likely to experience better service in their daily lives. This creates increased expectations for them from the service, including from internal support services or from interaction with the contractor. In order not to disappoint customers, the Help Desk (or support) must meet these expectations.
At the same time, it is quite difficult for organizations, especially service companies, to put quality at the forefront. They are too focused “inward” – on policies and support processes (ie, on how the service is implemented, and not on what emotions the client experiences at the same time). However, one of the key goals of support must be kept in mind – to give customers the information they need, to work more efficiently on requests, and simply to be available when the customer needs it. End-users are, after all, humans, not custodians of some assets that need to be maintained. How can you become more customer-centric?
◾️ Examine the client’s habits. For example, what types of applications are most often registered? What questions do users ask? What kind of background information do they need? Answering these questions will help you better meet consumer needs.
◾️ Regularly assess the level of customer satisfaction. There is no need to come up with clever ways of assessing service quality when you can simply ask customers if you are solving their problems. This could be an online survey, a closed request survey, or even a personal interview. Customer testimonials are very important because only they can provide information about what works in your approach and what doesn’t. This is a great free consultation.
◾️ Communicate according to the client’s needs and expectations, regardless of the type of problem (incident, scheduled maintenance, etc.). Warn the client about planned maintenance, give estimates on timelines when resolving incidents, etc. Communication with clients is one of the easiest things to do, but it is often forgotten about it. there is more important work to be done. But the lack of communication at this level is unlikely to make the client happy, and may well jeopardize long-term cooperation.
◾️ Close as many applications as possible on the first call. Whenever possible, repeated contact on the same problem should be avoided. The more applications are closed on the first call, the happier customers will be.
◾️ Create a customer self-service portal. The consumer loves to independently (and as quickly as possible) find a solution to their problem, and the self-service portal will provide an entry point for these searches and registering their own applications, if necessary. Along the way, a self-service portal or customer portal will provide savings for your organization – the more questions users decide themselves, the less the burden on support specialists.
Reporting can show how well the Help Desk works, both in general, to comply with general KPIs and metrics, and separately for each employee or support line, and provide information on registered requests. On the basis of these data, one can judge the effectiveness of certain organizational “structures” within the support, identify recurring problems, and determine trends. And the analysis of reports over time allows you to judge the changes in performance and the impact on the main indicators of some innovations.
◾️ Analyze the numbers regularly. A practice of weekly or monthly reports of Help Desk operation should be introduced. Performance data should not be kept secret, even if it is not what we would like. They can always be supplemented with plans to improve the situation.
◾️ Use real-time reporting tools. The dashboard allows you to understand the current state of the support team – if someone needs information, you can provide it almost instantly. In addition, monitoring makes it easier to collect regular reports (discussed above).
◾️ Analyze and visualize data. Tabular reports are sometimes difficult to read. It is not enough to collect data – it is necessary to highlight trends and abnormal phenomena, and the easiest way to do this is with a visual representation of data, trends, etc.
◾️ Share data from reports with individual structural units. Use reports to alert teams to the sources of potential problems. In many situations, this will allow you to avoid disaster.
Create a knowledge base and manage its content. The knowledge base allows you to give more information to both customers and technical teams, especially since the information in it can be “sorted”, giving access to those who need it and are authorized to use it. The knowledge base allows you to reduce the number of incoming support calls, which will make life easier for not only customers but also employees.
◾️ Create a section of answers to frequently asked questions. In this area, customers will be able to quickly get the information they need, without the support staff having to do this over and over.
◾️ Check the documentation regularly. Without this, the knowledge base will be useless. Obsolete articles need to be removed or updated. It will not be superfluous to assess how many applications are created in the system on the issues already described in the documentation. If there are really many of them, try to answer the question of why the knowledge base is not used?
◾️ Consider a mechanism for simple fixes in the knowledge base that does not require administrator rights. Save support specialists from unnecessary gestures when correcting information in the database.
