Help Desk Definition

What is a Helpdesk?

A helpdesk is a tool that organizes communication with customers to help companies respond to customers more quickly and efficiently. Using a helpdesk enables your support team to deliver the best possible experience to your customers.

Support services provide functionality to provide context and information about the customer experience, and also provide internal functionality to compare the performance of your support team and ensure that your team is the best option. Helpdesk tools are one of the most integrated tools to successfully manage a customer base.

A beginner’s guide to a helpdesk

There is so much information on support services that it can be overwhelming. Fortunately, we've put together information that will help you discover what a helpdesk is, what it can do for you, and how you can choose one for yourself. Find out what we have planned for you.

Why do people use a helpdesk?

No matter who you are, more than one person is likely to interact directly with customers each day. If this happens on several different email accounts with several different people, it can be difficult to have a context where you are already talking to a customer.

Helpdesk systems bring everyone's interactions together into a single interface and allow differently conversations to intersect and use for more context in the customer experience. It also allows you to use features like categorization and automation as a way to track down the kinds of problems your customers face.

A helpdesk tool helps build an organization out of chaos by keeping your ticket process clean and giving your agents the tools they need to do their job better.

How a helpdesk can help you?

If you are wondering if the support service is right for you, you may be looking to improve your customer service experience for your customers. Implementing a helpdesk can help in the many ways we have listed above, but let's look at each of these benefits individually.

Unify all your support channels in one place

Even if you don't currently support multiple channels like video, email or phone, having a helpdesk will allow you to unify all of your support channels in one place. There's nothing more frustrating for a customer than starting in one place (like a chat or phone) and mixing from one channel to another to try to get a response. Having a support application that allows you to easily transfer a client from one channel to another will be a blessing for you and for them.

Find out how your support workers are doing

If you only use personal inboxes to handle customer inquiries, you probably don't know what your customer service agents say if what they say is correct or how much they drive in a day. This information is important because it helps you evaluate your future hires while helping your agents monitor your own individual growth. A helpdesk system would help with this through robust analytics and customizable reports.

Find out what your customers value with marking and analysis

While you can gain insight into what customers are interested in through one-on-one conversations, the labels and analytics provided by offices allow you to get a clearer and more complete picture of their needs and wants. This is the best way to learn more about the things you could change in your product, add to your documentation, or slightly modify your processes to get better ticket deviation and happiness ratings.

Proactively help your customers with a knowledge base.

Finding good documentation is difficult, especially if you don't have a helper application to help you build a knowledge base. Customers prefer to find their own information instead of contacting technical support, but if they don't have documentation available, they are left with no other choice. Using a support tool to create documentation is a great way to make your customers happier and help them find the answers before they have to contact you. You can also access analytics for your knowledge base, letting you know what people are looking for the most or their most viewed documentation.

Automate tasks to develop your team

Using a helpdesk system will allow you to automate some of the tasks you have performed on a daily basis. For example, you can set up an automatic notification to ping customer service employees after their tickets have been queued for two days. You can also create manual workflows with help desk automation that automatically assign tickets to a specific member of the support team and tag them.

Create a context around a customer's journey

No customer should have to answer the same question twice, especially if it is their support team. With a helpdesk tool, you can have all the information in one place and see everything a customer has contacted. For example, if they have already sent you an email about a specific problem, you can make sure that your answer matches everything your coworker has shared with them previously.