Tips for Choosing Help Desk Software

Many small businesses start out by managing customer service through an email account. After all, when you don’t have many customers—yet!—you don’t have many support inquiries. Many companies can get by with just a “support@” email address that’s routed to a Gmail inbox—and a person who checks it.

As the business grows, it takes several employees to monitor the inbox and respond to all the requests. That’s when a company typically starts to run into email management problems. It takes a longer time to respond to customers, and sometimes they receive multiple answers, or none at all.

While folders can be used to categorize requests, the folders don’t offer a way to assign emails to agents, show a priority level, or run reports. The young company has no way to monitor the effectiveness of its support processes. Things start to break down.

Don’t wait for disaster! Implementing a help desk solution early in your company’s life cycle can have huge benefits later. But how do you know what you need? Here are a few things you should look for:

• Multi-Channel Support. There’s no doubt about it, we are living in a social world. Customers don’t just call or email if they need help. They are also quick to go to Facebook or Twitter when they need a response. You need to know them wherever you meet them, and be able to help from anywhere. It's really important to have a help desk solution that brings together web, email, phone, and social into one easy-to-use agent console so you can seamlessly manage cases from multiple channels.

• Reporting. One of the key differences between managing your support through email and managing it through a support solution is that you can easily get data. See how your agents are performing, and get data like C-SAT (customer satisfaction) scores and customer health indicators. You can also track customer needs and preferences, so you can drive improvements to almost every aspect of your business.

• Knowledge Base. A good customer service solution will let you consolidate all of your support content in one powerful knowledge base. It's best to have a knowledge base that can be easily updated by simply cutting and pasting content. Your service team can update solutions without needing a web designer, and everyone has the answers they need--right at their fingertips.

• Self-Service. Today's customers are used to using their phones and computers to find information so it’s no surprise that 72 percent would rather use self-service than pick up the phone or email support when they have a question. You don’t need to be a big company with lots of resources to build a great support portal. You just need a support solution that lets you share your knowledge base with customers. For small businesses, providing self-service is also a cost-effective way to offer 24/7 support to customers and increase satisfaction.

• Integration. Connecting the apps that run your business sounds like something that only big companies with big budgets can do. Not true! With today’s cloud-computing solutions, it’s easy for even small businesses to connect their customer service with a CRM system, or with anything from survey software to bug tracking to e-commerce. When you share critical data around your business, everybody wins.

Don’t wait until your email support process starts to break down. Look for a solution that’s cost-effective, easy to implement, and can grow with your business—today.