The Evolution of Customer Service and Help Desk Software
These days, simply reacting to customer complaints may not be enough to ensure customer satisfaction and the health of a brand. Social media gives customers a powerful voice, and brands can be damaged easily when unsatisfied customers take to social media to voice their complaints.
Smart businesses realize this. They are taking a more proactive approach to customer service and using a new class of customer service tools that help businesses ensure customer happiness and brand satisfaction in a world where consumer voice has never been more powerful.
The market for customer service and help desk solutions has evolved. A new breed of technology tools take customer service beyond the support ticket mentality. Not that support ticketing isn't important—it is—but it's only just the beginning.
Help desk technology and tools must now be multidimensional, making it easier for brands to monitor customer service histories and personalize their services. The evolution of the traditional support and help desk solution dictates that brands must constantly reevaluate the service they provide to their customers.
Knowledge and Training
No matter how friendly your customer service representatives are, if they can’t help your customers, the result will be a negative experience. It’s important to make sure you choose workers for your help desk who will patiently listen to customers and walk them through what they need to do to fix problems with your product.
If you’re a service-based business, your customer service reps should know enough about the work your employees perform to be able to respond to any complaints. Have them go through intensive training and also use knowledge bases and specialized software to help walk them through helping customers.
The Move to Mobile
Thanks to cloud-based solutions and mobile devices, customer service representatives no longer need to sit at a desk all day, every day. Calls can be routed to remote workers at their homes or while traveling, making it easier for small businesses to compete with large corporations with dedicated help desk teams.
To accomplish that goal you should choose a type of software that gives your employees the ability to view, assign, and close tickets from their mobile devices. You should also give today’s mobile-geared customers the ability to easily place requests for help with their mobile devices. Mobile apps and websites should have easy-to-find help buttons that take customers to an interface that can easily be handled on smartphone screens.
Full Integration
Businesses should strive for integration throughout their customer service technology stack. Sales teams must be able to see real-time data on a customer’s previous interactions with the brand. All teams should share the same CRM, bringing sales, service, and product teams together.
The best tools are built from the ground up with integration in mind, making it easy to connect a support solution with a CRM platform or related tools. When your business’s tools work seamlessly together, your support representatives can unearth sales opportunities, potentially increasing your bottom line.
The Personal Difference
Social media has given customers a powerful voice in a business’s brand reputation. They can either tell all of their friends about their great experience or they can share a negative experience that harms your reputation and scares away potential customers.
For that reason, it’s no longer enough for your business’s help desk to be operationally efficient--it's now a delivery center, directly impacting your brand’s ability to grow. In the end, the support a customer receives from your employees, at every level, can serve as the ultimate differentiator. Your customer service teams are the front line of your operation, often interacting with dissatisfied consumers long before management hears about any problems.
The software that customer service representatives use to do their jobs can make a big difference in the service they provide. With the right tools in place, employees can see a customer’s full history with their company and personalize their service accordingly. This small touch can make the difference between alienating a customer and winning long-term loyalty.
