Phones and the internet have made almost every piece of information available to customers at their fingertips. Customers can always find an apparent solution using the right communication channel. The speed of the solution is based on the complexity and urgency of questions.
The support department of companies will always go in a million different directions at once. Maybe there is a website error, or your network is running too slow again, you’re receiving too many queries at the same time, or maybe there’s a glitch preventing the payment processing at the user-end. Your support agents won’t have the time to solve more significant issues because they’re probably stuck in the daily here-and-now problems.
Businesses that excel at the customer experience drive revenues 4% to 8% higher than those of their market.
Bain
Employees need to provide a speedy resolution, to manage service requests successfully. They also need to keep the customer involved. Though requests can vary widely, the goal remains the same, i.e., to fulfill the request. All this while ensuring a positive customer experience. It is why streamlining your business’s customer request management process becomes inevitable.
Customer request management is a critical component of the support framework. It involves managing workflows and processes that are not repeatable. It includes various support tasks and activities. This article will go over the basics of customer request management and how it can benefit your business. Here’s a gist of what we’ll discuss:
What is Customer Request Management?
Customer request management refers to managing the lifecycle of activities linked to the fulfillment of support requests made by customers and other stakeholders. A dynamic solution equips the customers to register queries easily. It also helps support teams to streamline the fulfillment of customer requests.
Customer service request management is needed in nearly every area of a business, including:
Finance
Human Resources
IT and Software Industry
Education
Retail and Ecommerce
Medical Industry
Manufacturing Industry
How Does Customer Request Management Work?
A customer request typically goes through the following processes:
Customers who face queries contact the enterprise’s help desk to log/register their requests. They can do this through various communication channels (phone call, email, social media, chatbots, self-service, etc.)
The query is then assigned to an agent on the support end. It could be based on priority, expertise, or any other support parameter.
The support agents will then verify the relevant details and start with the resolution processes.
After resolution, agents will close the ticket or query request.
If the situation demands them to initiate an action with another department, they can log (assign) it from the help desk and pass it to the pertinent department.
The concerned department can then act on the request and perform offline activities.
Afterward, they can either close the request or pass it on to verify with the customer and close the issue.
There may or may not be a third-party involvement in the request fulfillment.
This entire activity takes place within a defined SLA timeline as per the company policy. Any delay in action can result in aggravated customers.
If your support team undergoes all the tasks mentioned above manually, it may wreak havoc on your support teams. A well-built customer request management system can help you streamline all your processes. To get customer request management right, you’ll need to focus on a broader vision of what a good customer experience means for your business. A flexible tool like DeskXpand can help your team cut through the chaos and configure workflows that easily fit your team. Take a look.
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Why is Customer Request Management So Important?
A study conducted on American customers states that:
Almost one-third of consumers would consider switching companies after just one instance of a bad customer support experience. Besides, most Americans have decided not to go through with the further purchases because of a poor customer service experience.
AE
On the other hand, another survey states that:
67% of customer churn is preventable if firms resolve issues the first time they occur.
Ameyo
These stats directly reflect how important customer request management is. Besides that, here are three primary reasons why companies need a customer request management system in 2021:
1. Consolidates the Data
Every day, every organization generates a considerable volume of complaint-related data. With so many incoming queries, it is easy to miss critical pieces of information in the process. Plus, there is a constant threat to data storage.
A customer request management system will store all your data in segments. With all data in one place, the data is easily accessible and secure. This way, agents will have to spend very little time looking for critical information like tasks, lists, notes, descriptions, deadlines, etc.
2. Increased Workflow Productivity
Increasing your workflow productivity will directly reflect your customer satisfaction rates. And customer satisfaction directly impacts customer retention rates. Hence, if your workflow productivity increases, it results in higher profits.
Investments in customer request management systems mean you’re investing in the future. It will help your team improve their productivity through multiple features. A self-service features can reduce your tickets by a significant amount. Robust ticketing features will make sure that you do not miss even a single query. A help desk updates your communication, reminds you of your tasks, and ensures that you meet deadlines. Nothing falls through the cracks.
3. Reduce the Error Margin
It is hard to make sure that you meet every timeline with manual or spreadsheet-based customer support. Manual systems call for tons of mistakes and flaws in the workflow. For example, your notes can get lost, and you may face data security issues, or issues with incorrect information while documentation, etc.
With a proper system in place, you can collect all essential information and ensure its security. The software will ensure that everyone follows the deadline and that the customers receive day-to-day updates regarding their queries.
4. Support Unification
Do you ever experience a chaotic situation if your customer support supervisor or agent is on vacation? Do things fall apart in their absence? This is exactly what a customer request management system prevents from happening.
It consolidates the entire support so that you’re able to access and retrieve data from a single place. So, in the absence of a particular agent, you can re-assign the tickets and maintain the flow of your SLAs.
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Challenges in Customer Request Management?
Some of the challenges that companies across the globe face while managing customer requests are:
The biggest challenge is managing diverse channels and multiple touchpoints from different places. The support reps have to juggle multiple tools of communication to get it right.
Teams find it difficult to unify all customer information in one place. It ensures fast response and enables customer satisfaction.
It is also challenging to maintain the SLA timelines irrespective of complex queries.
Maintain flexible support to allow a faster addition of new service requests.
Implement linked process flows since organizations grow and introduce new products and services constantly.
How Help Desk Improves Your Request Management Process
Organizations face multiple challenges constantly, despite utilizing a plethora of solutions. Following are four ways how a help desk can benefit businesses to overcome these challenges:
1. Prioritize Your Customers
A help desk will help you focus your energies on the most critical and high-priority requests. You can then distribute available resources based on the usage and customer feedback. A help desk enables you to provide an easy-to-find, intuitive self-service portal as well.
A centralized, searchable knowledge base will provide easy access to common problems and answers. It makes your support more customer-centric and allows them to find information whenever they need it. By making the request fulfillment process customer-centric, you’ll be able to speed up resolutions and minimize the overall costs. A help desk also:
Provides an intuitive and customer-centric interface
It helps you offer a comprehensive knowledge base
It creates a single point of contact for complete access to service requests.
2. Leverage Standardization and Automation
Businesses can adapt existing processes or define new ones to drive standardization and simplification to meet resolution. Standardization makes sure that your customers receive a consistent experience every time they reach out to seek support. It will improve overall support quality and efficiency. Support agents can also combine similar requests.
Business owners or support admins can also leverage automation features to address repetitive tasks like follow-up communications, updates on estimated resolution time, query registration and assignment features, and knowledge base recommendations. Automation features can also free up your staff to concentrate on delivering projects with more significant value to your customers.
3. Unify Your Support
Admin managers can unify their support workflows through help desks. A help desk enables you to document all the service requests (customer data, SLA requirements, analytics, approval process, etc.) from a single interface.
It enables you to solve customer requests while viewing everything you need in one place. You can view everything on a unified dashboard and then guide your team and operations accordingly. It allows your team to collaborate on critical issues quickly. Think how easy your support agent’s life would become if they could chat within the ticket when they needed to collaborate.
72% of consumers see having to explain their problem to multiple agents/support reps as poor customer service.
Dimensional Research
Omnichannel features bring together all the queries from the support channels. These queries from various channels (phone, email, chatbots, social media, etc.) are converted into a ticket and assigned to the agents according to the SLAs. Hence agents do not have to juggle multiple tools to address the issue and bring resolution. With a unified interface, teams can:
Manage data and maintain the SLAs easily
Provides employees with a 360-degree view of the query
Enables admin to monitor everything from a single place
Enables multi-channel and omnichannel communication
Agents can have the data and resolution at their fingertips
Data security is maintained
Since we’re talking about unification, DeskXpand is a help desk that brings everything together in a single interface. It is a robust omnichannel customer request management software built by ISO-certified professional developers with 14+ years of development experience. Find out more about DeskXpand.
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4. Provide Visibility
Your customers deserve to know status updates throughout their resolution journey. These updates include confirmation of request receipt, updates on their query, which agent is resolving their query, updates on the timeline, and so on.
Besides this, a help desk can help you improve visibility of your support by creating a dashboard and reports. The analytics and reporting features can help you identify the trends and roadblocks that can alleviate the need for specific processes and tasks too complicated or insufficient.
You can track resources, employee assignments, associated costs, quality of delivery, and customer feedback.
Advantages of Help Desk Software
Customer request management is an operating arm of an organization. It is designed to keep operations running smoothly. The help desk handles everything from individual tech support to providing a seamless medium for organizations to deliver. Here are some key advantages of help desks:
It standardizes your entire workflow and procedures enabling you to provide a consistent experience.
Help desks make things easier for the end-users. Anyone can create a service request simply by filling a form or registering through multiple mediums of communication.
Efficiency. The more you automate your manual tasks, the more likely you will reap their benefits.
The help desk eliminates the possibility of manual errors
and keeps the processes moving quickly to completion.Help desks provide a 360-degree insight to the support managers. With consistent processes and centralized information, teams can more efficiently control the request statuses and identify potential bottlenecks.
Help desk software enables companies to hum along effortlessly as every component does its part. It helps you enhance your team’s efficiency and serves as a centralized location for all your communications and data.
Help desks collect and store data from issues, products, and performance results. It enables a more straightforward analysis, and hence everyone involved in the support process can make well-informed and more thoughtful decisions.
Your employee’s productivity is likely to improve when they work collaboratively without snags and problems. As a result, they can get the job done as fast as possible and with ease.
Upgrade Your Customer Request Management Process with DeskXpand
DeskXpand is a robust help desk enhanced with the latest ticket automation features. It caters to all customer request needs from small to large businesses. Here’s how you can update your customer request management process with DeskXpand:
A. Smart Ticket ManagementDeskXpand is filled with robust ticketing features such as faster ticket import, collision detection, merging similar tickets, chat within the tickets, intelligent and automatic ticket assignment, canned responses, and comments. It also lets you create sub tickets within the tickets if needed. Lastly, it allows you to measure SLA performances. You can keep your customers involved in the ticket lifecycle through automatic notifications.
B. Omnichannel FeaturesOmnichannel features will allow you to interact with your customers through numerous channels (like email support, self-service, FAQs, feedback form, etc.) Multiple channels help you to provide a faster response and help you retain customers.
C. Shared InboxUtilize a shared inbox platform and give your team accountability to improve transparency. Help your team collaborate to address the customer needs efficiently.
D. Self-ServiceWith DeskXpand, you can provide a comprehensive knowledge base to your customer. You can reduce the number of incoming tickets up to a greater extent through this feature. Empower your customers to find answers to their doubts right then and there. Relieving your agents from answering repetitive questions will raise their efficiency. All this collectively results in lesser support costs.
E. Flexible CustomizationCustomize your customer request management system fully and adhere to your brand’s look and feel. Align its design with that of your website. It will help you showcase your brand personality and let them connect with you quickly.
F. Understand Customer BehaviorUse DeskXpand analytics to predict the behavior of your queries based on previous customer actions. You can also track your ticket inflow accurately to manage your staff accordingly.
The Bottomline
When companies manage customer requests through email threads, spreadsheets, or disparate tools, the processes become improper or inefficient. They risk wasting their resources and leaving their customers unsatisfied. The only key to customer success is managing and fulfilling customer requests effectively and accurately. Hence, it would be wise to opt for a customer request management system to delight stakeholders and avoid disruption.
DeskXpand helps customer request managers to avoid the pitfalls by organizing, controlling, and automating their workflow. All from a single place without the additional technical resources! It consolidates all information into a single system and makes it easy for managers to track the status of their support team.
So, if you’re looking to cite a solid customer request management record and improve your business efficiency, you MUST check out DeskXpand.
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/guide-to-customer-request-management/
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So, you worked your way up the ladder. You got promoted to the customer service manager position, and now you’re all set to manage a high-performing team. You might assume your job would get more accessible now since managing a team does not seem like a task. But you’re only looking at it superficially. Managing a team that manages an infinite number of your customers comes with a set of challenges.
When you start settling into the new role, you’ll realize the need for an entirely different skill set. As a customer service manager, you’ll be in charge of fostering a productive environment for your team. You’ll have to deal with critical issues from day one. You’ll also need to oversee the performance of your employees and ensure that your team is keeping pace with service demands.
Customer service involves dealing with critical situations from day one. When something goes wrong, the customer service manager is the first person responsible. Whether a team delivers a memorable experience or answers, the queries depend on the customer service manager’s skills. Building efficient customer service manager skills is not limited to ensuring customer success but also how happy and satisfied their team members are with their jobs. Perhaps initiating strategic direction and providing leadership are essential skill sets of a customer support manager.
It is their job to nurture profitable relationships with customers and build loyalty through remarkable strategies. If you are a customer service manager or aspiring to become one, we’ve listed some best qualities that you’ll need. These tips will help you advocate customer success through a deep understanding of both customer and business needs. Build and lead a strong workforce with these five customer support manager skills.
6 Must-have Customer Service Manager Skills
1. Responsive Communication
Responsive communication is the barest minimum customer service manager skill. It is an essential skill to build regardless of the industry you work in. The way you and your team communicate says a lot about your brand. Responsive communication would always work as it makes the customers feel that they’re heard.
Every day will come with new types of queries and problems. Managers and their teams need to be responsive and adaptive to situations. As a manager, you must lead the process and set a good example. A customer service manager must set an ideal example, even if it means getting their hands dirty or keeping the company’s spirit high. Managers should also coach their customer support employees to handle challenging customer calls and busy workloads.
How to Build Responsive Communication Skills?
There is no fixed rulebook or fixed ways to ensure responsive communication. But here are some ways that can help:
Acknowledge a customer query or an escalated issue as soon as possible.
Write back to your loyal customers often.
As a manager, you can write relevant blog posts on Medium and Linkedin and connect with your audience.
Make your vision clear and convey the same to your team.
2. Planning & Strategy
Planning and strategizing is yet another must-have customer support skill. A manager must get involved in planning and building customer-centric strategies. It is said that “when it comes to customer service, haste makes waste.†Building a deliberate, detail-oriented strategy will go a long way in meeting the needs of your customers.
While framing the strategies, make sure you keep in mind the “SMART goals†approach:
Design workflows that enable collaboration between your support employees. Collaboration will bring a loyal customer base and engage employees too. As a manager, you must continuously strive to discover any unmet needs. It would help if you also made sure that your goals and strategies ease your agent’s job.
Problem Solving Capabilities
Problem-solving capabilities are a significant part of planning and strategy. Your problem-solving tendencies will make you aware of the potential problems that may occur in the future. You can then plan accordingly and be ready for almost all possible situations.
Apart from this, you will need to be present and available to help your employees solve problems and get them going if they’re stuck somewhere. You’ll also have to deal with problems (leadership and management problems) like budget priorities, proving the ROI, bringing changes in your processes, company advocacy, etc. So how do you get ready for all these problems?
How to Build Problem-Solving Skills
Problem-solving skills can only be improved through a proactive approach. It will help if you communicate with your support team continuously. The more aware you are of a situation, the more likely you will solve the broader problem.
Thinking, discussing, and talking out problems will straighten half the things for you. And only this will help you build strategies you can use in your day-to-day support. Also, keep in mind that the solutions to the problems must be backed by data and should prove their grounds when quantified. “Why?†you’ll ask. Keep reading.
Recommended Read: How to Improve Your Customer Service: 7 Tips That Always Work
Importance of Making Data-Driven Decisions
Creating measurable goals and providing data-driven insights is yet another must-have customer service manager skill. If data back your strategies, it’ll help you remove roadblocks from your support and reduce the cost invested in the support process.
“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.â€
– Daniel Keys Moran
“Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.â€
– Charles Babbage
Especially in today’s world, where most customers are techno-savvy, managers can utilize analytics tools to find the loopholes in their systems. As a customer support manager, it is essential to keep track of important KPIs and metrics such as average time response, breached SLAs, agent performance, customer satisfaction scores, etc. These numbers will help you achieve stiff targets and improve overall productivity.
Data-Driven Foundation of Customer-Support
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3. Empathy and Diplomacy
Empathy: Not just customers, you’ll need to be empathetic towards your employees as well. You’ll need to take everyone’s needs and priorities into account while making decisions.
Diplomacy: Diplomacy is the most significant part of managerial positions. The same applies to customer support managers. They need to be tactful when it comes to navigating through tricky situations. You’ll need both these skills while dealing with both angry customers and frustrated employees.
While it is always good to give full affirmations to customers, a little diplomacy can save you from unnecessary customer frustrations. Diplomacy is all about phrasing, word choice, and delivery tone. It will ensure that the person you’re speaking to understands your position and reason even when you’re delivering bad news.
How to Build a Combination of These Skills
Empathy and diplomacy both are critical in a customer-facing role. Hence, instead of looking at empathy and diplomacy as two different aspects, I’d rather suggest you see and use their combination.
Every manager must agree that they’ll never be able to please everyone as a manager. But by practicing empathy and being rational in your decisions will save you from losing your customers. You can start by practicing various reflecting and listening techniques in your conversations. Talk and repeat what you as a customer would want to hear. Try to clear your intent whenever you speak. Clarify everything with your employees. Be affirmative yet indulging.
Diplomacy can be learned by watching how the diplomats do it. Only a rational approach would work. Read about how to choose the correct phrase and try rephrasing your regular day-to-day customer conversations. Deliver the right thing instead of delivering with emotions.
4. How to Best Handle De-escalations
There are always customers who want to speak to the manager regardless of best efforts and response from the customer service teams. It is a clear indication that the customer is unhappy. As a customer support manager, the customer will churn if you do not look into it at the earliest.
Under these circumstances, managers need to step in and work on what’s best for the company and customers. You can negotiate with the customer, take an affirmative stand. It is the best way to de-escalate any conflict. If the customer demands seem impossible to fulfill, you can communicate with them better and let them know. If you don’t do it, the consequences can be damaging.
Let me walk you through this with an excellent example:
Company Name: Proposify, A SaaS Company
The CEO of Proposify noticed that a customer was constantly complaining about the software. He noted that the customer was asking for solutions that were not possible to fulfill. After weeks of continuous complaints, the CEO decided to talk to the customer directly.
The CEO apologized for this company’s inability to meet the customer’s needs and also offered to provide a refund along with competitors that the customer should try. To his surprise, the CEO got the following response:
It is a perfect example and a right blend of empathy, diplomacy, and affirmation to de-escalate any issue. If you work for the customer’s best interest, the customers will know, and they’ll be delighted. In the beginning, it seemed like they’d lose a customer, but they gained a loyal customer and a valuable testimonial instead.
5. Team Building & Productivity
Managers are not the ones who can do the work better than the support reps; they are the ones who can get their support reps to do the work better than they can.
Frederick W. Smith
The primary goal of a customer support manager is to build a team of support representatives committed to carrying forward the company’s vision and providing exceptional service to customer issues. It starts from hiring the right people and training them adequately. As a customer support manager, you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of all your agents and help them grow.
It will help you eliminate unnecessary barriers that may bring down the quality of customer service. Good managers know how to keep themselves, and their teams motivated. Play your team’s strengths and guide them in the weak parts. Create a transparent work environment so that everyone can express their needs. Your trust and respect will create a sense of belonging in them, resulting in better performance.
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Recommended Read: Seven Tips to Skyrocket Your Agent Productivity
6. Innovative Solutions for Customer Engagement
We live in a world where ideal customer service practices are not limited to only delivering good services. The key lies in the answer to “How agile your customer support is.†It depends on your support to witness continuous improvements. It would help if you adopted innovations to support infrastructure by keeping your customers in mind.
A customer service manager’s skill involves enriching experiences for employees and customers. How will you do this if you’re not aware of the latest trends and technologies? For example, enabling a seamless omnichannel experience is something that the customers consider as a bare minimum. Now, if you do not know this, how will you work towards implementing an omnichannel experience? It is a fact that your customer support may seem ancient if you do not follow the trends or, worse, are not aware of the trends. There’s no solution to this except for reading and engaging in dedicated customer support communities. As a manager, you must know what your competitors are doing, what kind of employees they hire, the software they use, the technology that prevails in the market, etc. Once you start engaging, you’ll have half of your future problems resolved!
Recommended Read: Top 10 Customer Service Trends to Follow in 2021
Bottomline
An amazing experience can turn a satisfied customer into a brand advocate and promoter. Customer service managers and teams have a significant role in fuelling your company’s flywheel and generating positive reviews and retention. All these things will matter to the company’s bottom line. This perspective will allow you to keep the company’s goals in mind as you’ll put customers first.
The job of a customer service manager is not an easy task. It is very different from being an agent, and it requires an entirely different mindset. As a customer service manager, you’ll have to deal with the toughest of the issues, build a customer-centric approach, think about your employees, all this while ensuring that the customer satisfaction rates do not dwindle. It is a challenging role and a multi-tasking one. It puts you in a unique position to represent your company and build a brand image that no one else can build. I hope the above customer service manager skills will help you build the right attitude and prowess. You’re all set to rock.
The Article is Originally Published On:
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Everyone knows that help desk software empowers agents with a wide range of collaborative features. Studies have shown that as much as 88% expect a response within an hour. Hence, help desk software is essential for businesses now more than ever. Eventually, the goal of every business is to keep the customer satisfied so that they won’t leave.
Setting up high customer satisfaction targets isn’t enough. You must constantly strive to excel at customer service. Start with asking yourself:
Are you proud of your customer service?
Are your customers always satisfied?
Do you always have happy customers?
Are your agents overloaded with piles of tickets every day?
If your answers to these questions are a “No,†it is high time you revamp your help desk software features. An ideal ticketing system with advanced features eliminates redundancy of work and efforts on the part of agents. Having every feature under one help desk will drastically improve your support efficiency. Not only that, but it also helps customers effectively and promptly. It helps you serve an exceptional customer service experience!
What is an Exceptional Customer Support
(Source)
While flying the JetBlue airline, a passenger named Paul Brown casually tweeted about how he didn’t get a chance to grab his Starbucks coffee as he was at the smaller terminal of the airport. To his surprise, JetBlue customer service reps delivered a Starbucks venti mocha to his seat on the plane. Brown was elated with this experience.
It is one of the most excellent examples that other brands can learn from. The key takeaway? Customers don’t always need large gestures. Mr. Brown will surely be a loyal customer for the rest of his life. Plus, the tweets will do their work for years to come. Good customer service will keep your brand on top of your customer’s minds. Believe it or not, it is the simple things that count and produce loyal, happy customers.
It is also important to note that a lot of things go behind making a customer happy. For example, to serve this experience to Mr. Brown, the JetBlue customer support team would have gone through many different things. Firstly they would have had their social media channel in place with a unified interface (or an omnichannel interface). The customer support team was proactive in responding to the problem as quickly as possible. It was only possible because they had the data and information about their customer (Mr. Brown) on-hands.
Turn your customers into loyal customers like Mr. Brown here.
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Help Desk Software Features to Ensure Customer-Centric Approach
You would think that it took so many help desk software features to fulfill one customer’s demand. That’s correct! But once you achieve the maximum customer satisfaction, they’re going to be with you for the rest of the time. That sounds like a good deal to me.
So, the question goes: what are the features of a good ticketing system, and how will they benefit your business? Without further delay, let’s jump into it and find out:
1. Ticket Management Features
Ticket mismanagement is the most common problem for businesses. Especially if you’re still hung up on conventional manual processes. You may lose multiple queries, maintain a streamlined workflow and even miss/forget to update your customers about their ticket resolution journey.
Robust help desk software features can solve this problem indefinitely. With a shared team inbox, process customer requests, manage tickets, streamline your workflow and notify your customers alongside. Some must-have ticketing features are mentioned below:
Help desk software features that you need for ticketing:
Email to ticket conversion
Automatic ticket assignment
Shared inbox with shared access
Chat and comment within the tickets
Ticket notifications
Auto-responders or notifications
Service level agreements management
Collision detection
Unified interface for a single query
Robust data management to save customer history
2. Collaboration Features
The foundation of any help desk depends on the efficient management of its customer service and how collaborative its features are. Collaborative help desk software features are critical to your help desk software. Team collaboration is a must in building customer-intimate culture. A collaborative interface will empower your overall support. Let’s have a look at various collaborative features in detail:
A. Shared Inbox
A shared inbox is something that each of your support reps would have access to. This way, they would know all the incoming queries and could collaboratively work on them. Through a shared inbox, your agents can comment/chat within the tickets.
B. Collision Detection
Let your agents view potential ticket collisions. An ideal ticketing software would have it sorted. It saves unnecessary communication between agents and promises a standardized experience to the customers.
C. Merge Similar Tickets
Combine similar tickets and send the progress of tickets all together in one go. It would save hours of answering repetitive queries.
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3. SLA Management
Service level agreements define the level of service you expect from a vendor, laying out the metrics by which your services are measured. It also includes the remedies and penalties that would be charged when the service levels are not achieved. It is a critical component of any business trying to ace and provide better customer support. It includes:
A. Simplified SLA Target Creation
You can create targets for the entire workflow like time taken for first response, time taken for ticket assignment, response time, ticket closing time, etc.
B. Lifecycle Tracking
Keep tracking the lifecycle of your tickets. Keep track of the deadlines based on elapsed time, request categories, minimum response time, first-time response, etc.
C. Prevent Potential Breaches
The primary reason why service level agreement is the most useful help desk software feature is that you can predict potential breaches and prevent them. You can define automated escalation actions for each and every commitment. You can also notify the right team member to get the tickets resolved in time.
D. Custom Alerts and Notifications
Set visual alerts and notifications to ensure that those problematic tickets get more attention as the SLA breach time approaches.
E. Measure SLA Performance
Monitor the SLA performances and set more vital targets to deliver a refined and thorough customer service experience.
4. Self-Service Features
It becomes challenging when you do not have support employees working round the clock. For example, at the time of a sale or during the holiday/festival season, an eCommerce business is likely to receive several repetitive queries.
I am sure you do not want your support representatives to get overburdened during their work hours. Self-service allows your customers to gain autonomy and solve their queries themselves.
Self-service is one of the most popular help desk software features adopted widely across industries, countries, and business units.
A survey states that by 2022, around 85% of customer service interaction would be through the self-service medium.
Gartner
There are multiple benefits of having self-service features:
Boosts social engagement
Support cost reduction
Builds a social presence
Increases customer satisfaction & success
Provide detailed troubleshooting steps for common roadblocks faced by customers and share them with every user. You can add content in the format your customer wants. It can be:
Knowledge base
Video tutorials
FAQs
Personalized recommendations
Building a self-service strategy also includes building, making your website navigation friendly. You can include advanced search algorithms to ensure that the customers find what they’re looking for. You can also have advanced categorization and sub-categorization features.
Adopt a self-service tool for your organization? We have the perfect solution that caters to all your needs in a personalized manner.
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5. Canned Responses
Tools like canned responses, snippets, email templates, etc., can save you a lot of time. It allows you to pre-create and composes messages for generalized responses.
A. Snippets
You can trigger snippets by entering a code. They are used explicitly in writing an introduction and concluding messages. But using snippets, you can help your support agents during live chats and save them from writing the same thing again and again.
B. Email Templates
Email templates are pre-written messages. The customer support agents work on way too many common issues every day. Templates will help your agents save time as they won’t have to rewrite all details of an email.
6. Omnichannel Communication
Customers hate to wait on calls, being dodged and contacting brands repeatedly to resolve the simplest queries.
Businesses with only a single communication channel usually face this problem.
Omnichannel: An Important Help Desk Software Feature
Brands try to do everything they can to make themselves widely available to customers. But, many still struggle to implement a service strategy that truly meets customers to their specific terms.
73% of customers say that when the brand values their time, that is a good customer experience.
Using an omnichannel strategy brings you closer to your customers and helps you get a deeper context of their problems. Plus, an omnichannel response is a help desk software feature that has become the new benchmark for serving exceptional experiences.
Read more: Omnichannel Customer Support Software: A Key to Ace Customer Support
7. Automation Features
Automation is another help desk software feature. It will be regardless of the communication channel used by the customer. If you integrate automation in your helpdesk, you can ensure an immediate response.
If you use automated chatbots, they will respond to customers even when your team is not online. For example, your helpdesk can directly send a personalized response to customers whenever they register their queries by automating your incoming ticket process. They’ll hold the customer queries until your agents take over.
Since we’re talking about automation, did you know DeskXpand is now available with automated ticketing features? No? Check us out!
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8. Analytics and Reporting Features
Setting individual as well as team goals based on data will help you improve accountability. Set up a dashboard to track the team performances and daily goals. Agents will know how quickly they must answer.
Serve a Responsive CX and Monitor Agent Performance
Customer service managers can leverage analytics to boost employee morale and motivate them to reach expected numbers. They can track their team’s performance and help them if they’re stuck somewhere. This way managers can help boost agent morale and motivate them to reach expected targets.
Here are the three key metrics that you must measure:
A. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
The customer lifetime value is a measure of profits that your company makes from a given customer. It can be calculated by adding up a total revenue earned from a customer and subtracting the initial cost from that total amount.
B. Churn Rate
Customer churn rate helps you identify why customers are leaving. The churn rate simply states the number of customers that stop doing business with a company. This metric is calculated as a percentage of customers your company has lost over a given time. If the number is higher, you need to determine the reasons and change your strategies to reduce it.
C. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The net promoter score measures your customers’ willingness to recommend your company’s products and services to others. NPS helps you understand whether your customers are satisfied with your products or not. It is a good indicator of how loyal your customer base is.
The NPS is a 10-point scale calculated based on the response to the question: “how likely are you to recommend < brand name > to your friends or family?†or even a set of questions. However, the former question is largely popular.
9. Social Media Presence
Social Media presence is an obvious way to improve your customer experience. Social media channel is a breeding ground for both customer service wins and fails. Plenty of companies successfully communicate with their audiences and capitalize on Facebook, Yelp, etc.
According to a study by Conversocial, only 3% of tweets looking for help tagged the company. That means an incredible 97% of Twitter users could be tweeting good or bad things about your brand without you even knowing it! Yikes.
You can find mentions of your brands even if you’re not tagged. You can do this by looking up your company name in the Twitter search box.
Customers of the digital era are likely to be discussing their needs on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You can monitor your direct and indirect brand mentions and buzzwords in your industry.
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Thankfully, technology has made it easier for businesses to improve customer responsiveness through help desk software features. If you’re looking to manage your online reputation, you need to identify at-risk customers, make your support customer-intimate, and improve customer responsiveness; DeskXpand would do you well.
DeskXpand is an automated, omnichannel customer service software that helps companies deliver a cohesive and flexible customer experience across various channels. We are ISO27001 certified customer support solution providers with 14+ years of industry experience. We aim to help brands achieve complete visibility and a high-resolution rate through flexible help desk software features.
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/must-have-features-of-a-good-ticketing-system/
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“Customer Success†is one of the biggest buzzwords in any industry niche, and it is here to stay! It is becoming one of the most critical factors across industries. In fact, it defines the difference between a company going broke and achieving mega-growth.
Let’s all agree that the success of the business inherently depends on the success of your customers. If you ace your products and, more importantly, your customer services, your customer will stick by you and continue using your products and services. At its core, customer success is all about:
* Retaining existing customers
* Improving the overall customer lifetime value
* Ensuring that customers achieve their desired resolutions
In order to pull this off, you’ll need people, streamlined processes, data, and most importantly – the latest tools to organize and manage the former three aspects. In this article, we’ll talk about how helpdesks change your way of serving your customers. Tag along with this checklist and see how many you check off. I am sure, at the end of this article, you’ll be able to tell whether you need to adapt an email helpdesk or not.
Helpdesk Tools: Why Do They Matter The Most
Customer happiness and satisfaction are not something that you can take for granted. Helpdesk tools or email ticketing systems help to deal with just this.
Helpdesk tools are indeed great inventions. They help your company streamline your customer support operations, help your agents perform well, and fasten your query resolution rates. But these are not the only reasons why you should adopt an email helpdesk tool.
You need to start by thinking about the kind of services you offer and how you need to improve your existing services for customers. If you’ve been a part of the industry for a long time, you must be using legacy tools based on third-party applications. The solutions might be working for you, but you still receive a lot of negative customer feedback. Plus, if you’re still reading this, it probably means you’re not happy with the performance of your current tools or help desk.
Below I’ve outlined signs that might suggest that your customer support department needs to revamp your ticketing tools or helpdesk tools ASAP.
1. Still Stuck on Spreadsheet
Here’s a quick tip – don’t use it anymore.
Spreadsheets are free to use and seem like an obvious solution in the beginning. But, if you’re going to scale or are planning to scale or have already scaled, it is time to use more coherent data management systems. The more data you need to manage, the harder it gets to streamline your support. It will be hard for your support reps to catch up with the data. It’ll be hard for new employees to understand the data management process. Manual systems also call for tons of errors. These are just a few disadvantages, to begin with.
Consider a scenario where your client gets in touch with you through email and then wants to shift to another channel, say phone call or social media? Will you want your support reps to manage this information manually? An email ticketing system will automate the data management process for you.
2. You Don’t Have a 360-Degree Support View
As an admin, you’ll have a 360-degree view of your support. Email helpdesks provide a unified dashboard. A unified dashboard allows the admins or the support managers to monitor everything from a single place. They can see all the agents and their work from a single place.
DeskXpand Dashboard
Admins can provide quick support if an agent is stuck somewhere or has a problem in the workflow. This dashboard will also have reporting and analytics features so that managers can analyze every critical situation and take necessary advantages.
3. Your Resolution Time is Extremely Low
You must have experienced this one yourself. Waiting for help when they need it the most is one of the worst customer nightmares. Customers do not want to and will not wait for long. Look at their expectations:
Email Response Time Expectations
So, if you observe that your customer support agents cannot keep up with the customer expectations, it is best to act right away. It is a clear sign that you need an email ticketing system right away. An email helpdesk will help your agents answer queries on time. Plus, you can automate your ticketing tasks like ticket registration, ticket assignment, distribution, and save time.
Your team can leverage tools like canned responses, email templates, and knowledge base to save time for repetitive queries and frequently asked questions.
4. Trouble Using Multiple Software at The Same Time
Tools work better when they’re together. Your email helpdesk will be more effective when it is integrated with your:
* Data management tools like Trello, Jira, etc.
* E-commerce software like Magento, Shopify, etc.
* Survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, etc.
* Social Media channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
* Sales CRM, like Highrise or SharpSpring
* Email marketing tools, like Mailchimp and GetResponse
So, do any of the warning signs described above apply to your business? If the answer is yes, check out the DeskXpand email ticketing system specifically built to cater to SMEs.
The processes become improper and inefficient when you manage customer queries through email threads and other disparate tools. You risk wasting resources and leaving customers unsatisfied. The only key to successful customer service is fulfilling customer requests effectively and accurately. Hence, it would be wise to opt for an email helpdesk to delight customers and avoid disruption.
DeskXpand helps companies to avoid the pitfalls by helping them organize and automate their workflow. All from a single place! Consolidate all information into a single system and track the status of their support team easily. To yield a solid customer support record, you MUST check out DeskXpand.
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/four-signs-you-need-an-email-ticketing-system/
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“If your customer retention is poor, then nothing else matters.â€
– Brian Balfour
Be it service providers, start-ups, or well-established organizations, staying on top of customer support services is critical for all of them. It is essential for customer retention. Companies must continuously ensure customer satisfaction and ensure all their needs are met—everything from generating a support ticket to passing through the resolution workflow.
Most organizations have to manage with a regular influx of customer support requests. Only a well-planned ticket management system can keep your support up and running. A digital system centralizes communication for end-users and streamlines the work of support agents. It can drive seamless customer support and improve customer satisfaction.
Efficient customer support involves resolving support tickets in the shortest period and according to the agreed target resolution times known as service-level agreements. The ticket handling process typically works towards areas of incident management and request fulfillment. Support executives may also build and maintain a knowledge base to support ticket handling best practices to collect information about known issues and help reduce resolution times for similar tickets.
Typically, the task of the customer service team begins with a request from the end customer. The request generates a support ticket, and its details are passed through the workflow. Next, an agent is assigned, and they eventually resolve the issue. Designing a transparent ticketing system and implementing the latest helpdesk best practices is vital for the smooth execution of support queries.
Luckily, if you’re looking to enhance your customer support services, there are many easy-to-implement practices that you can adopt today. This article examines different ways to manage helpdesk tickets and offers proven ticket handling best practices to improve your support performance.
1. Decide a Universal Method for Ticket Prioritization
The first and foremost of the ticket handling best practices is defining a fixed method for ticket prioritization. Without a defined method of prioritization, your tickets will always be cluttered. Setting up a method will prevent the agents from cherry-picking the tickets. There are two ways in which you can prioritize your tickets.
A. First In, First OutThis method decides the ticket order based on the chronology of its registration. It enables you to address the support requests in the order they’re received. A chronological method will help you optimize workflow and prevent backlogs.
B. Prioritize Based on UrgencyThis method gives the ticket assignment power at the hands of the admin or support managers. Most ticket management solutions take an email, generate necessary contact information, in-depth details on the issue, and impact the customer. Admins can pick requests based on the urgency and the type of problems your customers face.
2. Avoid Unnecessary Creation of Tickets
Unnecessary creation of tickets that have approved resolution leads to overworked support agents and staff. When an issue presents itself repeatedly, your agents should develop an approved resolution for it. They can then document it within the organization’s knowledge base. Encourage your users to use your self-service for approved resolutions. You can direct them to these knowledge base articles and empower them to solve the issue by themselves. Pick a software tool that can help users connect with approved resolutions before an unnecessary ticket is created.
3. Monitor Your Ticket Status Regularly
As a support admin or manager, you must track and monitor your ticket status regularly. Make sure each ticket has a status. For instance, you can divide your workflow stages into various tags like “registered,†“open,†“in-progress,†“pending,†and “closed.†Your ticket management software should help you track the status of each ticket and view the updates on a unified dashboard. It enables you to follow each ticket’s progress and prevent requests from getting lost or neglected.
4. Decide Urgency Based on Ticket Information
Support representatives must implement and enforce a standard ticket format. It can include information about the customer, their description, and an assessment of its impact on business processes. Customer support representatives must implement and enforce a standard ticket format that includes contact information for the user.
Everything needs to be decided beforehand: A description of the issue, its resolution assessment, and the time needed to meet the resolution. You can use this information to find out how urgent each ticket is. Support teams can hence respond to tickets based on their priority. The development of standard methods to assess the ticket urgency helps to ensure that the service of the support staff aligns with the priorities with the needs of the business.
5. Analyze Your Existing Workflow
Take a complete overview of your existing support, support agents’ skills, loopholes in your workflows, technological needs, and so on. Finding out loopholes and trends in your existing support will help you find where you’re lacking.
Carry out a monthly or quarterly survey to evaluate your existing support processes. You can send feedback forms to customers after meeting the resolution. Find out where your team’s skills do and don’t measure up.
DeskXpand Analytics
The analytics features of a helpdesk will help you understand customer behavior and make data-driven decisions. You can gain actionable insights with large-scale customer data metrics. In short, you can get a complete 360-degree view of your support performance.
Support managers should strongly consider measuring at least the following KPIs:
* Average response time
* Average resolution time
* Average overall ticket handling time
* Ticket escalation rates
* Self-service usage rates
With the help of data, you can evaluate strategies to design better experiences. Use the data and predict the behavior of prospective client queries. Hence, make sure you have analytics features in your helpdesk. Align your support with the latest customer support trends. Hence be aware of the latest trends and then constantly update your support strategies accordingly.
RELATED: Top 10 Customer Service Trends to Follow in 2021
6. Make Self-Service Available
The cost of resolving a ticket is directly proportional to the escalation stage it reaches.
A study by Informa Tech (in 2017) states the average costs for ticket resolutions by escalation levels in North America:
* Tier 1 Ticket Cost: $22
* Tier 2 Ticket Cost: $91
* Tier 3 Ticket Cost: $195
* Field Support Cost: $416
* Vendor Support Cost: $1015
According to the same research, resolving a ticket through customer self-service would cost just two dollars! It is precisely why enabling self-service is one of the most critical aspects of customer support.
Go for a helpdesk that lets you provide self-service from within. You can go for a separate helpdesk software as well. It will help you reduce the number of customer calls.
By implementing DeskXpand’s self-service features, Jonathan, a healthcare start-up entrepreneur, was able to reduce customer support calls by 35%. He was able to forecast the problem of larger customer service requests even before he began his new venture. Read more about Jonathan’s journey with DeskXpand.
DeskXpand Knowledge Base
DeskXpand is an omnichannel help desk with comprehensive self-service and robust ticketing features. It helps you deliver an enhanced and flexible customer experience across multiple channels. I am sure you want to achieve complete visibility, reduce your customer inquiries and attain a high-resolution rate like Jonathan. Check out DeskXpand now!
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7. Get Rid of Manual Tasks
Manually filtering emails, tickets, tasks, and so on can be a significant time sink for your helpdesk. Plus, excessive spam mails, duplicate tickets, repetitive issues increase the probability of overlooking actual tickets that require attention and timely response. To eliminate these problems, support managers must look forward to helpdesks that provide ticketing automation. Automating manual tasks will help you gain a competitive edge and relieve your support agents of the burden.
8. Decrease Your Response Time
The best way to decrease resolution time is to collect necessary information when the ticket is created. It is also the best way to avoid lengthy email exchanges with customers. You can use the ticket management system to form request templates to ask users the most important questions before creating a ticket. You can also customize the request templates to reduce back-and-forth conversations with customers.
9. Avoid Unnecessary Escalations of Tickets
If you escalate a support ticket to a higher support level, it means you’re increasing the total cost of the resolution. So it is vital only to escalate tickets whenever it is indispensable. If a ticket approaches an SLA violation, it is automatically escalated. You can prevent this from happening by ensuring that your agents respond and attend to the tickets promptly.
As a support manager, you can also avoid unnecessary escalations of tickets by configuring alerts for tickets approaching SLA violations. These tickets can be treated as high-priority before they result in an unnecessary escalation. It is useful when a ticket may have been missed or incorrectly assigned and is now approaching SLA violation due to having been overlooked.
With this being said, escalations should be encouraged and welcomed in situations where they are necessary. For example, when agents need additional support for a positive business outcome, they must willingly escalate the tickets.
10. Implement a Tiered Support Structure and Segmentation
A tiered support structure is a must for more extensive and established companies that deal with a higher volume of tickets. It ensures that the most qualified technicians are focused on the most demanding incident fixes. At the same time, lower-tier technicians can focus on more straightforward tasks like reviewing/approving/routing tickets and fulfilling basic requests. This will optimize how your support staff use their time and reduce response time at each level.
You can also segment your tickets to meet the SLAs consistently. Segmenting support tickets ensures that the support request pertaining to a particular technology is routed to the most qualified person who can resolve issues as quickly as possible. However you choose to segment, the ability to triage support requests efficiently with segmentation can decrease first response times and positively impact customer retention and satisfaction.
11. Empower Your Support Staff With the Right Tools
Support agents need the right tools to resolve customer issues effectively. The whole process fastens when agents receive tickets with accurate and up-to-date information. The best way to empower your staff with ticket handling software that helps them stay organized and reduce duplicated or misdirected effort.
As the ticket moves through the resolution journey, different agents may be involved. Your support agents also need easy access to customer data as it provides a historical view of the customer’s journey with the brand. If every person involved can review the documented history, the support would become all the more efficient.
It is also a major relief to the customers as they do not have to repeat and re-explain the issue to several support agents throughout the ticket handling process.
Take Your Ticket Management to the Next Level!
Many organizations design their resolution journey or workflow based on these ticket handling best practices. It can only happen if you have efficient tools at your disposal. A good ticket management solution will help you frame the best and efficient customer support, while a bad one can break your workflows.
*Enters DeskXpand*
DeskXpand is an omnichannel ticketing system that allows you to implement all the ticket handling best practices mentioned above. The great thing about DesKXpand is that it is flexible, not prescriptive. It gives the organizations full power to determine which practices and recommendations work best for their business niche. There’s no right or wrong method. You have to pick what practices will suit you the best.
With that being said, our readers who implement and follow these ticket handling best practices are not only able to meet but surpass their customer’s expectations. So, are you ready to meet the demands of today’s digitally-driven world? Take your customer support to the next level with DeskXpand.
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/support-handling-best-practices/
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Lately, technology has condensed, reduced, and minimized the overall customer support time, be it a resolution, acknowledgment, or response. So much so that:
“93% of customers will make a repeat purchase with brands that offer excellent customer support.â€
When we say customer support, it means providing in-store support or solving post-sales support queries and doing it in REAL-TIME. Timing is the game here. You need to ask yourself whether your ‘customer time’ is the same as your brand’s ‘resolution time’ or at least the ‘response time.’ If you do not meet these basic requirements, your starting point is already a compromise.
The customer support landscape is ripe for disruption. Brands are slowly making progress toward a real-time and lively customer experience. Today, only a few companies leverage all the technology at their fingertips to enhance real-time customer experience.
For example, Amazon is at the forefront of building a compelling customer journey. They’ve connected their virtual assistant, Alexa, with customers’ purchases. A customer can make an order just by verbally mentioning the product. If we talk about the post-sales service, Sephora beats the competition. Sephora uses messenger apps like Kik to provide a real-time, personalized experience to the customers. Their strategies seek to create interactions that feel tailored to the customers.
Newer channels of communication have made it possible for brands to resolve queries within moments of registration. You’d wonder that this possibility already existed through older communication mediums (email, telephone, or walk-in support). So, where exactly does the value of real-time support lie? Where does the value of newer channels lie? Where do these two intersect? This is precisely what we’ll talk about today. We’ve got you covered with the latest strategies to build real-time support for your business.
What to Expect?
Evolution of Customer Support Through Centuries
Did you know that the 1750 BCE complaint tablet to Ea-Nasir is widely known to be the first complaint ever registered? The business-customer relationship has been present since the time we began exchanging goods and services. It used to take days to resolve customer problems back then.
Evolution of Customer Service
Thankfully, customers of the 21st century no longer need to spend hours working on clay tablets to tell us how they feel about our products. The popularization of the phones first and then the internet has made the whole ‘instantly reach out at the time of query’ phase significantly simpler.
Relevance of Real-Time Customer Support in Today’s World
A century ago, if customers had complaints, they would visit the store and get them resolved. The support process was personal, direct, and straightforward. It was because of the physical proximity between the brand and the customer. The experience took place in real-time.
Today, if I have a problem, I can still visit the store. Still, I will more likely do at least one of the following instead: email, phone, find the answer myself by browsing the query or FAQs (if the brand provides it), tweet about it, write on the brand’s Facebook page (or even LinkedIn for that matter), leave a bad review, so on and so forth.
So, what does this say about our concept of real-time? Has it changed significantly between now and the time a century ago? What exactly are my expectations? How does time relate to this context? Have I (as a customer) become more impulsive and impatient? Has time become more public, more empathetic, more appeasing, or more agitating?
The answer is simple: I have more options to choose from. And so does every customer. If customers can have an online instant response (and by instant, I mean at lightning speed) and that too remotely, they’re going to push companies to provide them a real-time experience (an online one).
So, how do you achieve this?
The more channels you have, the more possibility of serving a real-time response. The solution lies in finding out what aspect of your customer support is most effective in serving a real-time response.
Importance of Support Channels in Real-Time Support
In a way, every single aspect contributes to real-time support. It includes everything from your customer responsiveness, response time, support culture, a customer-centric approach, and the tech tools that you use. But most importantly, it depends on your support channels!
As we discussed earlier, the notion of ‘real-time’ support is not that new. The latest customer-responsive channels (Twitter, Facebook, chatbots, and so on) have given it a new meaning. Many companies offer social media channels to enable real-time support, but most haven’t mastered it yet.
The new mediums of communication benefit both customers and brands. Clients can now pass their queries and feedback on and get quick assistance. On the other hand, brands can easily find and interact with their customers through their preferred channels and serve a seamless support experience. Nowadays, support takes place more in real-time worldwide, and you need to choose the proper channels to deliver at this rapid pace.
Picking the correct channel for your audience (or rather a segment of your audience) sounds like a monumental task. But that will bring you higher customer satisfaction rates, improve your brand reputation, and enhance the overall CX.
How to Build a Real-Time Customer Support
In 2021 real-time support should be efficient, easy, and should match the support expectations of your customers. And enhancing real-time support MUST be a priority for any brand if they want to achieve maximum success. When you revamp your support processes and enable a more real-time experience, your brand is bound to grow higher and better. Here are a few ways to build real-time support experiences for your customers:
1. Hot Favorite Support Channel: Live Chat
Customers prefer live chat over any other medium of communication. For some industries, chat growth has increased by as much as 150%. It can be because more than half of all the customers prefer to chat with someone in real-time and online rather than calling and contacting a support rep.
Instant communication has changed the way companies connect with their customers.
And, it is not just telephonic support that’s losing out to live chat. There are other digital channels too!
A survey found that live chat has become the leading digital contact method for online customers, as a staggering 46% of customers prefer live chat compared to just 23% for email.
Through live chats, you can:
* Increase your sales and revenue
* Provide faster customer support
* Deliver a better customer experience
Live chat is not just limited to a pop-up window on your support website. You will need to switch between multiple mediums to meet a single resolution. It is precisely where the versatility of DeskXpand helpdesk comes into the picture. DeskXpand is helpdesk software that allows you to communicate with your customers in real-time through their preferred medium.
You’ll be glad to know that DeskXpand instantly converts your received emails into support tickets, but that’s not all. DeskXpand opens up additional avenues of communication through customers’ favorite social media channels. That’s right! Your team will even be able to field direct message inquiries from multiple channels. Take a free demo and find out.
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Common Misconception: Live Chat is All About Speed
According to a survey, companies with satisfaction ratings above 90% had an average chat duration of 11 minutes and 47 seconds. The ones with lower scores had an average duration of 8 minutes and 42 seconds.
These stats contrast with the usual belief that live chat is all about short, quick answers.
Well, it is true but not exclusively. Live chat is the best opportunity for you to have a 10-15 minute conversation that might have taken days over email and that too in real-time. You don’t necessarily need to aim for the shortest possible interaction to retain delighted customers.
2. Make Instant Help Available Through Chatbots
For several companies, AI chatbot technology isn’t a practical option for real customer service yet. On the other hand, many companies use chatbots to answer level one (most basic) queries.
There are cases where it can work well for much larger companies with bigger budgets and training data sets.
According to a survey, chatbots received slightly higher customer satisfaction ratings (87.58%) than those transferred to a live support agent (85.8%). Of course, these findings are more about the irritation of being transferred than about the bots. So much so that 29% of customers are frustrated by scripted and impersonal live chat responses.
3. Self-service For the Win
Another brilliant way to help customers get answers instantly is to provide high-quality self-service. A study by Nuance Enterprise discovered that 67% of customers prefer to use self-service options instead of speaking with a customer support agent or a company representative.
Your self-service should help customers solve common product issues independently. It can include answers to all the simple issues and questions in an organized manner. These self-service options can be of various forms, such as knowledge base, FAQs, tutorial videos, or simple documentation of your products and services.
The primary purpose of these articles is to provide customers with information that can help them troubleshoot their problems. Your team can provide detailed troubleshooting steps for common problems and share them with every user. Besides, you also need to make sure that your website is navigation-friendly. Your customers must be able to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Use advanced search algorithms to make navigation easy. You can also use helpdesk software to categorize your knowledge base articles into various categories and sub-labels.
DeskXpand Knowledge Base
The primary objective of the knowledge base is its site-wide visibility and 24*7 support availability. You can place an easy-to-use widget to redirect customers to your online library. This way, they can access it easily regardless of whatever page they’re on.
Do you know what would create the most compelling real-time support experience? A live chatbot that is tightly integrated with a comprehensive knowledge base.
Read More: Retain More Customers Effortlessly with Customer Self-Service Portal
Benefits of Real-Time Support
Real-time customer support is the best way to improve customer loyalty and reduce your churn statistics. Real-time support will help you build trust with your customers. Not just your support, your products, and your services will also meet positive changes through customer insights.
The data received during real-life support interactions are more likely to benefit the product team in making decisions regarding product improvements. And as for your company, having your customer’s feedback and ideas just one survey away is pretty priceless by itself.
Immediacy requires you to think on your feet. So, real-time support can be daunting for your support teams. But, if you have the right strategies in place, it is likely to be more interesting than intimidating. Plus, you can dig deeper into personalized solutions and achieve a higher resolution rate than in a traditional channel.
Real-Time Support Through Your Helpdesk
The final decision on whether or not to enhance your real-time support is yours to make. If you think you should have it because the trends say so – go for it. If you feel it would be beneficial to your business – go for it. If your customers are demanding it – go for it.
Perhaps, in the end, real-time support is all about understanding the context and managing the behavior. So, if you’re looking for a helpdesk to enable or improve real-time support in your business, we’ve got just the right tool for you.
DeskXpand is built keeping in mind the importance of serving a real-time support experience. It helps you build a one-to-one relationship with your customers through its exceptional features. We are an ISO27001 certified development company with 14+ years of development experience. Make sure you don’t miss checking out DeskXpand’s live demo.
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/real-time-support-techniques/
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The amount of data that companies across the world generate daily is mind-blowing. Every single day, quintillion (containing 18 zeroes) bytes of data is generated. It includes everything from customer feedback to call recordings to customer data. It also includes modern-day customer support departments. Customer support teams can be seen as data factories that pump out information at a breakneck pace. The data at hand is gigantic.
Besides, customers are the lifeblood of any business across the world. Supporting them is critical to the business’s success. It would be best to address several data metrics to understand and meet your customers’ needs in real-time. But as fascinating as it sounds, quantifying this data is more or less overwhelming. Making sense out of all these numbers is where the real problem lies. Customer service analytics can help support managers segregate meaningful information from junk data.
Do you usually find your customer service department lost in a sea of data? Worry not! Because we’ve got you covered. Here are some valuable tips for collecting and using your data in a manner that helps your business grow. Let us start with understanding what role helpdesk analytics plays in all this.
Helpdesk Reporting and Analytics: A Brief Overview
A helpdesk analytics software or customer support software with reporting and analytics features can give you a clear idea about what’s working well and how you can further improve your service operations. It uncovers valuable insights into customer expectations and gives a shot at predicting your customer’s future behavior. Sounds interesting, right?
DeskXpand Analytics
However, simply addressing these helpdesks within your software isn’t enough. You must be able to make calculative decisions out of the data and reports. Firstly, you need to generate the data in a format that makes sense to you and your support agents. Think line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, and more. The inability to deliver these analytics in an easy-to-read fashion could cost you and your agents a lot of time.
Break down the data visually to make it clear and concise. Secondly, once you have your reports, you need to make data-driven decisions that set you apart from your competitors. Let’s dive in and explore multiple use cases of customer service analytics and the metrics that you need to track today.
Helpdesk Metrics You Must Track
“Numbers will talk to you if you are willing to listen.â€
– Jim Bergeson
Most companies track crucial metrics of customer support KPIs like first response time (FRT), the average resolution time, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and many more. With the advancement in AI, it has now become possible to track data with an advanced-level approach.
Nowadays, businesses analyze not only quantitive data but also qualitative data on a large scale. And what more can you do with the data in your helpdesk analytics? Here are some helpdesk metrics and key takeaways.
1. Discover Pain Points of the Customers
As the famous saying goes:
“Behind every unhappy customer, there is an important pain point the businesses need to catch and solve.â€
Your support agents or support professionals understand customer pain points better than anyone else in your support network. Use your helpdesk analytics and take feedback from your support agents to discover the customers’ pain points. Monitor the success of your customer service channels. Check the bounce rate on your knowledge base or self-service website/portal. If it is high, it is clear that the content is not helpful for your customers. Identifying every single pain point is a major first step in improving your support.
2. Support Tickets and Related Metrics
Your helpdesk software must be creating several tickets every week. You need to know the number of active tickets, escalated ones, repetitive queries, first response time, and other such metrics at any given point in time. Here are a few ticket-related metrics that you must measure.
A. Number of Active Support TicketsYou surely do not want to burden your team with excessive work. Analyzing this metric will help you know if you need additional help resolving the ticket requests, assisting with hiring decisions. It will also help you get an idea about planning the schedule for your team for the next week or the next day.
B. Response TimeFind out how long it takes for each ticket to resolve. Find out how long the customers are waiting for a first, second, or third response. Answers like these are critical to your support effectiveness. Less response time means happy customers, after all. Hence the faster you resolve your tickets, the better.
C. Ticket Trends and RoadblockTicket trends and roadblocks include (but are not limited to) peak hours, peak issues, resolved tickets, unresolved tickets (in comparison to similar time frames from the past), etc. Besides, if you can swiftly switch between daily, weekly, and monthly views, it can prove to be a game-changer for your business.
D. Ticket VolumeOver time it will become evident when the volume of helpdesk tickets increases. For example, your customers may find that helpdesk ticket volume increases during holiday sales or when a new service is launched. Using this past data, you can predict when backlogs may be an issue, and you can bring in additional support staff on board to resolve those tickets faster.
E. Average Resolution TimeFind out how much average time does it take to resolve the tickets. You can also check the average resolution time per agent. It will give you an idea about the agent’s performance and help them if they’re falling back.
F. Tickets Per ChannelFind out which channels your support tickets are generated from. After knowing this, you can redirect your resources to the channel that needs them the most. For example, if most tickets are coming through chatbots, perhaps it is an opportunity to improve in-app messaging and educational snippets where possible.
3. Measure Employee Performance
As a support manager, you need to measure your team’s performance constantly. It would help if you also had rewarding schemes in place so that everyone feels motivated.
To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace.
Doug Conant
Helpdesk analytics can help you track key performance indicators and measure agent performance against service level agreements (SLAs). Track the average response time of your support agents and find out who is exceeding the expectations and who needs to pull up their socks and improve. You can make the KPI dashboard visible to everyone involved in your support team. They need to know that they have the right idea about performance expectations. Below are two detailed steps that you can take:
A. Incentivize Your EmployeesYou can encourage your employees by tying compensation and incentives to the customer issues they solve.
This is called giving every employee skin in the game. Employees must know the customer-oriented attitudes and behaviors.Donna MorriAdobe
B. Give Data Acess to Your EmployeesCustomer understanding is not only related to the support manager, admins, and the marketing department. Every business needs an employee experience team to facilitate customer understanding.
For example, Adobe Systems provides its support employees with customer insight access. They set up listening stations where employees can listen to customer calls, analyze them, and find their pain points. All this from the helpdesk itself!
4. Quantify Customer Feedback and Survey
Quantifying customer feedback would mean analyzing your previous workflows and processes. You can do this by gathering the feedback data and running regular analytics. It is the most straightforward method to improve the customer-facing employee workflow. Just ask for feedback! It will help you map the changes in your organization.
Customer feedback will give you a 360-degree view of your support process and workflows regularly. It would help if you did this at least on a biweekly basis. You’ll understand the patterns and reassess them successfully after analyzing them for the first few times. Make it your utmost priority and review them regularly. You can send them personalized feedback as well. Collect suggestions and implement constructive feedback.
Send surveys to your customers from time to time after they’ve used your products or services. Several tools are available in the market, making it extremely easy to create surveys that can give you valuable insight into your customers.
Measure data + Improve Support Performance = Delighted Customers
Customer support analytics offer rich insights into two crucial aspects: how customers perceive your support and how well your team performs to meet ever-rising customer expectations.
The metrics mentioned above can help you gauge whether your business is on the right track to offer exceptional customer experiences. You must accurately analyze qualitative data to understand the complete story behind these hefty numbers. Customer data hides more than it reveals ad DeskXpand is here to help you make sense of your data.
With our intuitive customer service software, your business can measure the metrics that matter and offer delightful support every single day.
DeskXpand’s exceptional helpdesk analytics helps businesses provide quick resolutions by measuring the metrics that matter and offer delightful solutions. It is an automated, omnichannel solution that caters to all business needs. We are an ISO27001 certified development company with 14+ years of development experience. Make sure you don’t miss checking out DesKXpand’s live demo.
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/helpdesk-analytics-you-should-be-tracking/
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Excellent customer service is the number one job in any company! It is the personality of the company and the reason customers come back. Without customers, there is no company!
Connie Edler
Dealing with customers is not something that you can take for granted. Especially when it comes to post-sales customer support; plus, if your customer support is based on manual emails, you might face many issues. A simple email-based manual customer support comes with its set of downfalls. The clutter of emails from all your customers leaves your agents scrambling to figure out which ones require more attention and which ones require immediate actions.
Manual systems have no place for measuring progress. You cannot keep track of your previous interactions with the customer. There is no method through which you can save the customer data safely. Email ticketing systems negate all these downfalls and help organizations build a straightforward approach to customer queries.
Email ticketing systems are a great invention! They are simple, easy-to-use, cost-effective, and helps you perform efficiently. They are a great help to your customer support department. It also helps your customers with issues, questions, or any other kind of need for communication. Let’s check out and find out how it works. Here’s what we are going to discuss:
Email Ticketing System: How Does it Work?
Usually, complaints are registered in the form of emails. You receive an email, register the complaint, resolve the issue, and write back to the customer. If the issue takes longer, you have to inform them that as well to the customer. Quite an effort, huh? Besides, if you don’t have an integrated helpdesk system, the work increases more.
An email ticketing system cuts this path and makes everything work from where it should, i.e., the email inbox. All the queries get registered through email. These emails are converted into tickets, and the acknowledgment notifications are sent automatically.
Advantages of an Email Ticketing System
There are so many advantages of using an email ticketing system. Let’s take a look at some:
I. Boosts the Overall Productivity
Switching between various tools makes your agents more tired and less productive. This results in an average agent spending more hours per week on emails. But, email ticketing systems are collaborative. You can perform each and every task from the same place. The overall efficiency and productivity of the work and processes are improved.
II. Improves In-team Collaboration
Collaboration changes everything. An email ticketing system allows your team to collaborate. How? By using shared inboxes! A shared inbox creates transparency in the workflow. This is applicable both for managers and agents. This way, everyone can be on the same page, including agents, managers, and the team.
Collaboration makes the response quicker for tickets that require different types of expertise. As a result, your response time would drop drastically. This eventually leads to more satisfied customers.
III. Gives a Transparent and Efficient Workflow
Transparent workflow is an essential part of teamwork. When everyone knows what the other team members are doing, the work gets better. This applies to both the agents and the manager. Transparent workflow is also essential because:
Your agents know what they are working on.
They also know what they’ll be working on next.
They can set up weekly or monthly goals.
If someone else is dealing with or is stuck with a problem and need help, the manager can easily find out where they’re stuck and who can help.
Priorities are defined, and this helps agents plan their schedules accordingly.
Agents can avoid potential collisions.
IV. Gradually Reduces Errors
Manual systems call for tons of flaws in the customer support workflow. It is hard to ensure that everything is on time and in place with manual or spreadsheet-based customer support. Notes can get lost, and there is always a data security issue.
With an email ticketing system, you can collect all essential information and ensure its security as well. The system ensures that the deadline is followed automatically and the customers receive day-to-day updates regarding their queries.
V. Centralization Makes it all Work for the Best
Centralization changes everything! Whether it is related to transparency, collaboration, or productivity itself. Centralization is an important aspect that we considered while developing the DeskXpand email ticketing system. The idea was to allow people to make the most of their work from a single interface. We’re sure it will change your support game.
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Why Should an Organization Invest in an Email Ticketing System
If you’re thinking about investing in an email ticketing system, you’d probably have a question about whether the cost of investment will pay off or not. Calculating the return on investment of a new tool can be tricky. You might have questions like, “what impact will it have on the revenue?â€, “will it decrease the cost of business?â€, “will it be cheaper than your previous manual customer support?â€
These are the most perplexing questions for businesses, customer support managers, and teams. Measuring the impact of your actions has always been difficult. This could be because customer support is still seen as a “cost center†rather than a revenue generator.
But, in the post-pandemic world, the scenario is changing. Companies have realized how badly they need a digital system in place to provide an utterly touchless experience. Ergo, this is the correct time to invest in an email ticketing system.
But the key is to make the right choice and select the right system for your business. When you serve an exceptional customer experience as a part of your product’s offerings, it eventually drives revenue. But, all this is only possible with the right features. So, while choosing an email ticketing system for your business, you need to be utterly careful about your business needs. Following are some of the essential features of an email ticketing system:
What Should You Look For in an Email Ticketing System?
An email ticketing system is a way to make sure all your tickets get enough attention on time. While choosing an email ticketing system, these are the features that you should consider:
1. Convert Your Emails to Tickets
An ideal email ticketing system lets you set up email forwarding rules. These rules are to make sure that all the customer emails get automatically converted into tickets. You also need features where you can auto-cc every response sent to your email. This also ensures that you have a copy of the response handy whenever required.
An automation feature is required because it eliminates the need for manual query registration. This way, no queries can slip through the crack. Plus, once the query is registered, your system can trigger an automated acknowledgment response. It also helps you unify all the data in a single place that agents can access securely.
2. Immediate Ticket Assignment
It could be a hugely time-consuming task to sort through a pile of tickets and assign them each manually. Deciding priorities and resources manually can also be a pickle. This can also lead to tickets going unassigned. An email ticketing system can help you automate this process, helping you save time and ensure fast and accurate responses.
Plus, it gives all the controls in the hands of the support manager. The managers can set up various rules based on service level agreements and according to the agent’s expertise. They can apply their methods of ticket prioritization. This also prevents agents from cherry-picking the tickets.
Managers can assign tickets based on two methods:
2.1 Round RobinThis method is the simplest form of automatic ticket assignment. It distributes the tickets evenly between all the available agents. This way, you can also manage if any of the agents are not present or on leave.
2.2 Assignment Based on Various ParametersThis method is popular amongst companies as it ensures that the ticket goes to the most suitable agent on the team. For example, you can set up a parameter that all the queries coming from social media are assigned to a specific agent.
3. Auto-Identify Existing Tickets
Autoidentifiers can be used to avoid redundant tickets. For every incoming ticket, your ticketing system should be able to identify if the email thread is a reply to an existing ticket or not. If it is not a thread to an existing ticket, then the system should generate.
4. Automatic Answer Suggestions
Your support agents might receive multiple common queries on an everyday basis. Typing out these answers each time slows down the process of your entire team. An email ticketing system like DeskXpand pulls in relevant articles from your knowledge base for common queries.
This way, agents do not have to repeat answering the same queries again and again. All they need to do is hit send if the suggestions are accurate.
5. Email Templates and Canned Responses to Save Time
With DeskXpand, agents can use templates to reduce the time spent on typing repetitive content. You can save templates based on the kind of common queries you receive. With the help of email templates, agents can respond to the customers much faster and reduce the manual effort required with each ticket. Email templates can also help you send personalized responses while writing back to your customers.
Canned Responses
It refers to ready-made (pre-formatted and pre-saved) responses that can be used to reduce your customer support response time and serve consistent support to your customers. It usually includes common greeting messages or common responses for future use.
It saves the support agents from typing repetitive answers time and again. This also reduces typos and helps the customer support agents disperse stress.
Canned Responses
DeskXpand, an email ticketing system, provides built-in and extensive ticketing functionalities to empower organizations and their support departments. It comes with extensive features like automatic ticket import, assignment, email templates, canned responses, auto-identifiers, and so on. I’m sure you’d like to take a look. Take a demo now!
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6. Chats Within the Ticket
The most significant benefit of using an email ticketing system is that it simplifies support at the agent’s end. Take this feature, for example: chat within the ticket. Sounds mainstream, right? But only a support agent can tell you how much unnecessary communication they get to avoid because of this simple feature.
Once you enable your agents to chat within the ticket, everything they do is logged on the system. Even if they want to escalate the issue to senior authorities, they can do it within the ticketing system. It saves a lot of redundant communication.
7. Reclaiming Deflections
Reclaiming deflections refers to managing a sudden spike in the number of incoming queries on a particular channel. Agents can do this by routing it to the available agents. For example, on a particular week after your company offered a considerable sale, your social media tickets are raising like never before. As a support manager, you should be able to redistribute these tickets and assign them to the available agents. An ideal email ticketing system would allow you to do this seamlessly.
8. Unified Dashboard
A unified dashboard is another common feature that an email ticketing system should have. A unified dashboard allows the admins or the support managers to monitor everything from a single place. They can see all the agents and their work from a single place.
DeskXpand Dashboard
This enables admins to provide quick support if an agent is stuck somewhere or has a problem in the workflow. This dashboard must also include reporting and analytics features. The support managers must be able to see everything from the same place.
9. Autoresponders
Sometimes, customers only need to know that their queries have been registered successfully. If the customers do not hear from you within 24 hours of registering a complaint, a negative sentiment appears. This affects your long-term relationship with the customer. This is where auto-responders come into the picture.
A study says, less than 10% of companies use autoresponders. You can use it to notify your customers that you’ve received their queries. Through automated email notifications, you can keep your customers involved through every step of the resolution journey.
10. Quantifiable Feedback
The customer support cycle only ends when your agents receive the customer’s feedback. Without an email ticketing system, it isn’t easy to quantify customer satisfaction. With DeskXpand, agents can attach a feedback widget to their replies, enabling customers to rate their experience.
Managers can comprehensively measure these ratings. It can be based on individual agents or a broader level as well. This also helps agents understand the areas they’re strong in and the areas they need to improve.
11. Analytics and Reporting
Top email ticketing systems don’t stop at helping the queries meet resolution. Analyzing your workflow to find roadblocks and trends is essential too.
By leveraging the best email ticketing system, you can pinpoint unique relationships between queries and find the most trending queries. Later you can add the solutions to these queries to your knowledge base articles. Through your email ticketing system, you can find out the strategies you benefit from and those that need scrapping. You can evaluate the productivity of your entire support through email ticketing system analytics.
An Ideal Email Ticketing System for Businesses
Regardless of your organization and industry niche, your company will need an email ticketing system or any other dedicated software to manage customer support. Keep in mind that the most important thing is to keep the customers happy and resolve their issues soon. It is also important that your agents do not feel burnt out and can do their work seamlessly. If the agents are happy, the customers’ issues are solved, and hence the customers are happy!
Hence, do not settle for manual or inefficient software. Take some time to think about it, and do not settle for anything less than your needs. DeskXpand is an email ticketing system that turns your emails into support tickets and gives your team a unified workspace to collaborate. It provides a single space to support customers, manage agents and their tasks, resolve and close queries once the resolution is met.
DeskXpand, an email ticketing system, is built by functional experts and developers with certifications in their respective fields. We are an ISO:27001 certified email ticketing system development company trusted by users worldwide for 14+ years now. So, are you ready to take a demo?
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/email-ticketing-system-wiki-guide/
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