An essential guide to the best help desk software

Help desk solutions are the key to any well-run support or service desk. As more customers pivot online, whether it is to purchase or to get support, businesses need to be present to address their needs. To capture new customers, and retain existing ones, an efficient help desk software is essential for teams to provide good customer service.

The same can be said for IT help desks serving internal employees. Remote or hybrid work is here to stay, which makes it challenging for IT experts to help employees without an in-person visit. For this, a reliable help desk solution will help them provide virtual support effectively, and keep businesses running smoothly.

If you are looking for ways to help your teams serve customers or employees better, explore the following topics below:

• What is a help desk software?
• How does a help desk software benefit my business?
• What to look for in a help desk solution?
• Who uses help desk software?

At its core, a help desk software is aimed at helping companies provide their customers (external) or employees (internal) with information and support effectively. As inquiries come from multiple channels such as email, voice, live chat or social media, help desk solutions combine all conversations across channels in a single platform. To help service teams tackle high request volumes, good help desk software come with features to coordinate support, reduce repetitive work, measure feedback, and evaluate performance. Put simply, it helps service teams streamline work and provide superior experiences for their target audiences.

There are numerous benefits to using a help desk solution, chief among which is the ability to combine all communication channels in one place, and automate time-consuming task distribution. Below, we list some of these benefits for your customers, your teams, and your business.

Build loyalty through customer experience

Help desk solutions help you provide better experiences for customers and employees (internal IT or HR desks). By offering support on more channels, customers have more options to reach you in their preferred way. Help desk software also help streamline communication chains and processes, allowing agents to improve response rates and handling times. With speed and convenience both covered, delivering positive customer experiences becomes easy.

Optimised workflow and improved productivity

With a help desk solution, you can customise workflows according to business conditions and agent availability across locations, channels, time zones, shifts, and automatically route requests to the right agent. This ensures that agents are working on tasks they are good at, and customers get the required support swiftly. Help desk software also provide an organised agent console that allows them to see who is working on which tickets, SLA warnings, internal notes, and more.

Driving continuous improvements with data and analytics

Managing help desk performance can be challenging, particularly when dealing with larger, distributed teams. A help desk solution provides live dashboards that transmit live data, facilitating central management and agile resource allocation. Help desk software can also help you gather insights through customer feedback and performance data, which informs management strategy on service improvements, product development and human capital pillars such as recruitment, training and performance incentives.

Businesses, no matter the size or industry, must have customers and reliable IT to operate. That’s why FocalScope serves both small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises of all kinds: travel management companies, e-commerce and retail businesses, logistics providers, telcos and financial services, government organisations, and more.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs)

Smaller companies often have to juggle numerous operational tasks with limited manpower. That’s why they need a help desk software that can automate repetitive work, so that their agents can focus on serving customers and building relationships. On the other hand, midsize businesses need a flexible solution that can scale up as they grow. Here are a few ways a help desk solution can benefit SMBs: 

• Combine all channels—email, voice, live chat, SMS, social media messaging— in one unified platform.
• Help desk software are more fit for purpose than traditional email. They can help agents respond faster with canned responses and prevent them from answering the same ticket.
• Automatically prioritise and assign incoming requests according to pre-determined rules, eliminating the need to manually sort and distribute requests.
• Enhance team collaboration, allowing agents to leave internal notes and have private discussions.
• Configure individual SLA policies and alerts to ensure performance targets are met. If a ticket has not been answered in 30 minutes, it can automatically escalate it to a manager, or a rapid-response team.

Large enterprises

Bigger companies need a reliable and secure help desk solution that allows global teams to collaborate effectively and provide seamless customer experiences across channels and locations. With teams distributed in different places, some working from the office or at home, large enterprises must eliminate work silos so that they can tap into the full strength of their global workforce. They would also need tracking mechanisms to get visibility on daily operations, and reporting features for upper management. A suitable help desk solution will help address these needs, and more:

• Coordinate support across locations, shifts, time zones, and route tickets to the right agent according to business needs. This ensures customers get the fastest response times round the clock.
• Auto-translation capabilities that enable agents can support more locations without additional spend.
• To provide visibility, a good help desk software should include live dashboards and reporting features that help managers track traffic and performance with metrics such as handling times, first-touch resolution rates, waiting times, and more.
• Integrate with external tools such as CRMs, e-commerce platforms, travel management booking systems and more, to enable agents to reference information quickly and accurately.
• A flexible help desk solution offers tailored deployment modes such as cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of the two. Depending on the environment, solution providers should recommend the best mode possible.