These days it is becoming more and more common for companies to have a technical help desk. Whether this help desk exists to assist customers with technical problems or to resolve technological issues within the company itself, the help desk is becoming a fixture at companies worldwide.
As it is with any service-oriented position, it can be hard to measure the success or failure of such a service as there is no product actually being produced. You can always analyze a sales team based on the number of attempted versus successful sales, and when a physical product is being produced the number of returns for manufacturing defects makes a good yardstick.
However when it comes to service positions, these metrics do not apply. Most web-based help desks therefore measure their success in customer satisfaction surveys and similar manners.
The question then becomes how can you improve the relationship between your company and your clients. One of the very best ways you can do this is to make sure they receive excellent service and the best way to do that is to make them feel valued. The sorts of things that make them feel special are simple. A customer does not want to feel talked down to, a customer does not like having to repeat themselves, and most importantly a customer wants to feel like they are being listened to.
This is where excellent knowledge base software can make a huge difference. By making use of such technology you can make the customer feel more valued and have to repeat themselves less by accurately tracking the reasons for their calls in the past, how many times they have called and how recently, and very importantly what was done in previous cases where the customer called about the same issue.
Help desk software is also invaluable when it comes to billing. Not all technical support is provided for free and some companies end up in a situation where they bill based on the number of technical support calls received by a particular customer, and have no way to track the outcome or accuracy of those calls.
Also, a good system will allow your technicians to notice trends in calls. Such things as when a customer always loses their internet connection when it rains, or a series of calls from the same department, over and over, about network connectivity. Without good help desk software you may not ever find out that a junction box is filling with water or your network provider has an outage.
Take this as an example. You call technical support for the fifth time about a problem with say, your internet connection. The first thing they tell you to do is reboot the modem or router, completely ignoring the fact that the other four times you called that day you did the same thing and it still isn’t working.
By making use of ticket tracking and other help desk software you can eliminate these annoyances and focus on what is important, which is resolving the customer’s issue as quickly and efficiently as possible. In this day and age it will definitely give your company a leg up on the competition.
