There are many online platforms available to help you keep track of customer contacts. Some are better than others. But, no matter how good a helpdesk is, it won’t be effective if your settings aren’t optimized for your business needs. We’re going to look past the ‘bells & whistles’ and examine the best tools for optimizing your helpdesk platform by thinking S.M.A.R.T…
S – Self-service
M – Macros
A – Automations
R – Reporting
T – Tagging
To optimize your helpdesk, make sure these tools are properly set up.
Self-Service
Self-service options vary widely depending on the helpdesk and you’ll want to select what makes sense for your industry. It’s a good idea to at least enable help article suggestions through a widget. Most helpdesks allow you to create a help center or knowledge base on the same platform. Having this is crucial when it comes to creating self-service options for customers as the best way to manage tickets is to deflect them in the first place.
Macros
Macros let you make use of dynamic content and automatic field & tag updates and can standardize agent responses to maintain consistency and accuracy. Use them with integrations (if available) to gather data from other online tools and minimize the need for agents to exit your helpdesk to pull important information such as order numbers or purchase history.
Automation
Increase efficiency by performing repetitive tasks using automation. Then your agents can focus on things that require a human touch. For instance, automatically tag certain tickets and assign them to a specialized team or queue. Another important automation tool is sending surveys to your customers. Surveys are a simple way to stay in touch with customer sentiment. It also allows you to quickly identify potential coaching opportunities for your agents.
Reporting
It’s important to keep a pulse on the type of tickets that are created in order to make data-driven decisions. Reporting tells you how well your support team is doing and gives you insight into any issues that your business may be facing.
Some platforms let you create custom fields for standardizing product & issue types. If not, consider exporting what data you can on a set cadence to build reports outside of the helpdesk. 3rd party Analytics tools may also be helpful, especially if you want to connect your support data to your eCommerce storefronts.
Tagging
A good tagging infrastructure is the foundation for advanced workflows and custom reports.They give you valuable insights into the type of issues your customers are concerned with. Automatically tag tickets when they are created. Use the tags to create rules for how tickets are handled and add actions to macros. Additionally, tags let agents manually identify issues within tickets. For best results, aim to have at least 80% of your tickets tagged.
These S.M.A.R.T. tools for optimizing your helpdesk performance aren’t the only ones available, but will do the most for your workflow. It may seem daunting to learn a new platform and all its settings, so let wrrk help you set up these tools. If you’re just getting started from scratch, we can get your helpdesk up and running with everything you need.
