How a Help Desk app reduces headaches for SMBs
Matt Archer
March 9, 2021
What is a Help Desk?
Many SMBs struggle with providing quality support to their customers for the products and services they offer because they tend to lack the resources and understanding of how best to handle that support. Oftentimes, other parts of the business take priority and support becomes relegated to the backburner, which can lead to many customers being rightly frustrated with the ability to get the help they need. A Help desk application can help alleviate that problem by providing an all-in-one solution to many of the common challenges in client support. Help Desk applications represent an array of solutions to SMBs. They focus on items such as:
- Client Ticketing
- Internal Ticketing
- IT Asset Support
- HR Support
- Self Service Support
- Document Storage
- Time Tracking for Employees
- Robust reporting on Ticketing times (hours open, hours since response, etc.)
How can a Help Desk reduce headaches for Small Businesses?
SMBs often don’t have the time or resources to be able to allocate to supporting their products/services properly. It can lead to customer dissatisfaction, employee frustration, wasted time and lost revenue.
Having access to all of the aforementioned areas in one place in an easy to use app can really streamline the support process, saving employees time and frustration, while making sure your customers receive high-quality, timely support.
Below are four key areas that a Help Desk app can do to improve the quality and efficiency of your support services.
Keep support-related emails threaded and trackable in a ticketing system
Your team may process dozens or hundreds of tickets a day, meaning they’re unlikely to remember the specific content of one ticket. Having the ability to see the entire history of a ticket from creation to presentation, in a threaded and easy to read format is really important, because it allows your support team to quickly understand the nature of the original issue and the progress of the resolution so far.
Coupling that with the ability to track internal comments made on the ticket, attachments provided by the customer, and records of similar issues previously encountered and you can expect a lot of saved time and more targeted support for the customer.
Managing tickets across departments
Many companies provide support across different types of products and services. If every support request got dumped into one large pile of tickets, it would be difficult to determine how best to quickly categorize them and help customers, especially when their subject-line might be not helpful.
This is where Departments can be very powerful. By setting up departments for each of your main support services (Internal, External, Customer, etc.), you can filter tickets that match certain criteria into the corresponding department. This benefits the customer because they get in contact with an expert who can answer their questions immediately, and benefits your business because it saves time by having the issue addressed quickly and with a higher degree of quality.
Automated reminders to reduce requests being left untouched
Both clients and your internal support team likely have busy schedules with a lot to keep track of. It’s not uncommon for something to slip through the cracks and suddenly a support ticket hasn’t been updated in days. The client is mad because they haven’t gotten their answer, or your team is frustrated because they can’t help until the client provides more details.
Automated reminders can help resolve this issue by setting up criteria to notify the client and/or your internal team members when the ticket hasn’t been touched in a certain amount of time (among other criteria). This prompts whomever needs to take action next to do so, which can help ensure the customer and support team stay in contact with each other until the issue is resolved satisfactorily.
SLAs to help important tickets get answered quickly
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a common part of Help Desks at many companies. These agreements allow customers to pay more for priority service and provides a guarantee that certain criteria will be met when clients purchase that level of support.
Help Desk apps can be programmed to track those SLAs and send out automated emails, reminders and tasks to your support team if certain events occur, or even automatically escalate a ticket up the support chain if certain deadlines or requirements aren’t being reached. This can save time for your support managers that otherwise would need to be manually prioritizing and validating tickets, and ensure your customer gets what they need within the bounds of the SLA.
Zoho Desk can support Small Businesses
There are several Help Desk applications on the market, but we find more and more that Zoho Desk is really leading the charge for the SMB space. Zoho Desk brings a very robust feature-set to the table, ranging from the expected requirements of ticket/task management to time tracking, automated workflows, reporting and SLA-specific settings.
Zoho Desk can be connected into the rest of the Zoho Suite (including Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects and Zoho Finance), as well as other products on the market to be able to be able to track a customer’s lifecycle from initial sales all the way through support and back again. With Zoho Desk’s ability to be embedded right inside of Zoho CRM, your team can even solve support tickets entirely within the Zoho CRM infrastructure, minimizing the amount of apps and browser tabs they need to have open.
Final Thoughts
Positive Results™ is a proud partner of Zoho and helps SMBs by analyzing their current business processes and implementing cloud solutions, such as Help Desk applications, to resolve any gaps we find within those processes.
We have assisted businesses in implementing, and optimizing Zoho Desk to fit their unique business needs and allowing them to more effectively support their own customers. If you need help with implementing, customizing or optimizing your own Help Desk app, please reach out to us. We’re happy to help.
Positive Results™ Custom Business Solutions
440.499.4944
