When it comes to the digital marketplace, you need every tool at your disposal to help your business thrive. In an era where customers are more sophisticated and demanding than ever before, a smooth and reliable shopping experience is more important than ever. That’s where a service desk comes in — to resolve customer inquiries and issues quickly and completely and make sure your customers always leave happy.
But what exactly is a service desk, and how does it differ from general customer support?
What Is a Service Desk?
A service desk is more than just a phone bank or a staffer devoted to answering customer emails — it’s a complete customer service solution. The purpose of the help desk is to create, consolidate, and resolve support tickets from multiple sources and run them through a streamlined process that ensures a smooth and seamless customer service experience.
The main strength of a service desk is in organization. Tickets are routed to the proper agents no matter where they come from (text/SMS, email, phone) and are unlikely to be lost or misdirected. This translates to happier customers, improved customer loyalty, and increasing revenue.
Why Are Service Desks Important?
Although the boost to customer satisfaction is a great reason to embrace service desk software by itself, it’s not the only reason a service desk system is vital to the success of your e-commerce store.
For one thing, a service desk brings order and predictability to your support agents’ daily routine. Smoother day-to-day operations means less stress for your staff, as there’s no need to search through multiple files or folders to find the information they need.
Another feature of service desk software that’s likely to prove invaluable: knowledge bases and self-help portals. One of the most efficient ways to reduce the strain on your human agents is to provide a means for customers to help themselves. Having a knowledge base online means customers can search for issues or answers on their own, and potentially get their problem addressed without having to contact a support agent at all. With the aid of AI chatbots, they can even have the experience of chatting with a knowledgeable representative, allowing your staff to focus on more sophisticated or nuanced issues that chatbots aren’t well suited to handle.
Finally, there’s the benefit of having metrics and analytics, which many service desk solutions offer. With analytics, you can track ongoing challenges, anticipate issues, and adjust your strategies to maximize the quality of your customer service.
Signs You Need a Service Desk
So how do you know if you need service desk software? Here are a few things to look for:
- If you’re getting increasing customer inquiries, especially about subjects your customer service team is finding difficult to manage manually — or if they’re being inundated with repetitive, simple inquiries that might be better handled by an automated process.
- If you’re seeing slow response time to customer inquiries, leading to an increase in negative reviews — and, subsequently, lost sales.
- If your support team is having difficulty managing support across multiple channels (email, chat, social media, phone, etc), which means queries sometimes get lost, or previous conversations with the customer aren’t syncing up — meaning they have to repeat themselves, something no customer enjoys doing.
- If you’re seeing an increase in problems with order, returns, or refunds — and especially if you’re having difficulty tracking and taking care of these issues in a timely fashion.
Even one of these issues is likely a good reason to think about implementing customer service software — and if you’re seeing several, it may definitely be time for an advanced software solution.
How to Choose the Right Software
Let’s say you’ve decided to take the plunge and start shopping for service desk software to integrate into your e-commerce store. How do you choose the right software for your needs?
First of all, the (mostly) good news: there are a lot of service desk systems out there to choose from. While that might not help with option paralysis, it does mean you have a good chance of finding software that’s just the right fit for your needs.
Here are some of the things to look for:
- Ease of use: The software should be intuitive and easy to use for both customers and support agents, to minimize headaches.
- Scalability: The entire goal of service desk software is to help your business grow — so the software should be able to grow with you!
- Security: Keeping your customer data safe and secure is paramount, especially in an age where data breaches are becoming more and more common.
- Automation: Whether or not you choose to use AI features, it’s good to have that option, and automation is one of the core features — and biggest benefits — of service desk software.
Integrating and learning new software can be a challenge, but the benefits are worth it, especially in the long run. Your bottom line with thank you!
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