7 Ways to Increase Help Desk Efficiency
It takes months to find a customer and seconds to lose one.
Researches show that it costs substantially more to bring a new customer instead of retaining an existing customer. Delivering exceptional customer support not only retains your existing customer base but it will also generate more leads through referrals of your satisfied customers.
To achieve this goal, help desk must be efficient since this is the primary point of customer’s interaction and engagement. This article will focus on 7 ways to increase help desk efficiency.
1. Choosing the right resources:
Though this point seems obvious, but time again, managers adopt incorrect decision making in hiring help desk analyst. While hiring, the ideal candidate should be energetic, enthusiastic, emphatic, patient and articulate.
Here, we have not focused on technical skills though it is also crucial but technical skills can be taught. Manager can’t teach someone how to be emphatic, these qualities are in born. Hiring tech with these soft skills is the key to end-user satisfaction. Read more about email traits for tech support executives here.
2. Mix of resources:
In a help desk environment, struggling too long for a problem to resolve leads lower productivity for techs. A problem might be resolved by a second level resource in 10 minutes and the same might take an hour for first level tech to resolve.
Thus a second level resource could faster resolution time to bring more productive help desk that leads to higher customer satisfaction. Managers must ensure that their help desk is mix of resources of every level because it is often more difficult to train technical experts to adopt good customer service skills.
With this in mind, look at employing technical experts and customer-savvy individuals who can learn the technical aspects of the role.
3. Responsive, transparent and taking ownership:
To improve end-user satisfaction, timely response is the key. Keep the customer informed about every progress of the problem; silence seems lack of progress or ignoring their problem.
Many times, help desk agents close the issue once it is resolved and fail to communicate it to end-user; it is important to be transparent to customer to list down set of guidelines that can be communicated to end-user on how the problem was fixed.
It happens that the customer has a problem that requires involvement of another department; service desk must retain ownership of relationship with the end user and follow-up with the other departments to provide satisfactory resolution. By giving up ownership, you will lose ability to ensure right level of service delivery.
4. Centralize knowledge-base:
As technology evolves, more and more knowledge will exist in more disparate form. The information stuck in emails, forums, comments, notes, tickets and even in the brains of individual agents.
If you don’t have a mechanism to aggregate knowledge at a single point, create a single point where all this information is stored and accessed. Centralizing all the knowledge gives an edge to learn and provide timely resolution to end-user.
5. Focus on education instead of resolution:
From a help desk management perspective, it is more important to educate customer instead of resolving their problems. Focusing on self service solution in the form of knowledge base and FAQs help resolving customer problems at their and even during off hours and this will save their time; educating customers can help reduce contacts and cost.
Once a problem reported by customer focus on educating customer while providing resolution so that do not come again for the same problem.
6. Right tools for the job:
Reduce trouble ticket resolution times and improve end-user satisfaction through the use of IT management tools, manager must ensure that the help desk has the right mix of tools required to address customer issues. A complicated help desk tool will bring more complication and before providing resolution to end-user, agent will engage themselves in fixing issues with the tools.
Feature-rich and easy-to-use help desk software is a necessary component in managing both costs and end-user satisfaction.
7. Customer feedback:
Customer feedback is the best way to fine-tune your content to deliver the best support. Setting a mechanism to ask for a customer feedback form with every single customer contact this will help rate help desk and based on the customer feedback, make necessary adjustments to attain end-user satisfaction and improving help desk an efficient.