Help desk software

With a growing online store comes a growing amount of customers. Many ecommerce entrepreneurs struggle keeping up with the growing number of incoming emails and questions from customers. Help desk software can be a solution to this problem.

What is help desk software?

A help desk is a point of contact for your customer and employees of a business. The main focus of a help desk is fixing short-term issues, while a service desk main’s focus is providing full service to its customers or users. Online stores usually deal with quite a lot of support questions of customers. The main focus of a help desk is keeping the customer satisfaction level high by fixing issues and delivering service to its customers or users.

All your customer support in one central help desk: Zendesk. The #1 software for your help desk according to Gartner. Fully integrates with most ecommerce software.

When you’re running a small business, you might be able to keep your customers happy by responding to their emails and phone calls. However, once you begin to grow and scale up, you’ll find that it will be harder to keep track. More questions also means that you will need to prioritise issues, which is hard to do without the right support software.

Keeping track of incoming questions becomes harder once you start having more customers.

This is where good cloud based support software steps in. When a customer calls or emails with a question, it will be transformed into a ‘ticket’ within the system. All information about the issue is logged here. Categorising, prioritising and reporting your customer’s issue becomes a lot easier this way.

Why using help desk software can be useful

There are several benefits for a support desk that come from using the right tools in your online business. The biggest one is the fact that it makes keeping track of incoming queries a lot easier.

This also makes it easy for other colleagues on the service desk to keep track of each issue and its progress. If the same customer calls again about updates, they won’t have to explain themselves again. You or your employees will be able to see all the previously logged information.

With ticketing software, questions no longer get lost or forgotten, which means happier customers.

Software delivers information based on data

With the ability to add tickets to questions, the software makes sure they no longer get lost or forgotten, which means happier customers. This type of software is also helpful when prioritising tasks and tickets. For example, you can group together similar issues. This gives you better insight of common issues, and which issues need to be solved first.

It also can measure the customer satisfaction rate or deliver certain ticket management info such as how much support requests you get about a certain topic, or about metrics such as your average response rate.

What features do you need?

If you’re working with a support team or employees then features for team collaboration are helpful tools. For example, you don’t want multiple employees or team members responding to the same customer. Most support software suppliers have a ticketing system. A support ticket enable users to see who else is viewing or replying to a question.

A ticketing system enables users to see who else is viewing or replying to a question or customer.

Another common feature that’s useful for omnichannel businesses is the support of multiple channels of communication within the help desk software. Communication with a customer across all channels gets logged within the one ticket. This means that your support desk respond within the platform and the customer can continue the conversation on their preferred channel or device.

All your customer support in one central help desk: Zendesk. The #1 support platform according to Gartner. Fully integrates with most ecommerce software.

Some software also offers a self service portal: if the same support questions return too frequently, the software creates a knowledge base where customers find the answers themselves.

Using software to improve your productivity

If you’re trying to enhance your productivity, there are many automatic features that can be useful. Most software suppliers offer time-triggered automation for tickets based on time lapsed. You can also set deadlines for when the ticket needs to be resolved. Not to mention you can also program automatic email notifications when a new support ticket is created, for example.

Some help desk software also have ‘self-service’ features so that customers can help themselves, without needing direct contact with you or employees. These features usually include a chatbot or automatically suggested solutions for common problems. This can save you and your team a lot of time, which helps your workflow to become more streamlined.