Help Desk Best Practices: How to Keep Your Customers Happy?

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates

Any organization, any industry segment, any geography, any size and segment – if it is serving customers, there ought to be a help desk associated with it. IT Help desk could be various categories and in different forms, but the core objective remains the same for all – customer service and satisfaction. In order to achieve the best, organizations ought to follow certain help desk best practices so that they can offer maximum and effective support to their customers.

Your organization’s IT help desk serves as the important link between your customers and the different teams that are working to support the IT systems. These help desk services and solutions abide by certain policies, processes and standards that help them serve their customers to the finest.

It is known to all how important customer happiness is to any business. A high-class client support experience is the major key to attaining the best of customer loyalty, retention and satisfaction. And that can be achieved by having an efficient help desk system in place and that can be achieved by following certain service desk best practices.

Help Desk Support – An Important and Indispensable Business Ingredient

The major objective of an IT help desk is to offer a spectrum of IT services within an organization and it is primarily a unified point of contact for any type of client issue, need, assistance and help. The help desk is supposed to offer timely help, prompt answers and abide by the different levels of the service level agreements. They are supposed to follow the processes in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

IT teams are supposed to utilize the help desk software solutions for better ticket life cycle management, automation of meticulous tasks and workflow optimization. Only then can organizations vouch for maximized business output and increased profitability.

Some of the major features of a help desk software are:

• Problem report and change request management
• Service request handling
• Self-service issue handling
• SLA driven compliance
• Quality and timeliness of help desk services
• Management of IT infrastructure

Here are some of the different categories of help desk services and solutions:

• Cloud-based help desk software
• On-premises help desk software
• Enterprise help desk software
• Open source help desk software

Why are Help Desk Best Practices A Must and How Do They Help in Making Customers Happy?

It has been a known fact that help desk is a must to keep customers happy and loyal. Best practices to be followed are the most efficient way to ensure things get done in the right manner. Best practices suggest mechanisms, processes and means by which the goal can be easily and effectively attained. Here are some strong reasons that signify the importance of customer service best practices and the reasons they must be followed:

• Helps in finding areas for possible enhancement and growth
• Acts as a start mechanism for an assessment procedure
• Assists in abiding by the ITIL help desk best practices
• Guides you in the best possible direction to avoid any hassles
• Brings over the experience of the industry to have a better performance
• Gets you in groove with the latest technologies and modernized steps

7 Help Desk Best Practices That Make Your Customers Happy and Content

• Build a Single Point of Contact Through a Portal

Customers always need assistance and they look for it at a central location. It is advisable to have a unified point of contact through an IT portal that caters to customer requirements and directs them to the concerned stakeholder. This relieves the customer from searching for the right help themselves and fastens the entire process of help desk.

• Set Up Service Level Agreements (SLA) Wisely

To measure and analyse our service parameters, it is wise to have setup the SLA terms and conditions in a detailed manner. It becomes easy to track, monitor and analyse how we are serving our customers and what better can we do, to make the help desk more effective. It also helps in abiding by the ITIL service desk best practices. SLAs are tailor-made and hence can be changed based on needs and relevance.

• Observe Customer Trends and Patterns

One good way to reach out to exact customer expectations is to keep observing their trends and patterns. We have been measuring different metrics to analyse different parameters. But it is more important to get to the root cause of the problem and rectify it thereon. This can be done by observing what the customer is needing and tendencies being followed. It is a best practice now not to just solve issues but prevent them from happening. This turns out to be beneficial for the support team and the customers, both.

• Encourage Self Service by Clients

It isn’t enough to just have lower ratio of complaints from customers. It is also important to have them use the self-service portal more often, so that they turn independent and feel satisfied about solving issues themselves. These self-service portals help customers to find what they want, themselves, thereby making it a relief for the support staff and increasing the confidence level of customers, on the business.

• Leverage Real-time Analytics, Reporting to Perform Client Satisfaction Surveys

In the era of business intelligence and big data, it is best to leverage the potential of data and extract maximum information through reports and analytical dashboards. Real-time information can be utilized to understand customer patterns, according to ITIL best practices.

• Implement Change Management Integrated with Help Desk System

As a part of customer support best practice, the entire change management procedure must be seamlessly integrated with the main help desk system so that there is a smooth flow of information, back and forth. Any changes handled would be available handy, with the help desk.

• Automate Help Desk / Change Management Processes

Automation is the key to a successful process, in today’s fast paced era. As one of the customer support best practices, it is advisable to automate major processes like service request registration / monitoring, problem request handling, status monitoring and tracking etc. Automation helps customers to get quick results and relieves the support staff from getting busy all the time.

There are many helpdesk solutions that rule the global market. What is important, apart from the technical side of the solution, is the level to which the service provider indulges in implementing and supporting the IT help desk best practices. A good technical service provider is sure to ascertain a positive rollout of the helpdesk portal, amongst the users. After all, it is the end users who need to be happy and comfortable operating it, only then can the customer be kept happy and satisfied.

Genial Helpdesk is an effective software solution that caters to help desk ticket categories best practices and is considered ideal for post-sales support. It enables ticket generation, monitoring, tracking of the tickets, generation of AMC quotation and sending it to the customer.