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How to Make the Most out of Your Help Desk

The primary aim of help desks is information assistance and troubleshooting. Help desks extend their services through telephone, usually toll free numbers; email; and live chat. The concept of help desk has become an integral part of the overall plan that is devised to offer the customer or prospect a satisfactory experience.

Help desks are normally associated with call centers to assist customers with inquiries before and after the sale. It’s a known fact that call centers influence customer perception of a company enough to affect a buying decision. Couple this with the fact that retaining an existing customer is ten times cheaper than getting a new one and we begin to realize the importance of having the right help desk setup for your business.

How can help desk help your business?

Today, the customer is more educated and aware of his choices as well as his rights as a customer. He is more open to communication with the company and in doing so he provides the company with valuable information which otherwise the business would have found hard to come by. This information plugged into the company’s CRM database is the basis for developing customer-related projects, be they in marketing, sales, or the day-to-day work at the front-end.

By placing several means of easy communication at the customer’s disposal the company enables him to reach out and make an informed decision about his purchase. The advent of the internet has led to a reduced dependence on telephone support and problems associated with it are now overcome. With voice chat, IM, and email at their disposal, customers no longer need to navigate through automated telephone answering machines and companies need not be cut off from the customer in the event of an outage.

A help desk is very often the first experience that a prospective customer has of a business. It can make or break his perception of a company. A responsive and professional help desk assistant builds a positive image of the company. Trained and adequate staff and a help desk integrated with the company’s CRM philosophy are an invaluable resource for converting leads into business and retaining old business.

A structured approach for facilitating information for the customer should be central to a company’s help desk support. Often, most common doubts are resolved through the FAQ section on the company website. A help desk also benefits your business by enabling incident tracking so that internal issues in the computing environment can be resolved based on priority.

As a business, you need to be aware of the best help desk configuration in terms of software, hardware, and knowledge that will boost your business. Vendors who deal in help desk software also provide asset management, CRM, call center management solutions and more. You should seek out a package, preferably from one vendor, that will enable you to harness their benefits in a rounded manner. Before doing so, consider the issue of vendor lock-in. Also consider the methodology of your help desk and the extent of customer support that you will offer vis-à-vis internal error tracking and rectification.

Conclusion

A systematically run help desk results in lower overheads and higher customer satisfaction. Ease of communication, better reporting, data generation, are some of the benefits of a help desk system. With a planned approach to help desk you can definitely drive your business objectives more efficiently.