Help desks may look different from one organization to the next, but the value they bring remains constant. Whether serving internal employees or acting as a technical support headquarters, help desks can be a key differentiator between a positive and negative customer experience.
Modern help desks transform the customer experience
Typical help desk workflow
Help desk workflows can vary based on a variety of factors, such as the software used, a team’s structure, and a customer’s individual preferences. But with the help of Zoom’s contact center solution, here’s how you can optimize the common help desk workflow:
What are the benefits of help desk software?
Help desk software automates ticket requests and enables agents to resolve tickets faster. In addition, it can:
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Streamline processes
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Reduce workloads
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Improve customer service with consistent quality standards
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Provide better insight into your company’s network and device security
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Improve employee productivity
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Improve customer experience
What are the benefits of Zoom Contact Center?
Because it’s omnichannel, our cloud-based contact center helps agents deliver prompt, accurate, and highly personalized responses to their customers over a variety of touchpoints, including voice, web chat, text, and of course, video. Built-in analytics complement common help desk software metrics to determine where improvement is needed and maximize your ROI.
We can help you:
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Increase flexibility and scalability with one platform
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Minimize complexity with a centralized administration portal and dual-purpose desktop clients
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Improve return on investment (ROI)
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Reduce your total cost of ownership
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Minimize help desk staff turnover
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Deliver efficient, personalized support
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Decrease abandon rates
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Understand agent performance and areas for improvement
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Improve customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and first contact resolution (FCR)
FAQs
One way to think about a help desk is to consider where you might go for a technical issue at work. Perhaps you need help upgrading your computer’s operating system. Or, you’re having issues with a business app and need to contact the company for help. While both of these examples fit under a general “customer service” umbrella, it’s the help desk agent who is responsible for helping you.
Help desks may serve customers internal to a business, such as employees and contractors, while overseeing technical issues related to hardware, software, and network usage. They can also have external customers when providing technical assistance or support. Regardless of whom they serve, help desk agents and supervisors typically respond to what’s known as incident management issues, but it’s not uncommon for them to also act as service desks and provide customer support that goes beyond break-fix requests.
Sometimes, a help desk is a catch-all for internal and external customer technical support, or it can play a role in a larger customer service department. Because help desks can impact a business’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT), it’s not uncommon for customer support teams to use help desk software to track performance metrics related to customer satisfaction and customer experience (CX).
Traditionally speaking, help desks are similar to call centers in that they are a way for customers to request support or seek help with a problem. But call centers differ from help desks for a few reasons. First, they are typically less technical and address overall customer service-type queries for things like product questions, processing returns, and facilitating sales. Second, with call centers, customers are limited to connecting with agents via telephone support only.
Help desks, on the other hand, provide more technical or IT-related support and assist with tasks such as resetting passwords, ordering or setting up new computer hardware, troubleshooting technology, or responding to major network issues. Depending on the communications platform and help desk software that a business chooses, customers can request support via multiple channels (phone, web chat, SMS, or email) and aren’t just limited to voice, like in a call center.
Both help desks and call centers bring tremendous value to an organization, as they can be the first point of contact between a business and its customers, and make or break a positive customer experience.
Basic help desk software includes a POC, or point of contact, to receive customer queries, and a ticket management system to organize, track, process, and route tickets for faster resolution. Other basic features of help desk software include:
- an aggregation tool to collect queries for knowledge-base articles
- forums for accessing information such as FAQs or community-answered topics
- dashboards for easy reporting and measurement
- analytics to measure agent performance, productivity, and customer satisfaction metrics
