IT Help Desk Support: A Guide for MSPs

Similarly, customer data could also be used to know the types of customers who are more interested in hybrid support rather than talking to a bot. Chatbots are a great tool when it comes to providing conversational support to customers. You can use them to ensure 24×7 engagement with users on your website.

Several studies have predicted that by this point in time, about 80% of customer service contact would be automated,1 and it’s no wonder why. HelpDesk also helps users assign tickets to agents based on skills or availability, identify VIP customers, and categorize customers and tickets. Other predictive features include email templates, custom fields, ticket summaries, and text enhancements. To make sure your knowledge base is helpful, write engaging support articles and review them frequently.

Stay compliant with outbound automation

Consumers receive timely and helpful answers, while support agents can work more efficiently and effectively. You can automate a service desk to streamline ticket creation, answer FAQs, gather feedback, and handle other basic tasks. Any company can claim its product has automation but only offers one or two features.

This is why you must choose software with high functionality and responsiveness. As you find the best way to incorporate AI customer service software into your company’s workflow, remember that it should be agile enough to keep pace with customer expectations and changes. While automated customer service may not be perfect, the pros far exceed the cons. A help desk IT support tech needs to be familiar with ticketing software, documentation, general knowledge bases, and client SLAs to establish their scope of work. They should also be familiar with softer skills, such as navigating escalations and client relations.

Workflows

«We wanted a solution that integrated all channels and that gave us the flexibility to implement in the way that we needed.» Then, we ran another campaign where we reached out to our most engaged users and asked them to review the software on one of the popular software review sites. Applying rules within your help desk software is the key to powerful automation.

Additionally, if customers are stuck on an issue from the last time, a chatbot can easily pull up their records and help solve their issue efficiently. You can handle several customer conversations with it at once but still hardly type anything. Therefore, there’s a way out – canned responses (aka saved responses). When clients land on a website, they want to see solutions at light speed. Provide a self-service knowledge base to reduce the burden on a support department and boost customer satisfaction. But with such a broad-ranging selection of omnichannel customer service today, you are free from picking and choosing.

Set up a chatbot

Additionally, automation can ensure tickets are routed to the right agent for the task. It includes a shared inbox for team collaboration, allowing agents to view conversations in one place. Agents can prioritize tickets, automate tasks, and automated customer service system tag teammates into the conversation. It also features private notes for users to collaborate through side conversations. As your customers learn that your live chat support is very efficient, your chat volume may surpass your phone queues.

Customer tracking software and reporting tools let you measure and analyze customer history, behavior, and customer service metrics. This data is essential because it tracks how many requests you receive, how many tickets are open, when agents manage those tickets, and how satisfied the customer is with the experience. Most service desks with customer tracking and reporting tools will also auto-generate graph reports for simple viewing and analysis.

Anticipating customer needs before they arise is an example of excellent customer service. When they reach customers, they can show greater empathy and solve problems with increased mental capacity. In addition to being quick to set up, easy to use, and customizable, the customer care software should scale with your business as it expands. The software needs an infrastructure to run smoothly while adapting to your ever-changing needs. Service desk software should have options to accommodate a growing company, like seamlessly adding or removing channels and integrating new systems and software. Customer service software that enables omnichannel support lets you meet the customer on their preferred channel for fast and convenient support, resulting in better CX.

By creating pre-built responses for top call drivers, you can equip your team to support customers via email, chat, social media, and phone. While this seems obvious, many businesses overlook this method of contact. When customers call, they’ll appreciate that you’re actively working on their problem.

What will help desk automation do for your business?

By automating some of the processes your clients will get accurate information to their questions on every occasion. You can set up automatic replies for common questions and a queue system to let customers know how long they have to wait for support. An automated call center decreases the number of clients on hold and improves customer satisfaction with your support services.

With Zendesk, Degreed improved team efficiency and transformed its customer service strategy by automating certain activities, leading to a 16 percent improvement in its CSAT score. The biggest potential disadvantage of using automated customer service is losing the personal touch that human interaction can provide. While automated customer service technology is improving yearly, it isn’t always a replacement for someone looking for a real human conversation. Imagine a simple reboot of your product is usually all that’s needed to fix a common problem. If just one customer calls about this issue per day, your support team can handle that.

How to Automate Customer Service

Now, let’s go through these automated customer service softwares and evaluate which one will be a good fit for your business. ServiceNow offers help desk software that specializes in IT service management. It also has a customer service management (CSM) tool that focuses on automated issue resolution and self-service capabilities. Automated service desk features include intelligent routing, tracking tickets throughout the resolution process, an AI-powered chatbot, and automated self-service.

You can also include onboarding video tutorials or presentation videos to show your customers how to use your product instead of just describing the process. It’s more helpful and adds an element of interactivity to your knowledge base. Once you install the platform, your customer service reps will be able to have a preview of your website visitors, your customer’s data, and order history. And representatives who have more insights about the client can provide better support. For example, when your shopper has a question around 1 o’clock in the morning, the bot can quickly answer the query. It can also redirect the buyer to a dedicated page for more information.

• Furthermore, you can also look at user analytics on the dashboard and update your strategies in real-time.
• Over the last decade, live chat has become the standard for companies wanting to offer top-tier support.
• These technologies (especially artificial intelligence) can be used to provide quick, real-time support, and engage customers proactively.
• An automated call center decreases the number of clients on hold and improves customer satisfaction with your support services.
• Explore Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, to discover how AI-driven chatbots and analytics are transforming the customer experience.

For instance, if you’re a chatbot user, make sure it can route product- or service-related customer issues to a support squad and sales requests to a marketing or sales team. While the phone remains one of the most widely used customer service channels across all generations, that trend is evolving. Northridge Group reports that younger generations embrace communication channels outside of placing a phone call to receive support. As digital natives, Millennials and Gen-Z are increasingly comfortable solving problems by themselves. They are familiar with online knowledge bases, FAQs, virtual assistants, web chat, and social media messaging.