5 Ways A Helpdesk Benefits Your Customer Service Team

Every business has to serve its customers – that is the basis on which a successful business runs. But it is also true that businesses have to serve their employees.  If a company takes from their employees and gives nothing back, it’s going to leave behind a staff of embittered angry individuals with a sky-high turnover rate. 

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The fact of the matter is, you want happy employees. Not only does it enrich the working environment and therefore impact customer interactions, but happy employees are up to 20% more productive than unhappy ones. What’s more, happy sales personnel have 37% higher sales numbers

One great way to make your employees happier is to arm them with the tools that they need to be efficient at their jobs. One such tool is an internal helpdesk, which provides employees with one central platform from which many of their important tasks can be completed. 

Here are five ways that an internal help desk benefits your team –

1. Self Service: Helps them find solutions faster

Employees need to be able to help themselves and solve their own problems to be effective at their job. It is never good when an employee’s ability to do their job is mired by having to wait for approval or for someone else to tell them a vital piece of information. 

That’s where the power of an internal Helpdesk comes into play. 

Helpdesks give resources to employees that allow them to be more self-sufficient, and thus efficient at what they do. 

One of the ways in which an internal Helpdesk can make the lives of your employees easier is by providing them with an internal knowledge base, which employees can access with any questions they might have. 

A knowledge base is a database of informative articles that are meant to teach an employee or customer more about the company and the products that it produces. If an employee is confused about a certain aspect of the service, they are able to access the knowledge base through the Helpdesk to find the answer without having to ask anyone. 

This also makes the company look better in the long run. A prospect’s faith in the company might be shaken if the sales or support representative they are talking with has to “check with their boss” regarding a question about the service. 

This is especially convenient for new employees, as it affords them the opportunity to learn the ropes of their new job without having to bother anyone or show a customer that they are not very experienced yet. 

This kind of speedy service leads to a more pleasant customer interaction, which also keeps both the customer and your employees in a good mood. It’s a win-win situation. 

2. Omnichannel Support: Offers a single view of all platforms

In today’s business environment, you’ll want to be as interconnected as possible throughout the various platforms that you utilize. This is as true for the satisfaction of your employees as much as it is true for your customers. 

Looking at this from the employee side of things, it is frustrating for them to have to navigate through a slew of different programs that all connect to various platforms. Answering social media inquiries requires a login to the social media tool. Gauging the effectiveness of a recently launched email campaign requires them to sign in to an email platform. 

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All of this back and forth leads to a decrease in productivity as well as an overwhelming stress on the part of the employee. When you have to bounce from one platform to another, it’s possible to forget certain steps and make mistakes that could negatively impact business. 

Not only that, but the employee has to deal with multiple passwords and has to learn how to operate multiple different systems. That’s a lot of information that could easily be forgotten, or at least lead to an avoidable slowdown. 

Using a Helpdesk platform, employees should be able to access most if not all of the marketing platforms that your company utilizes. The end result is that these workers have fewer passwords to deal with, only one user interface to learn, and improved efficiency all around. 

This is known as an omnichannel approach, where every platform that a company utilizes comes together in one centralized location. 

Using a Helpdesk with omnichannel support, your employees will have fewer opportunities to forget a task or make a costly mistake because all of their daily actions will be optimized into one platform. 

3. Collaboration: Allows cross-team visibility and alignment

“86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures” – Source

Employees also need to be able to effectively communicate with one another. The ability to converse and collaborate with other departments can make an employee’s life much easier, thus improving their overall happiness and productivity. When departments can’t communicate, that’s when costly mistakes are made which can cause customers to fall off. 

Here’s a hypothetical example. Let’s say a sales representative signs a deal with a new client. They offer them a special rate for signing on which was communicated to management but not to billing. The billing department charges the new customer for the full amount. 

Understandably, the customer is irate and demands a refund. All of this could have been avoided had this company utilized an internal helpdesk. When going to charge the new customer, the billing department would have seen the previous exchange with sales staff and could have easily confirmed the pricing with the sales representative personally. 

Now, because of this lack of communication, the customer will either completely cancel their service or, if the salesperson manages to save the sale somehow, their opinion of the company will be negatively impacted forever. 

Helpdesks help to establish effective communication between departments that is essential to meeting customer needs. If everyone is on the same page then there will be no surprises when customers are sent on to another channel.

Installing an internal Helpdesk system within your company will ensure that there are no big surprises when employees interact with other departments and it will improve their overall working environment by allowing them to communicate quickly with co-workers and superiors. 

4. Artificial Intelligence: Automates routine, repetitive tasks

One of the most common complaints among support staff is that they are constantly bombarded by a lot of the same mundane issues, and that makes their workday incredibly monotonous. When employees are so exasperated by such common repeated issues they tend to make mistakes which could negatively impact business. 

One way to ensure that your employees remain sharp and attentive is to take those common issues off of their collective plate. This can be done by utilizing the power of artificial intelligence found within a help desk automated platform. 

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Artificial Intelligence can help clear out some of the support tickets that might overwhelm employees. This leaves your employees open to handle some of the more challenging tickets which require a human being to solve.

While that is one of the most useful features of the artificial intelligence installed within a Helpdesk platform, it is not the only way that this powerful system can help make your employees’ lives easier. Artificial intelligence is constantly keeping track of customer interactions to develop complete profiles for every customer. 

These profiles are based on a large amount of data, including behaviors, buying patterns, device usage, platform choice, and more. When a customer calls in, your employees can instantly access all of this information and comb through it to gain a better understanding of the customer and their specific history with the company. 

This makes conversations easier and more productive, giving your employees a greater chance at success. Employees want to know that the company they are working for is doing the best that it can to provide them with the tools for success. A Helpdesk is one such tool that could go a long way toward showing your employees that you care about their results and are willing to invest in the tools that they need. 

This beneficial artificial intelligence uses predictive analysis to prepare your staff for all conversations with a customer. It can do this thanks to the ability of a Helpdesk to mine for data. 

5. Data-Mining: Enables informed decision making 

Data mining allows you to improve the lives of your employees by making changes to the overall direction of the company that make the entire system to function easier. Through the data gathered by these machines, you will be able to see what is working and what is not.

These changes are fueled by an understanding of the customer experience, which is the sum of all interactions that a customer has with a company. The overall experience of making a purchase and interacting with a company is essential to retention efforts. Retention is then essential to continued profitability. You want to keep your customers coming back for more. That is the lifeblood of a business.

More business means more opportunities from your employees. More opportunities could lead to advancement and pay raises. 

These company-wide improvements remove a lot of the stress from employee lives. When the company is functioning optimally and they are armed with the tools that they need to succeed, employees will be happier and far more effective. 

In Conclusion

Bottom line, you need to keep your employees happy. Implementing a helpdesk will create opportunities to help your employees who in turn go on to help your customers. 

When employees are happy, they are providing excellent service. When they provide that level of positive service it helps your brand in both reputation and loyalty. Positive customer interactions go a long way toward driving increased retention. That, in turn, creates a more profitable business.