EMAIL TO HELPDESK TICKETING

Email isn’t built to handle customer support

Managing customer service out of a shared inbox can be challenging. What you need is an email ticketing system like Freshdesk that approaches customer service with easy-to-manage ticketing and enables seamless collaboration to ensure your support stays effective and prompt.

Why do shared inboxes fail?

Using an email inbox for customer support is difficult. You require complex folder structures or confusing color-coded tags to track issues, and as the number of support requests increases, collaboration becomes a nightmare.

Before long, managing multiple mailboxes for different teams and products causes your efficiency to take the hit. You might end up missing customer conversations that need your immediate attention leading to dents in your customers’ satisfaction.

Why are email ticketing systems better for customer support?

An email ticketing system or an email-based helpdesk software automatically converts incoming emails into tickets that are easy to track, monitor, and manage.

With a helpdesk ticketing system, you’ll have customizable inbox views, logins for each member of your team, and still remove the chances of two agents picking up the same customer email, or missing emails altogether without a proper tracking mechanism.

The main advantage is that an email ticketing system brings clarity about the owner, type, status, and priority of the ticket to everyone in the team. This helps keep all your customer support agents on the same page, improves transparency, and ensures that no customer conversation slips through the cracks.

Here’s how Freshdesk makes customer support easier

Track, prioritize, and follow-up on customer requests from one place. This will help your support team deliver faster, more efficient customer support.

Assign ownership: Each inquiry gets assigned as a ticket in Freshdesk to a member of your team. They become the owner of the ticket and will be responsible for its course of action.
Prioritize tickets: Get each ticket prioritized based on their exigency into four categories - Urgent, High, Medium, and Low.
Set deadlines: Set standards of performance for each inquiry that comes in. Service level agreements (SLAs) act as customized timers for each inquiry.
Engage on any channel: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, phone, chat, messaging (WhatsApp), or even through your website. Get a consolidated view of all customer inquiries.

What are the benefits of moving from a shared inbox to an email helpdesk system like Freshdesk?

Freshdesk helps you streamline email and social media ticket management, improve customer satisfaction, and increase agent productivity.

Improve support efficiency

Tasks like routing, tagging, or following up on support tickets can take up a lot of time and effort when done manually. You can free up your support team's time by automating these tasks with customizable workflow automation rules that run on different parameters and agent availability. Agents get notified when a ticket has been assigned, updated, or is nearing SLA deadlines, enabling them to act fast and offer timely support.

Freshdesk also helps ensure that no two agents end up working on the same ticket with agent collision detection.

Cut down on repetitive work

Typing out the same messages over and over again can feel like rote work after a point. Freshdesk enables you to answer frequently asked questions in a few clicks using solution articles, canned responses, or support email templates.

Collaborate to resolve issues faster

Customer service teams need to work within and across other teams to resolve certain issues. On Freshdesk, you can collaborate even as you work on tickets, with the in-built discussion pane that enables the people looped in to gather context of the customer issue quickly. You can even drop notes on tickets to share progress or log your updates for future reference.

Collaboration within an email ticketing system

Empower customers with self-service

Most customers today prefer finding answers on their own over speaking to an agent. Empower your customers to help themselves by publishing a detailed knowledge base with FAQs and help guides. An exhaustive knowledge base can help you deflect up to 60% of customer service requests and reduce agent workload. Additionally, you can set up user community forums or discussion boards where customers can help one another.

Deflect customer emails with a knowledge base

Offer assistance with 100% context

In today's world, context is king — customers hate having to repeat themselves and expect you to have relevant information about their order history, and previous interactions. Freshdesk offers individual timelines for every customer, giving you full context and history of conversations they've had with your representatives, enabling them to create a better customer experience. Freshdesk also stops agents from sending replies to customers without getting the full picture and the recent developments.

Measure performance with intuitive reporting

Reporting and analytics are essential to identify loopholes in your customer service strategy. Track the right metrics to understand how quickly your team resolves issues or when they're the busiest using Freshdesk's one-click reports. Get a bird's-eye view of your customer service using live dashboards that offer real-time insights on team performance and customer satisfaction.

Reporting within email ticketing software

Is it the right time to upgrade to an email ticketing software?

Think of an email ticketing system as an efficient and flexible email management solution that offers immediate benefits and continues to grow in value in the long term.

In the short run, you can bring a method to the madness and improve efficiency. And in the long haul, you can scale your customer service and keep up with evolving customer demands and growing business needs without shifting tools again.

Plus, you get the added benefits of integrating with a wide selection of apps, including CRM, invoicing software, and collaboration tools, to better extend Freshdesk's capabilities and integrate it into your daily workflow.

Migrating from Gmail or Outlook to Freshdesk can be done seamlessly. Your agents can get all the context they need without having to manually forward older threads to Freshdesk.

With Freshdesk’s agent-friendly UI, transparent pricing, and helpful customer service team, you really have nothing to worry about.