How to Convince Your Boss to Approve Budget for a Helpdesk
You know the value of helpdesk software, but it all comes down to allocating budget for your team. You’ll have to convince your boss to invest in a helpdesk software—or even better, show them how a helpdesk software can enable your support team to achieve more return on investment (ROI).
We’ll show you how a helpdesk brings unique value to your support team, with lots of evidence to back it up. Your boss will be wondering why you haven’t invested in a helpdesk already.
Frame the Problem
Your boss needs to know exactly why your support team is losing productivity with your existing setup. There are now way too many customer queries to manage manually, and you can’t see the forest for the trees—which is a good thing! More tickets means you’ve got a lot more customers.
As your support team grows, you need a better way to collaborate over tickets than a shared email inbox. It’s easy to lose track of things and miss important customer emails. A lack of efficiency means longer support wait times and rushed interactions, causing customers to churn and, potentially, complain to 15 of their friends1.
And yet in the customer support industry, we often find it hard to measure the contribution our team brings to the company objectively. We make customers happy, but how do you measure happiness?
Additionally, you could also do a customer service maturity assessment to find out how your current strategy measures against industry benchmarks. You can use your maturity score or maturity level to make a compelling point.
Customer Support Drives Revenue
Many businesses remain stuck in the old mindset that customer support is a cost center. Though it definitely can be if you approach it in the wrong way, customer-centric teams know better. Customer support teams can play a central role in the growth of a business. To understand how useful a helpdesk can be, you need to move towards viewing customer support as a revenue-generating business driver—not as a cost center.
Customer-centric teams like Buffer and Zappos are showing how incredible customer service turns potentially apathetic customers into loyal fans, which translates directly into revenue. “We take most of the money that we could have spent on paid advertising and instead put it back into the customer experience. Then we let the customers be our marketing,” says Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos2.
The Evidence for How a Helpdesk Improves Your Bottom Line
A helpdesk improves customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, which then leads directly to better customer retention3. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25%–95%—so your customer support literally earns more money for your business.
You have 60–70% more chance of making a profit from an existing customer versus 5–20% for a new customer. Customer churn—the rate at which your customers cancel their subscriptions in a given period—is a key problem for SaaS companies. A long-term customer subscription is far more cost-effective than acquiring a new customer. The cost of acquiring a new customer is also five times more than keeping an old one. Your business dollars should absolutely be invested in your existing customers.
A helpdesk solution saves your support agents time so they can focus on making your customers happy. Happier customers:
– Are more likely to recommend your company to their friends in referral marketing, and the Lifetime Value of a referral customer is 16% higher than non-referrals4.
– Pay more for a better customer experience—the longer a customer stays with you, the better their experience should get.
– Are 81% more likely to work with you again than a completely new customer.
– Are the 20%5 who will provide 80% of your company’s revenue.
A Helpdesk Gets You Customers
While a helpdesk makes existing customers happy, it also has a vital role to play in attracting new customers to your business. Your agents can support potential customers better during the purchase decision phase, ironing out small irritations before they can balloon into big problems. For example, proactive chat is great for purchase-stage questions because it can pop up exactly when the customer needs help, since they are unlikely to context switch.
Once a new customer signs up, a helpdesk improves their onboarding experience by allowing you to resolve more queries. According to one study we conducted, an email from a support agent resulted in a 100% increase in customers finishing the onboarding process.
Personalize Your Service
A helpdesk allows you to build more connected relationships with your customers, where you see the whole picture, and don’t just interact with them in fragments. Evidence shows that personalized service increases sales by 19%6.
You can start giving the silver service that enterprise customers of high-touch software typically receive for a fraction of the cost. Helpdesks are often delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which means that they are more affordable for small businesses who don’t want to (or can’t) make a capital investment. You can meet customer expectations and beyond without breaking the bank.
Organize Your Support Team
Your helpdesk doesn’t just help your customers—it increases your team’s productivity and efficiency, which translates directly into happier customers.
A helpdesk is an organizational tool which helps you log and manage large volumes of queries in your customer queue. It can segment and prioritize according to your objectives. It also enables you to provide omnichannel support by bringing all your correspondence onto one place, a cornerstone of personalized customer service.
Your team can also work more collaboratively as a helpdesk is designed for multiple users. Tickets can be assigned to individual team members with set deadlines for resolution. You can collect data about your team’s performance from the detailed analytics in your helpdesk, and use it to see how you could improve operations.
Automation and Scaling
You can increase productivity and automate many repetitive support tasks, thereby freeing up your agents time for more meaningful and human-focused work.
Helpdesk software often comes with a self-service knowledge base—allowing your organization to support customers in a way that scales. You can automatically export support tickets as new knowledge base articles, and search for existing help articles to send to customers when they contact support.
Keep Track of Customers
Your helpdesk also functions as a customer database in the same way that traditional Customer Relationship Management software keeps track of customer details, but there is more of an emphasis on customer support.
Being able to keep track of customers helps you provide a higher level of service, so that you can move from firefighting everyday problems to a more proactive support strategy. It means you can prioritize customers who potentially offer more profit for your business, and allocate resources to developing them.
Catch Customers Who are About to Churn
Despite your best efforts, sometimes customers can slip through the net. A helpdesk helps you keep track of those customers who are likely to leave your business.
Better queue management brings your attention to customers who are about to churn, and you can invest in ways to re-engage these customers before they’re lost for good. Automatically initiate remediation processes if a customer reaches a certain number of tickets, for example, and assign a personal support agent to correct the problems.
Conclusion
It’s no longer enough to use traditional methods to manage customer support. A helpdesk solution is the only answer for proactive, growth-oriented, customer-centric support teams.
Customer support goals are directly tied to organizational objectives, and happy employees make for happy customers. Not only does a helpdesk make your support team more productive, but it directly improves customer retention, meaning more profits for your business.
A helpdesk solution has many benefits that completely justifies its impact on the budget, and they don’t usually require an upfront investment. There are now many excellent customer support helpdesk solutions on the market, including our very own Freshdesk.
Source:
1 – https://reputationrefinery.com/96-of-unhappy-customers-wont-complain-to-you-but-will-tell-15-friends-infographic
2 – https://neilpatel.com/blog/zappos-art-of-culture/
3 – https://www.invespcro.com/blog/customer-acquisition-retention/
4 – https://www.referralsaasquatch.com/17-referral-marketing-statistics/
5 – https://aircall.io/blog/customer-churn/
6 – http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2015/26743/why-personalized-marketing-will-dominate-in-2015-infographic
