A 10-Step Checklist to Setting Up a Help Desk
Congratulations on your big step to onboard a help desk system! You no longer have to worry about unattended customer inquiries or struggle to balance the workload evenly among your support team members. You get to effortlessly assign ownership for requests, track your team’s progress, and measure customer satisfaction.
To realize the immense value of a help desk, you need to first set it up the right way for you and your support team. And no, setting up a help desk isn’t as daunting as you think it is. We’ve put together a simple, step-by-step checklist on how to set up your new help desk for guaranteed success.
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How to set up a help desk?
Preethi Sriram, who heads a team of solution engineers at Freshdesk, has helped several customers from different industries set up and adopt our help desk software—Freshdesk. Preethi and her team dive into the exact support challenges each team faces and recommends best practices for businesses to see the maximum value from their help desk system. She shares the following tips and steps to implement a help desk and set you up for success.
Step 1: Plan your help desk workflow
To plan the sequence of processes for your help desk, start by reviewing the customer service goals and the challenges you want to address in your support while implementing a help desk. Your help desk setup could vary based on industry-specific needs and goals.
Preethi Sriram explains, “Based on your industry and team size, you can customize and set up certain workflows for your business. For example, if you want to onboard 20 agents onto the help desk system, would they all handle similar queries, or do you want to divide the agents into smaller groups to handle specialized queries related to your industry? We’re also observing the rising trend of small businesses requesting a customized support portal while setting up their help desk.”
You can begin with these questions.
- How many support email addresses do you need? Do you want to consolidate all customer inquiries in a single mail address and link it with your help desk account, or do you need multiple mailboxes?
- Do you need internal agent groups to handle different request types? If so, how many? What access and permissions will different agents need?
- What customer communication channels do you want to add to the ticketing system?
- What help desk or agent performance metrics do you want to track? Do you want to monitor customer satisfaction with CSAT scores closely?
- Are you interested in collecting customer feedback after every service interaction?
- What elements do you need in your self-service portal? Do you want a contact form along with the FAQs?
Step 2: Add customer service channels
Now, it’s time to link your support channels to your helpdesk. Many businesses still prefer email as their primary customer service channel, so setting up your email channel would be the first step.
- After you’ve decided on your support email address, add the email ID to your help desk. Your help desk will automatically trigger a verification code or link sent to the support ID you just added.
- Once you verify the account, you can set forwarding rules in your mailbox to send the incoming emails you receive in the support inbox to your help desk.
- If your help desk supports social media channels, add your Facebook, Whatsapp, or Twitter accounts to your help desk. In Freshdesk, you can easily add your Facebook page or Twitter handle with Freshdesk, view all the posts as support tickets, or filter posts based on keywords and track them in your Freshdesk account.
Step 3: Bring your support team in
You’re now ready to onboard your team members to the help desk. Depending on the type of plan you’ve subscribed to or the number of licenses you’ve purchased, you’ll be able to add and set the permissions for a different number of agents.
- Adding team members: Start creating agent profiles—which your agents can also customize later—with unique email addresses, contact details, and time zones they’ll be operating from. You can also map them to specific groups like billing or returns, either now or later. Some help desks also allow you to choose if you want to add a full-time or a part-time agent.
- Define agent roles and permissions: You can specify the type of access you want to grant agents too. You may want some team members to only view certain tickets and not edit them, or you may want agents within a particular group to view certain types of requests while others can’t.
You can choose a particular role for the team member, such as an account admin, a supervisor, or an agent, to allow or limit the set of activities a member can do within the help desk. For example, a supervisor may be able to create reports, but a member defined as an ‘agent’ may not be able to.
Step 4: Define SLA policies
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in customer service set expectations right between businesses and customers on the speed and scope of customer support. Within your help desk, you can create SLA deadlines or targets for when your team has to send the first response on any channel or resolve a customer issue completely. Ensure you set your business hours or operational hours—your company’s working hours—in your help desk before defining SLAs.
If your help desk allows you to define multiple SLA policies, then set up varying SLAs for different business criteria.
Businesses these days prefer to create multiple SLA policies based on the channel of request, the type of customers they service to—setting shorter SLA targets for VIP customers, or the type of issue the customer is facing. You want to address critical billing issues as quickly as possible to avoid impact on revenue or retention – Preethi Sriram, Regional Head of Solution Engineering at Freshdesk.
Step 5: Create automated ticket workflows
The biggest benefit of a help desk is being able to take advantage of powerful automation and the reduction of manual efforts while still providing good customer service.
Modern and intuitive help desk ticketing solutions like Freshdesk enable you to automate routine tasks such as assigning tickets or notifying customers of request updates using simple rules.
Here are a few automation workflows that Preethi and her team recommend for businesses across industries implementing Freshdesk.
- Automatic ticket routing: To assign particular types of support requests to agents based on their skills, workload, or in a round-robin order.
- Time-triggered automation rules: ‘If following up with customers is a huge challenge a business faces, setting up time-triggered rules to automatically trigger follow-up emails to customers after a certain number of days saves time and effort for reps’, says Preethi.
- Automating the escalation process: Setting up rules to trigger escalation emails to agents when a resolution SLA is missed or to notify agents of an approaching deadline escalation. Preethi adds, ‘Some businesses value CSAT scores as a key metric for measuring customer experience and want escalation rules to be set up when they receive a low CSAT score. The feedback is created as a ticket automatically, and an agent reaches out to the customer to find out if the company can do something to correct or improve their previous negative experience.’
- Keyword-based filtering of customer queries: You can set up keyword-based rules that segregate inquiries based on the input keywords and assign them to the respective specialized agent groups.
- Automated email notifications to customers: To keep customers in the loop about the progress of their service requests, you can auto-trigger email notifications to your customers with the latest update.
Step 6: Configure agent productivity features
Help desk systems also have time-saving features for agents to offer faster and effortless support. Here are a few widely-used help desk productivity hacks that you can set up for your agents initially.
- Pre-defined personalized response templates: You can create templates, or canned responses, with dynamic placeholders for your common customer replies that agents can add in a single click rather than typing out the same responses multiple times. You can also ensure consistency in your customer communications with these templates.
- Creating automations for common support scenarios: You can club a series of steps that agents recurrently perform for a particular customer request—say a returns query—into one workflow that an agent can execute at the click of a button.
- Knowledge base for agents: If you have FAQ documentation or guides that contain product information, you can add them to the help desk and create a knowledge base that agents can refer to for resolving customer queries.
Step 7: Set up and customize your self-service portal
Your customers are finding it more convenient to find answers on their own rather than depending on a human agent for issue resolution. You can host a self-service portal on your help desk with FAQs, guides, tutorials, and contact us forms to encourage customer self-help.
Customers are finding self-service portals hosted on your website as an easier way to start a conversation with your business. So having branded contact forms and customizing your support portal to feel as a part of the user experience make it easy for customers to reach out to you – Preethi Sriram.
Based on the self-service options extended by your help desk, you can start curating frequently asked customer questions, troubleshooting guides, video guides, or even host a community forum.
Step 8: Integrate existing apps with your help desk
If your customer data is spread across other tools like Shopify or Quickbooks, or you use different apps, including Microsoft Teams or Slack, for collaboration and file sharing, you can connect these applications with your help desk system to access all relevant information from a single view. Your team can resolve issues more quickly and efficiently with all the data at their fingertips.
Step 9: Check help desk security settings
Enable the available security options for your help desk in this step. For instance, in Freshdesk, you can enable single sign-on for your agents for seamless authentication and also choose the hosting region of your data server. You can also perform domain verification of your email service through the DKIM (Domain Key Identified Mail) process to avoid email ID spoofing—a technique by which non-business entities can impersonate your company with your support email address.
Step 10: Test and optimize your help desk deployment
Now you’re ready to create your very first ticket and test if all the channels are integrated properly and the workflows are working as intended. Use your built-in help desk reports to gain insights into your help desk usage. You can keep an eye on the volume and number of tickets you receive, analyze ticket volume patterns, and monitor critical SLA metrics like first response time or average resolution time with help desk reporting.
You can iterate and optimize your support operations and overall help desk management based on these insights.
A quick checklist to organize your help desk
Here’s a handy checklist summarizing all the above help desk implementation steps.
FREE resource: Help desk set up checklist
Get started with your help desk system today
A help desk system brings greater accountability and ownership among your support team members, empowering you and your team to offer delightful customer service experiences. If the thought of onboarding and implementing a help desk ticketing system stops you from trying a tool, then we hope that this help desk checklist will help you visualize and build your help desk the right way.
If you’re looking for an intuitive and powerful help desk software that is easy to set up and use—for both admins and support agents—then feel free to take Freshdesk for a spin.
