Why do small businesses need a helpdesk?

When you’re running a small business, every decision you make goes a long way in shaping your customers’ experience, and in turn, their loyalty towards your brand. You have to do absolutely everything you can to earn their trust - answer questions, take special requests, and sometimes just be there for them round the clock to show them that you care. 

When you’re operating on a shoestring budget and a lean team, you might think answering customer questions out of a shared box is the most viable option to provide customer support. However, the limitations of using a shared inbox are only discoverable when your business starts to grow. 

Here are the three major challenges you’re likely to face if you continue using a shared inbox to provide support:

Delayed responses

Without a seamless workflow to route incoming conversations to the right agent, some burning customer issues might not be assigned on time, and a few might even slip through the cracks. This leaves a dent on your customers’ experience and reflects poorly on your brand.

Duplicate agent effort

Shared inboxes do not offer an easy way to keep track of new customer conversations, the ones that are open, and the ones that have been resolved. Due to lack of visibility, two agents might end up responding to the same customer conversation and this can lead to a duplication of effort.

Reduced agent productivity

Some customer conversations might include repetitive questions or basic how-to doubts. If your team doesn’t have an effortless way of tackling these basic questions, typing out the same message over and over again will eat into their time.

Restrained collaboration

To resolve some customer conversations, you might require additional help from other teams, such as the product or billing team. A shared inbox’s limited capabilities such as simply forwarding a conversation to the concerned person might not be the most efficient way to collaborate across teams seamlessly.

Ultimately, all these challenges get in the way of you delivering great support experiences, and retaining customers. However, a customer service software for small business will help you track and manage customer conversations, offer support across channels from one place, improve productivity and collaborate effortlessly. A helpdesk tool like Freshdesk will help you bid goodbye to these woes and focus on delivering delightful customer experiences as you scale your support.

What does Freshdesk offer for small businesses?

Streamline your support

If you would like to go beyond email and provide support on different channels, you can conveniently do so with Freshdesk. You can handle conversations across all channels right from a single inbox.

  • Provide omnichannel support on chat, phone, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and your website. 

  • Integrate your Shopify or Woocommerce account with Freshdesk to handle requests that come in through your e-commerce setup.
  • Ensure your team provides timely responses by setting up basic service level agreements (SLAs). 
helpdesk software small business

Reduce bottlenecks with automations

With Freshdesk, you can automate repetitive tasks that take up most of your time and focus on delivering delightful experiences.

  • Automatically route conversations to the right agents based on different criteria such as the content of the message, agent skills, language requirements etc.
  • Close the loop with the customer by setting up rules to follow up or send a feedback survey.
  • Flag poor customer experiences or escalate conversations that exceed the acceptable wait time automatically. 
helpdesk software small business

Scale your support with self-service

Freshdesk enables you to provide support across the globe and around-the-clock, without having to increase the strength of your team.

  • Set up a knowledgebase with FAQs and help-guides to deflect basic questions. 
  • Embed a widget on your website and a chatbot on your customer portal to provide contextual help to your customers.
  • Foster an active community and let your customers interact with each other.
helpdesk software small business

Increase agent productivity

Freshdesk helps ensure your agents have everything they require to provide fast and satisfactory customer resolutions.

  • Respond to repeated customer questions with a single keystroke, using templated responses. 
  • Onboard new agents and help them ramp up quickly using agent assist bots that recommend the next best course of action.
  • Cut down the time spent looking for customer details by providing necessary details needed to handle conversations.
helpdesk software small business

Collaborate effortlessly

As your business grows, collaboration will be an important part of customer service. Freshdesk comes with a slew of features that can help your team collaborate without stepping on each other’s toes.

  • Collaborate with complete transparency and accountability by sharing ownership of the customer conversation.
  • Split large customer requests into smaller tasks that can be worked on in parallel to offer faster resolutions.
  • Resolve multiple conversations in one go by linking similar requests and broadcasting updates or responses.
helpdesk software small business

Track and measure progress

Freshdesk provides periodic reports that can help you reflect on your current performance and make changes accordingly.

  • Get a bird’s eye view of open and unresolved conversations, your CSAT scores, and more, using dashboards. 
  • Analyze trends in tickets, gauge team performance, and monitor customer satisfaction using Freshdesk’s built-in reports.
  • Build custom reports and stay on top of key support metrics that are important to you and your team. 
helpdesk software small business

Support your customers for free with Freshdesk

Get started in minutes

Sign up, get your team on board, and start using Freshdesk without requiring a comprehensive onboarding to understand the tool.

Extend your capabilities

Integrate your account with other apps such as your CRM or Slack from the Freshdesk marketplace and build robust workflows.

Keep your customers data secure

Freshdesk is GRPR and HIPAA compliant, lets you host data in centers across the globe and offers IP whitelisting, custom email servers and SAML SSO.