What Is A Help Desk & How To Set Up A Help Desk In 5 Steps?

Basically, the help desk is the central online hub where customers can speak to customer support staff. It can be a physical desktop, but more commonly a virtual space that customers can contact when they need help. Depending on the size of the company, the help desk may have an individual employee or a dedicated support team.

In a sense, each company has a type of help desk service as part of a customer or account management system. If a customer has a problem with your product or service, they will probably call your organization to resolve the problem. Helpdesk management software solutions are designed to facilitate customer support with ticket management, communication, automation, and other features.

How To Set Up A Help Desk In 5 Steps?

When setting up your own help desk operation, it is important to decide how to use it. From there, you must identify the gap between your goals and your current support operations. These five steps provide the insight to plan a process that can be followed at any level within the administrative structure and allow the help desk to easily expand as the business grows.

The five steps to follow when setting up your help desk are:

1.Determine the support provided by the desktop

Traditionally, the help desk support services is the place to receive basic customer tickets and correct customer reported problems. However, it can also provide more strategic capabilities by managing customer service workflows, centralizing customer data, and acting as a centralized location to build a self-service knowledge base.

You can also expand your help desk to include service requests across the company. This means that the help desk can serve both internal and external customers and can serve as a central hub for the customer relationship management (CRM) process.

Regardless of the experience you choose, a help desk system will helps you do this by acting as a centralized hub that facilitates all communication between you and your customers. This frees up agent time by consolidating information and automating the administration process, allowing customers to better assist with work orders or error correction.

2.Determine the help desk staffing needs

One of the first questions most help desk outsourcing companies face when creating help desk administration is the number of people required to form a support team. This largely depends on your customer base and the amount of inquiries you generally receive.

In most cases, each support agent must spend approximately 70% of the time responding to tickets. This is called utilization. The remaining 30% of the time should be used for secondary tasks such as meetings, training, breaks, and general work downtime. When utilization exceeds 70%, customers expect more. If it is low, the agent spends a lot of time idle.

You can use these guidelines to estimate the total number of hours required for staffing. Once your team is made up of the correct number of agents, you can decide whether to be a generalist who will respond to all entries or a specialist who will only respond to entries related to a particular topic.

Once your team is deployed, you can leverage metrics and analysis from help desk software to optimize staffing levels and repeat as your needs change.

3.Define priorities

When creating strategies for support ticket operations, you must classify, prioritize, and assign the received tickets based on your unique business requirements. For example, most systems provide the ability to automatically route tickets to a team or department that can provide professional support. An example of this is a billing problem that is immediately routed to the accounts receivable department.

Similarly, ticket automation can help you deliver on your promises in service level agreements (SLAs) where you have promises to your customers. If the client has an SLA that allows access to more specialized support, the ticket can be automatically escalated. You can also create multiple SLAs with different response times based on ticket types, products, customer groups, or other criteria defined in the service management console.

4.Create a canned response or knowledge base

If your customers contact you with frequently asked questions (FAQ), spending time manually entering the answers to each request can overload your agents. Creating and implementing canned responses to common queries can save agents and customers a lot of time and effort. Similarly, the customer page knowledge base can help customers themselves.

Clients are used to helping themselves. Using self-service options, such as knowledge bases, can save you time and resources to help them. Research has shown that customers prefer to solve problems themselves rather than solving problems that they talk to customer service representatives. Therefore, self-service channels can help increase customer satisfaction.

5.Track and improve key indicators

If you want your help desk operation to be as efficient as possible, you need to continually improve your setup. Evaluating key metrics using the software's reporting tools will help you understand the overall effectiveness of your agents and their work.

With helpdesk solutions, you can track data such as response times, resolution times, and overall customer satisfaction. You can also schedule automatic reports on these metrics and distribute them to your company's team members.

Help desk management reports can be used to identify problems, but they also have the advantage of identifying operational trends. For example, many customers may be confused about how to return items to their company's e-commerce store. Having a repetitive answer that clarifies the return policy can solve this problem. You can also use this information as a reminder that you need to better explain this policy on your store's cashier page.

Another way to gather useful information is to keep track of all the interactions in the survey with customers. This is a great way to collect qualitative feedback from users and assess how their agents meet their needs. It also helps to build loyalty through a positive customer service experience