Like any other company, IT companies need to be on their toes to retain their customers, acquire new ones, and register more revenue. Customer service plays a significant role here. The way your support staff serves your customers speaks volumes about the values you stand for.

By providing customers with timely responses and effective solutions, service teams can bring a huge difference in how customers view your IT firm. Simply by listening to customers and addressing their issues at the earliest, they can make your customers talk favorably about your company and stay with you for long.

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Question is how can you enhance your support capabilities and fix the IT issues of customers effectively and promptly. Equipping your customer support staff with powerful IT help desk software is the solution. Before we jump onto the benefits of a help desk tool, let’s first understand what it is and then trickle down to -

1. Importance of IT help desk system
2. How help desk system works

What is a Help Desk Tool?

It is a powerful tool that establishes a single point of contact between your support staff and customers. It provides a centralized dashboard where your squad of technical experts can manage customer requests and address them quickly.

This ticket management system automates the issue resolution process, enabling you to troubleshoot customer issues efficiently. It equips your support staff with the capability to work collaboratively and handle customer communication from a central location.

Why IT Companies Need Help Desk Software

IT companies need help desk software in order to support their customers effectively. It helps the support staff to address customer issues related to your software product, password and security system, technical glitches, and more.

Importance of help desk software for IT companies

1. Fast Resolution of Customer Issues

When customers reach out to an IT company with questions or issues, they expect their questions to be answered within the shortest time possible. Although people have varying response time expectations depending on the communication channel used, 75% of customers consider fast response as a critical element in defining customer experience.

To ensure customers are not kept waiting for responses, IT companies can fast track issue resolution using help desk software. Some of the help desk features that make this possible are:

1. Ticket labeling - Support staff of IT firms can analyze issue tickets and filter those that have similar attributes.
2. Canned responses - Pre-drafted emails that IT support staff can use to answer common customer questions.
3. Automated ticket routing - Tickets can be routed to specific individuals who have prior experience of handling similar queries
4. Customer knowledge base - The support team can share the links of relevant knowledge base articles with customers. These articles have all the necessary information customers need to resolve a query on their own.

2. Empowering Customer Support Teams

Customers not only expect fast responses. They also want to be served by knowledgeable staff. Due to the technical nature of products and services, IT companies need to empower their support teams to serve customers more efficiently. IT Help Desk software comes in handy in enabling this.

One of the best Help Desk features that can empower the support staff of IT firms to manage tickets seamlessly is the centralized dashboard it provides. The tool consolidates all incoming customer requests from various channels on a single platform. Here, tickets can be assigned to respective technical departments that have the expertise to resolve them.

Users can also bookmark tickets, tag individuals on them, prioritize and label them, to make tracking and resolving tickets easier.

3. Product or Service Improvement

With Help Desk Software, IT companies can monitor customer complaints from the time they are raised to the time they are resolved. This makes it easy to identify product or service areas that require improvements.

In the event of a high number of customers raising complaints on similar issuers, Help Desk Software makes it possible for the support staff to track issues, and identify their patterns. The development team can go through the query reports regularly and analyze them to bring significant improvements in the products and services.

This helps IT businesses meet two objectives in a go - resolve customer issues, as well as improve their offerings so that such complaints don’t arise in the future.

4. Prevent Potential Issues

IT companies need to proactively mitigate issues that could result in poor service or outages. One way of identifying areas that require immediate attention is by looking at the issues that customers report to the company.

Help Desk software comes in handy in enabling IT firms to identify potential problems and address them before they begin to affect customers significantly. Using a suitable help desk too, companies can track and evaluate trends in the frequent issues raised by customers, and take proactive steps to eliminate them in the future.

5. Customer Issue Referencing

Help desk software makes it easy for support teams to refer to customer issues. The software comes with a history log function that documents all questions asked by customers. The history log serves two purposes. First, it allows service teams to reference customer issues raised in the past quickly. Second, it makes it easy for support staff to convince the development or product teams to act on a problem by proving that it has been persistent.

Research suggests that 38% of customers feel more valued if agents know the context of their queries, or are familiar with their previously-raised issues. This is where customer issue referencing works. Help desk ensures that, while dealing with customers, agents don’t get blank and are familiar with the past interactions customers have had with the company.

6. Customer Surveys

Customer service managers often have too much on their plates, with little to no time left for capturing feedback from customers regarding their experience with agents.

IT help desk software offers the perfect solution for this.

It sends automatic surveys inviting customers to give feedback on how satisfied they are with the support offered. From these surveys, IT companies can gauge the performance of agents, and get a clear picture of whether the service staff takes customer queries seriously or not.

The surveys provide IT support staff a sneak peek into the areas they are good at and those that need improvement. By making things transparent, a help desk tool helps IT firms identify weak areas, which, if fixed, can improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Now that you are familiar with help desk benefits let’s look at how this ticketing system works.

How Help Desk Works

A powerful help desk tool is designed to help IT companies respond to customer issues within the shortest time possible. Based on different help desk software features, here are five ways that help desks work:

1. Ticket Management

Help Desk software enables IT companies to receive the issues from multiple communication channels and register them in the system as tickets. Users can then categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets to service reps, for fast and effective resolution.

This makes it easy for IT companies to:

1. Capture all issues raised by customers
2. Ensure there no two service reps working on the same ticket
3. Use customized status to monitor workflow

Once the problems are resolved, the service team can then close the tickets and take up new ones.

2. Multichannel Communication

Customers contact IT companies using different communication channels, including:

1. Emails
2. Social media platforms
3. Phone calls
4. Live Chat

Responding to requests through these channels can take a toll on service teams, resulting in various customer requests going unattended. Through the multichannel support function, IT help desk support converts customer queries from different communication channels into tickets that are easy to manage and resolve.

Once the issues are received, the software enables IT companies to communicate issue status to customers through the channels they used to submit their issues initially. By allowing multichannel support, a help desk tool ensures that no issues fall through the crack.

3. Task Automation

There are numerous administrative tasks that service teams in IT companies need to undertake.

These include:

1. Drafting email responses
2. Generating and assigning tickets
3. Prioritizing issues
4. Status updates
5. Responding to common questions

Help desk software enables IT companies to automate tasks so that tickets are routed to service reps based on their skills and workload. Service reps and customers get automatic updates on the progress made in resolving issues. Agents can also use canned responses to deal with frequent issues raised by customers.

4. Team Collaboration

IT help desk software comes with various features to enhance team collaboration. These include:

1. Internal notes
2. Shared inboxes
3. Priorities
4. Child tickets
5. Alerts or notifications
6. Priorities

These features enable agents to work collaboratively while answering customer questions. The software allows teams to view customer requests and assign tickets based on priorities and the expertise of different individuals. This ensures that the ticket goes to the right person and is resolved in minimal time.

5. Customer Service Performance

A robust help desk tool collects and analyzes data that assists in measuring the performance of the customer service function. Through analytics and reporting, help desk provides companies with meaningful data such as -

1. Average resolution time
2. Tickets resolved by each service rep
3. Pending requests
4. New tickets

Leveraging this information, IT companies can identify service reps that need more training and examine the challenges faced by the support team in addressing customer issues.

Final Thoughts

Whichever way you look at it, help desk software is an asset for IT companies. The technical nature of the products and services provided by IT companies make it even more important for them to use help desk software.

Implementing a powerful ticketing system is crucial, especially if providing customers with exceptional experiences is what you strive for. If you think this is not worth investing, think again. Research suggests that for every 1$ you invest in customer experience, you can get a return of $3.

What better way to improve customer experience than by adopting a versatile help desk tool that can bring you unmatched results.

With numerous tools available in the market, choosing one can be a task.

To find one that meets your customer service goals, pay attention to critical features such as -

1. Ticket management
2. Priorities, labels, and tags
3. Reports and analytics
4. Search and close tickets
5. Filter tickets
6. Customer notifications
7. Centralized dashboard
8. Child tickets
9. Attachments and notes
10. Automated emails
11. Ticket routing
12. Integrations with third-party tools

A feature-rich and powerful IT help desk support tends to boost the productivity of service teams and is more responsive to the needs of customers.

Author Bio

Dwayne Charrington is a technical writer currently associated with ProProfs Help Desk. He possesses hands-on experience in writing for the customer service industry. Dwayne is insightful when it comes to industrial challenges, emerging customer service trends, and how businesses overcome related challenges. Dwayne likes drawing connections between different industries and entities while designing his blogs.

Why Help Desk Software Is a Critical Asset for It Companies key takeaways:

#1. What is a Help Desk Tool?
#2. Why IT Companies Need Help Desk Software
#3. Importance of help desk software for IT companies
#4. 1. Fast Resolution of Customer Issues
#5. 2. Empowering Customer Support Teams
#6. 3. Product or Service Improvement
#7. 4. Prevent Potential Issues
#8. 5. Customer Issue Referencing
#9. 6. Customer Surveys
#10. How Help Desk Works
#11. 1. Ticket Management
#12. 2. Multichannel Communication
#13. 3. Task Automation
#14. 5. Customer Service Performance
#15. Final Thoughts