Optimizing your help desk and processes is key to maximizing the satisfaction of customers. Help desk management should be a complementary process between your help desk software and your team. On one hand, your help desk should provide you with the optimal features to improve your processes. On the other hand, you should define your workflows and ensure best practices are followed. With that said, here are 10 best practices for managing your help desk and improving your support.
Tips and best practices for managing your help desk
Use a designated helpdesk
If you haven’t already, it’s time to set-up the right designated help desk. Using only a shared inbox, or multiple fragmented tools is one of the biggest setbacks of efficient support. A designated help desk provides a central place for agents to provide help desk support. Implementing a dedicated location for all tickets makes it easier to manage requests and ensure prompt service. Most help desks offer what’s called omnichannel support. Omnichannel means that customers can reach out via multiple channels (such as email, forms, or chat) and regardless of where the customer submits a ticket, the ticket will be logged in one place. A help desk like OneDesk not only organizes all tickets into one place – it allows for very powerful work views. Work views are ways of filtering, grouping, searching, and sorting tickets. This feature not only makes it easy to see the information you need, it also ensures no tickets fall through the cracks.
Improve process with key metrics
Another best practice for managing your helpdesk is to ensure great support is being met and that your team is on target. Improve your support and resource management over time. You can keep on top of tickets using scheduled reports. Schedule reports help you monitor your team’s performance and identify areas for improvement. For example, create a daily report of unsolved tickets to see what is left over at the end of the day. Or, create a report on employee timesheets each week to measure where your team has spent their time each week. OneDesk also has a variety of charts and graphs to monitor your Key Performance Indicators.
Save time with effective automation workflows
Automations are a highly important best practice for managing your help desk. Automation rules cut back on a ton of the repetitive work involved in organizing and triaging tickets. Automations can help you automatically organize work. For example, you can route tickets to the right project containers. Create an automation to help you automatically archive old resolved tickets. Escalate issues or assign to tickets agents or teams based on a huge variety of conditions. In OneDesk, automation rules are highly flexible and configurable.
Encourage self-service with a knowledge base and portal
Another important best practice for managing your help desk is making use of self-service tools. Encouraging self-service can help your customers find answers to their questions and reduce the workload on your support team. Create a comprehensive knowledge base that covers common customer inquiries and includes fleshed out guides. In OneDesk your articles can include text, images, such as diagrams, or attached documents. Make sure your knowledge base is easy to find. Add a link to your homepage or add the web widget to your site. A portal is another helpful self-service tool. The portal can cut back on questions about open tickets. It enables customers to view the status of tickets on their own terms.
Use a knowledge management strategy
For a help desk, a knowledge management strategy can help you organize and leverage your knowledge to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your support. This might involve properly defining processes for agents or creating robust sources of information to aid in responding to customers. Utilize an internal (agent-facing) knowledge base for internal process, documentation, and best practices. As part of your strategy, you should provide resources to help your support agents use the customer-facing knowledge base effectively, such as search tips and best practices for linking to articles. By implementing a knowledge management strategy, you can provide faster, more accurate support to your customers, reduce ticket volumes, and increase customer satisfaction.
Create useful canned responses
Canned responses, also called saved replies, are pre-written responses that your team can insert into a message. Canned responses make answering common questions faster. Plus you can still edit the reply if necessary before posting. Saved replies also provide a single source of truth your team can use to answer questions accurately. The best practice for canned responses is to create replies for the kinds of questions you receive often.
Use SLAs to guarantee great support
SLAs, or Service Level Agreements, are agreements between an organization and their customers. Even if you don’t have official agreements between customers, you can use SLAs to make sure your team is meeting key metrics. In OneDesk you can create SLAs based on a ticket’s priority level. SLAs can help you meet and analyze response and resolution times.
Get feedback with customer surveys
Getting feedback on tickets with customer surveys is a key best practice for improving your help desk’s performance and customer satisfaction. Customers can provide valuable feedback on your processes. In OneDesk, the survey is sent automatically on resolved tickets. It allows the customer to rate their satisfaction and leave comments. Analyze the survey results to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to your helpdesk’s processes and procedures.
Archive old resolved tickets
Clear and simplify your view of old resolved tickets. using an archiving feature. Archiving allows you to keep things organized. It makes tickets easier to find, assign and prioritize. As well archiving reduces clutter so your team can focus on the new or high priority issues. Archiving can also improve performance in a help desk system since less tickets need to be loaded. The best part about archiving is you can always go back and view old tickets. Need to review an old issue? No problem just search up that old ticket.
Organize tickets logically
On top of using a dedicated helpdesk tool, you should be sure to keep your help desk organized. In OneDesk, you can make use of portfolios, containers, and folders. These are unique features that can keep your work organized and structured. For example, you can use a dedicated container for a certain client’s tickets. Or, break up your tickets for different departments working in your account. Check out How to structure your account for tips on organizing your OneDesk account.
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