Let’s be honest, not all clients are created equal. That might sound mean or elitist but it is actually kind of true. Even for a small business, large clients, or well established ones, can represent a huge bonus for you and could even cause greater damage if they were to leave. Learn to organize your clients!
Organize your clients into a hierarchy
You have to organize your clients portfolio into hierarchies. There are your recent and new clients of a similar size at the bottom, your standard blob of regular clients who just do their own thing, and then there are the higher tiers. Problem clients, those who often find themselves lost; and the big fish at the top, Key stakeholders you say use your services on your website.
You know this list off the top of your head, you’ve just never committed to grouping them as such; and why not? Grouping your clients helps your helpdesk workers to recognize the client and what tier they are in, this gives them a sense of how to behave and handle the help. And no, this isn’t a method to push priority to bigger clients and forgo your smaller ones!
This is not a negative tactic; this will help you and your clients. A new client might enjoy you giving them links and quick access to FAQs and other types of easy to find materials even if they haven’t asked for it. A regular client might not want to be flooded with information they already know, they will want a more to the point solution, especially if they do not ask questions often! And of course problem clients who have requests often or big fish should be handled quickly or referred up quickly, they’ll appreciate the gesture and as a manager you will always prefer to be hands on with these ones.
Organize your clients into groups
A ladder scale is good, but another useful method of grouping is not to group them by importance but also by type: similar businesses, those using one product specifically, location, etc.
Why limit your groupings to only reflect the scale they occupy in your daily life and in your business? Group them also according to time zones, to help you deal with clients that all require the same work hours for care. You’ll know if you can’t solve their issue in their morning that that will be a bigger problem than assuring them at the end of their day that it’ll be done by the time they come back the next morning.
You can also group them by country of origin, and allow for some of your workers who handle other languages to be ready to handle these groups more than others. This will help your teams and workers coalesce into clearer groups and have a more defined experience for which they can be ready and prepare for.
You can also group your clients based on which of your services and products they make use of. This will lead you define your workers into clear groups of skills, with those specializing in applications or certain types of products working towards those clients making use of those rather than not have any structure at all.
All these types of groups are things for which you would pay hundreds of dollars to gather reports and other documentation from external consultants. Make use of the available technology at your fingertips and take ownership of your in-house data to make your helpdesk seamless and efficient. Rather than have your workers be jack of all trades and masters of none, have them placed in clear groups and increase your efficiency of response and the quality of these responses. Organize your clients right and you’ll help them as much as your workers and your business.
In the End…
This is the key to helpdesk management. Not all clients are alike, not all clients need the same help either. Define your clients, organize your clients and simplify the process by which you do your business. Here at OneDesk we understand the need to categorize and classify all too well, With OneDesk you can easily create groups and types for your clients and allow for these higher systems to help your work and your worker’s work.
Photo Credit: poppet with a camera / Neopolitans / CC BY