5 tips for choosing the right help desk software

Choosing the right help desk for your business can be a difficult task. How do you pick the right one? Here are 5 tips to help you out.

If you run a customer-facing company, you probably realize that customer support plays a big role in your business. Today’s customers value the quality of support as much as the quality of the product itself, and businesses of all sorts and sizes need to resolve their customers’ problems in a quick, hassle-free, and consistent fashion. But what do you do if e-mail and phone support aren’t cutting it anymore? The answer lies within choosing the right help desk solution.

With so many help desk solutions to choose from, this can become a difficult task. Every business has different needs and considerations. Before picking out a help desk software, you’ll need to evaluate your business requirements. Your customer service strategy depends on it. Read on to find out what you need to look for in a help desk solution.

1. What Are Your Customers’ Expectations?

The business you’re in usually determines the expectations of your customers. Are you an app developer or are you in retail? Maybe your company focuses on food delivery. These are the questions that’ll help you gauge the volume of tickets you’ll be dealing with.

If your company has a social media presence, you’ll want to focus on that area and take customer support requests there. Social media is an extremely powerful tool to ensure your customers receive the top-notch support that they deserve, and your help desk of choice needs to fulfill this requirement. We’ve touched on the importance of social media customer service in our blog before, which you can find here.

Customers also look for a fast response time. The right help desk will help you respond to customer queries in a short turnaround time and keep them happy and increase customer loyalty.

2. On-site or SaaS

Deciding on the type of help desk deployment is an important task. There are two options: an on-site deployment where you install the software on a server that you own, and a Software-as-a-service solution that’s hosted on the cloud and managed for you.

Both have upsides and downsides. The advantage of an on-site deployment is that you keep your data in-house, suitable for critical data like finance or healthcare. The disadvantages of self-hosting are two-fold: you need to invest in the hardware and employ an IT professional to manage and maintain it. This can greatly increase the long-term costs of your help desk.

SaaS solutions have none of these disadvantages as they are cloud-based and managed and maintained for you. Security is handled by dedicated security professionals. All you need is an internet connection, and you don’t have to purchase or rent any servers. This is the best way to go if you’re not equipped to host your own help desk solution.

◊ Tip: A cloud-based customer support platform like Desk360 might prove a great solution for you in this regard. Discover what Desk360 can do for you by choosing the best plan for your business with a 30-day free trial.

3. Omnichannel support

Imagine how many channels of communication your customers have to reach out to you for support. Social media, live chat, e-mail, and phone are the most widely used ones. Now imagine unifying them and creating an interconnected system, allowing you and your customers to seamlessly switch between them.

This is crucial because your support team will be able to take notes and share contexts between each other and across all channels. Without an omnichannel-enabled help desk, you won’t be able to turn social media comments into tickets, provide support over messaging platforms like WhatsApp, and the live chat widget on your site will be ineffective. Not combining all these is detrimental to an otherwise consistent and stellar customer experience.

◊ Tip: Don’t let your search for a customer support software turn into a nightmare. Discover the intuitive user interface of Desk360 and find out how easy it is to manage customer messages coming from multiple channels on a single page with our next generation inbox.

4. Support team performance analysis

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. This is especially true in a customer support environment, where monitoring performance metrics is crucial in effective decision-making. Performance reporting allows you to track performance trends by agent and by channel over time, identify strengths and weaknesses, and set realistic performance goals for your team.

Keeping track of metrics like ticket volume, ticket volume per channel, agent activity, response time, resolution rate and backlogs helps you make key decisions regarding your support team. With a help desk software equipped with first-grade reporting capabilities, don’t let an ineffective and mismanaged support department affect your customer experience negatively.

◊ Tip: With Desk360’s real-time dashboard and advanced reporting capabilities, visualize your data with a single click and manage your teams more effectively.

5. Budget concerns

Whether you’re a small or medium-sized business or a start-up, you can afford good customer support. There are many reasonably priced plans with different features out there. When allocating your tech stack budget, customer support is often overlooked, thinking phone and e-mail support is enough for the time being. Don’t wait until it’s not.

Investing in the right help desk software is effectively investing in customer experience and loyalty. Even a reasonably priced help desk software will immensely increase your customer satisfaction rate, which will increase your bottom line in the long run. Even a $15/month SaaS subscription will work wonders.

If you’re in the market for a reasonably priced and feature-rich help desk, look no further. When it comes to help desk software, Desk360 checks all the right boxes. We at Desk360 are dedicated to providing you a top-notch customer support platform, focusing on meeting your every need. Check out our feature set and unbeatable prices at desk360.com and drop us a line. We’ll be happy to hear from you.