What is a Help Desk?

A help desk is a powerful collaborative tool widely used in the IT sector. It helps businesses scale cost-effectively, improve customer satisfaction and streamline communications systematically. A help desk can be an individual, a global organizational function, or an external service that serves broad-ranging customer support activities.

Types of Help Desks

There are 3 types of help desk software available.

Cloud-based

Cloud-based help desks are widely used and managed by web browsers. It is easy to set up and provides an anytime-accessible central repository, integrations, and scaling. The only disadvantage is that it mainly depends on the internet connection, technology, and hardware.

On-premises(self-hosted)

On-premises help desk solutions are hard to set up. But they manage everything related to storing data through in-house servers and system configuration while keeping data secured. Moreover, it can also be tailored according to the organization’s needs.

Open source

Open-source help desks give businesses a considerable chance to modify some of the help desk features according to their needs by changing the software’s source code.

The Role of a Help Desk in Your Organization

The help desk has become a bedrock in the modern competitive world as it delivers solutions wherever possible. It’s one of the most flexible ways to carry out quality customer support. Help desks ensure that customer concerns and technical issues are quickly addressed and resolved, boosting efficiency and saving valuable time by eliminating the need for agents.

Help desks have made it even easier for customers to contact a particular organization for support by facilitating online and offline contact support (email, phone, live chats, social media). It also helps managers track and prioritize incoming tickets within the company.

In addition, ticket volume, customer satisfaction, resolution times, and agent performance can be continuously tracked by help desk solutions. Likewise, these help desk solutions can help improve your organization’s processes in many ways.

Who Uses Help Desks?

As mentioned, help desks are used by many organizations and individuals. Here is a list of user types that primarily benefit from using help desks.

Enterprise owners (B2B and B2C)
Small business owners
IT support managers and technicians
Customer success managers
Customer service managers
Company stakeholders
Customers

Advantages of Help Desk

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction gives an indication of value in your service or product. Help desks support you to consistently empower users, deliver technical support, and provide a better customer experience. Below are some tips for upheaving a help desk’s client satisfaction.

Make customer satisfaction a priority.
Empower your agents.
Open up your channels.
Have daily help desk stand-ups.
Ask for customer feedback.
Empower your end-users.
Act on customer feedback.
Schedule and undertake regular customer reviews.

Boosted Productivity

The help desk also performs complaint management effectively using tagging system and complaint ticketing. This paves the path to increase efficiency, clarity, and productivity, avoiding confusion in the workspace.

Scale Smarter

With help desk software, organizations can scale smarter to new diverse areas while supporting a high volume of customers. As a result, the company can expand its business to new regions without hesitation.

Improve Overall Workflow

Thanks to the help desk software, now you can track metrics like:

Average time spent resolving tickets
Ticket volume or total conversations
First response time
Response time
Resolution rate
Tickets completed
Tickets by the hour
Number of tickets

It also prioritizes important tasks, auto-assigns help desk tickets, avoids duplicate tickets, resolve tickets faster, and acts as a multitask smarter to maximize efficiency.

Operate from Anywhere in the World

This is one of the leading advantages of cloud-based help desk software that can be accessed globally. Therefore, it is the perfect solution if your team works remotely. Also, the agents can resolve and respond to their customers with the help of help desk mobile applications in case the agents are not available on their desks.

Disadvantages of Help Desk

Financial Cost Concerns

Compared to shared inboxes, file systems, and spreadsheets, help desk software can be more costly. This is because organizations install help desk products as self-hosted software or SaaS products.

Learning curve

It can take some time for users to get familiar with the tool initially. Yet, they can learn about the tool and grasp its functionalities easily and quickly by setting up workshops, introductory programs, and questionnaires.

Limited Facilities

If you choose free help desk software, it will only have a limited set of resources and facilities. Consequently, this will lead to poor client experience while tarnishing your organization’s goodwill. Hence, it is essential to consider the features when selecting free help desk software.

Inconsistency

Team members can also get disappointed when facing free help desk software limitations. Their limitations can frustrate the users and reduce the processes’ accountability, consistency, and effectiveness. So, you must be careful when choosing free help desk software.

Help Desk vs. CRM

CRM System or Customer Relationship Management System is a dedicated platform that manages your relationships with customers. CRM is a very comfortable and convenient place to store all data when the business expands daily. It allows you to collect and keep data and information about your company and customers. So, you can get a clear image of every customer and understand their status.

Although the help desk and CRM system sound pretty similar, there are some significant differences. CRM systems only handle customer information, while the help desks utilize the information to aid agents. Also, help desks can be used to automate responses, answer common questions, and redirect people to an info portal.
So, it is clear that help desks serve more purposes than CRM systems.

Help Desk vs. Live Chat

Live chat is a setup that assists representatives in communicating with customers in real-time. So it is an online messaging application, and most help desk software has them as an inbuilt component.

Live chat seems interruptive as it needs immediate attention, which may lead to exhaustion of your team. Also, it requires more force when compared to the process of help desks. Therefore, more human resources are needed for a live chat solution.

Key Features of a Help Desk

A help desk is comprised of multiple features. Below are some vital features designed in a help desk to improve end-user experience and enhance customer satisfaction.

Ticket Management

A perfect help desk composes robust ticket management capabilities, allowing businesses to grasp, organize, and manage service requests from employees, customers, and support teams. In addition, help desks automatically assign tickets and allow end-to-end traction service tickets to trail the progress of issues and resolve them.

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Collaboration Properties

Here, all the agents get a chance to work with built-in collaboration tools. You should have the below collaborative features to enable collaboration successfully between team members.

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Automation

This is another user-oriented help desk feature that can ensure immediate responses to your customers. For example, suppose that you utilize automated chatbots so that they will respond to customers even when your team is not online in the blink of an eye.

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Reporting, metrics, and analytics

Reports, metrics, and analytics play a vital part in achieving the success of a support team. Help desks support you in collecting and tracking performances, daily goals, and metrics. Then those metrics can be converted into reports in real-time.

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Third-party integrations

Most of the help desks integrate with other third-party tools like Slack, Hubspot, Jira, and Salesforce to avoid switching between external tools.

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Should I Use a Help Desk?

As discussed, help desks can support your organization’s internal and external users in many ways. For example, help desks perform a vital role in tracking, sending, and managing service and work order requests. So, if your organization is looking for ways to automate, scale, or increase the user experience in support services, using a help desk is the perfect solution.

It also improves the customer’s experience with your product or service. If you need an effective method to organize customer communication effectively, you should use a help desk.

Likewise, there are many situations where help desks can improve your organization internally and externally. So, if you have a requirement, don’t hesitate to go for a help desk solution.

Bottom Line

This article discussed a detailed analysis of help desks and their dominant features, pros, and cons. I hope you now have a good understanding of help desks and why you should use them in your organizations. Thank you for reading!

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