Successful Help Desk Support

As a business owner, the inner working of your company is your responsibility. Whether your help desk is in-house or you outsource customer support, there are ways to ensure the success of your customer service department. Here are five tips for improving help desk support within your company:

1. Mix Your Staff

When it comes to your help desk, customer questions and complaints will be varied. Your customers do not want to be transferred to multiple agents for their issue to be handled correctly. Agents that make up your support team should be a varied bunch. Employ agents that are skilled in customer service, those that are able to help with technical issues, and those that are able to issue refunds and returns. The more varied your help desk support, the less likely your customers are to be placed on hold or transferred multiple times.

2. Evaluate Costs

Take a look at your customer complaint log. If you see a trend emerge, it is often cheaper to spend money putting a permanent fix on the problem than to keep fielding customer complaints. For example, if your agents are spending the majority of time helping people navigate your website, your site needs a serious overhaul. If agents are spending hours on the phone telling customers how to assemble your product, instructions included in your packaging need to be made clearer.

3. Employ Self Service

Give customers a way to resolve their own issues and answer their own questions. Employing self-service solutions can take 20 percent of the load off of your agents. These solutions work well at the lowest level. For example, install software that will allow users to check shipment status by following a prompt and inputting a telephone number. Give customers a way to reset their password for your website over the phone. While these solutions only work well at the lowest levels of service, they free your agents to concentrate their efforts on more important customer issues.

4. Evolve

Be flexible in the way that field customer queries and resolve issues. Just as you need to evolve to grow your company, you should constantly be looking at ways to improve the customer service your company offers. Take a look at your metrics at least once per month. Are call times too long? Are customers transferred too often? Are you issues resolved at a percentage that is higher than average? Your metrics hold the key to improvement; use them wisely.

5. Empower Employees

When employees are given the ability to solve issues on their own, morale is boosted. Happier employees equal motivated employees and, in turn, a better experience for the customer. Give your employees the information and skills that they need to resolve customer complaints in an appropriate manner. No agent should be forced to get authority from a manager to solve a simple problem.