10 Must-Have Features of Help Desk Software

Have you ever had a problem while shopping online, then you reach out to your vendor’s support service, but it takes them forever to respond? 

Did it discourage you and make you vow never to patronize the services of a business that did not care about its customers again?

Every business owner should value their customers. After all, 78% of customers will back out of purchase due to a poor customer experience, and you can’t run a business if no one is paying for your goods or services. 

You must ensure that all of your customer’s needs are met so they will continue to patronize you. Even if you have the best product on the market, you will not attract or retain many customers if you provide poor customer service.

Customers dislike having to wait. They expect you to respond quickly to their inquiries and to solve their problems. 

Around 80% of consumers say they would rather do business with a competitor after having more than one bad experience, so you must prioritize always providing your customers with the answers they need as quickly as possible.

That is exactly what a help desk system does. 

It allows you to communicate easily with your customers and meet their service needs. Your support staff will have all the tools they need to respond to customers effectively and on time with the help of good help desk software. 

But, before we go any further, let’s look at the help desk software to understand better what it does.

What Is a Help Desk Software?

A help desk is a software that helps you prioritize your tasks and support your customers when they have requests or issues. Your IT team would not have to sort through email notifications manually and possibly miss some important and urgent ones when you have your help desk software to do it for you.

Help desk software converts your customers’ requests and support issues into tickets. It then organizes them into categories that make it easy for your support teams to address these issues on time. 

You improve your customer communication with a good help desk system because it helps you to attend to your customers on all available platforms.

Since customers use many means and channels to reach out to every business, you need a tool that compiles every message and sorts through them. Help desk software collects your customers’ complaints from different platforms and helps you manage them better. 

It reduces the workload on your support staff by putting similar messages and questions into one ticket, helping them avoid duplicated answers.

Not only does a help desk system improve your customer communication, but it also helps you to categorize issues and prioritize the important ones. An effective help desk system gives you an excellent approach to solving your customers’ problems on time.

Help desks focus on solving problems.

Why Should You Use a Help Desk Software

Most businesses get customers with similar problems who reach out to their support team on numerous social media platforms. Wouldn’t it be faster if you had a tool that sorted out these messages and helped you deal with them once?

Help desk software helps you handle all your customer complaints regardless of where they try to reach you. It categorizes all the messages you get from your users from different forms of contacts and passes them to the same support staff working on it.

With efficient help desk software, your users’ important issues are prioritized and attended to quickly by your support teams. They send tickets to the appropriate support staff that deals with all related issues and helps you attend to your customers on time.

They make your support operations easy and prioritize your customers’ satisfaction. No longer will you lose customers because you were too slow to attend to their issues when you use effective help desk software with good features. 

Here are some benefits of using help desk software for your business:

Prioritize Important Tasks

Most help desk software tells you the order you need to address your tickets. You get to process the tickets with high severity before attending to others.

For example, replacing a computer that came in the wrong color is far less important than fixing a crashed company server that affects hundreds of people.

Measure Customer Satisfaction

You get to satisfy all your customers’ requirements since help desk systems help you attend to them efficiently.

Not only do you answer their questions, but you also solve all the problems they might have. This leaves them satisfied and keeps them coming back since satisfied customers make loyal customers.

Improve Support Operations

Help desk systems help you automate your support operations and allow your support staff to attend to your users’ complaints and requests.

It integrates all the messages your users send you on different platforms and makes it easy for your support teams to attend to them at once.

Manage Contacts

You need to keep track of how many new contacts you get and know the percentage of your returning customers.

Help desk software helps you monitor information regarding your customers, both old and new. It provides your support staff with information about your customers and allows them to manage their problems effectively.

Self-Help Service

Most customers prefer self-help over waiting for support agents to solve their issues. You must equip your business with tools and information that help your users help themselves. 

Effective help desk software like Zoho Desk provides a knowledge base that helps users solve their problems without waiting for help from your support operators.

Although help desk software helps you to improve your service operations, you need to make sure you choose the right one. Let us consider the different types of help desk software and see how they work.

Types of Help Desk Software

Cloud-Based Help Desk

Cloud-based help desk software like Freshdesk is a SaaS (software as a service) hosted on your service provider’s server. 

They are entirely web-based and take care of aspects like maintenance and technical support. All you need to do to access all its feature is to create an account for your company and pay a monthly or annual fee.

You do not need to stress over storing your data as the server stores and backs it up for you. It helps your support agents to perform their duties irrespective of their location. 

Self-Hosted Help Desk

A self-hosted help desk is licensed software you purchase to help you with your support operations. It usually involves a one-time setup fee and leaves you responsible for its maintenance and technical support.

It gives you control over all its features which helps you to have good security and fewer data breaches. Self-hosted software allows you to customize your help desk as much as you want to suit your customers’ needs. Since you control all its processes, you get to monitor all your customer and employee activities.

Enterprise Help Desk 

Large organizations often struggle to meet customers’ needs and cater to their thousands of employees. Even employees need a service desk that helps them with issues like poor connection or forgotten passwords.

Enterprise help desks like Salesforce Service Cloud provide support not just for your customers but for your employees as well. This type of software is designed solely to cater to the needs of big organizations and help them with their support operations. It ensures that your teams and departments are getting technical support at the right time.

Open Source Help Desk

An open source help desk allows its user to access its source code and modify them. You can customize the software by editing its code to suit your company’s needs. Most open-source help desks like UVdesk and osTicket let you download their software and modify their code for free.

You would need a highly skilled developer or programmer to modify the underlying code and enhance the software to create a custom help desk system for your business. Usually, your vendor provides instructional guides or offers some technical assistance in exchange for a fee.

10 Important Features of Help Desk Software

Great User-Interface

Although it is expected for new tools and software to take some getting used to, some just come with an interface that confuses both your support operators and customers.

You must ensure that your help desk software has a good interface that your support teams find easy to use before you commit to it. After all, what use is a help desk if your support operators do not know how to use it?

For example, your support agent, Susan, has to attend to 10 customers in an hour, but she spends half the time contacting an administrator for help because she does not understand the help desk interface.

A good help desk has an intuitive interface that guides its users and makes it easy for support agents to give customers the help they need. You do not want your support staff to spend more time maneuvering the help desk software than they spend helping customers. 

Excellent Customer Support

The main reason you use help desk software in the first place is to support your customers and help them to solve their issues. A help desk is of no use to you if it does not allow you to provide customer support efficiently.

While you may want to assume that all help desk software provides tools for excellent customer support, that is not always the case. You have to ensure that your help desk software provides the support you need for your customers.

You can read reviews of their customers and people that have used the software to know what to expect and determine if it will provide you the support you need.

Some help desk software provide different levels of support based on your payment plan. You must research to gather information to determine if you would have to pay an extra fee to get your desired customer support.

Customization Options

Every organization has its logo and brand color code. You must choose a help desk that lets you customize the software to maintain the view of your brand across all platforms.

Customizable help desk software like Front allows you to modify your help desk and give your customers a feel of your brand. You get to personalize your help desk and give your users a better interface. 

You do not want to give your customers generic responses that discourage them and make them feel unimportant. You have to customize your answers to make them feel valued. 

Some help desks like Zoho Desk help you personalize your messages by acting as e-signature software and letting you use your signature as a footer.

With customizable help desks, you can sort through customer complaints faster by organizing them in tickets with labels. The help desk then sends these tickets to the appropriate support agent that attends to multiple issues at the same time.

Migration Options

It is common for businesses to find a help desk that serves them better and try to move from their old one. Migration is easier when your present help desk provides tools that help you move your data to the new help desk.

Consider a situation where your business wants to migrate to a new help desk. If your present help desk does not have a migration feature, you would have to start over with your new help desk. You would have to customize from scratch and gather customer data repeatedly.

Migration options help you to save time and preserve data because all you have to do is move your old data to your new help desk and make a few changes.

Some help desk software like Freshdesk migrates for you, while some may provide tools like Stitch Data to do it for you.

Collaboration Features

Your help desk must allow your support teams to collaborate regardless of how many they are. It must have features that promote teamwork and communication among your support operators.

Customers are impatient, and you do not want to stress them. You must keep everyone involved in solving a particular customer issue informed about new developments. It should allow your support teams to communicate and solve customer issues privately.

Imagine that a customer has an issue and has reached out to your service desk, and a support agent attends to them and fixes the problem. But when they experience a similar situation the next day and reach out to your help desk, they must explain it to a different agent again. You lose customers because they feel you do not value them.

Your help desk must have collaboration features like saved conversations and notes that equip your support staff with information on how to help customers.

Data Analysis and Metrics

You must provide your customers with quality support. How do you know that your customers get the support they need if your help desk software does not measure it?

You need a help desk system that lets your customer rate and review their experience at your service desk. You can then use this information to know what you are doing well and what you need to improve.

Efficient help desk software does not just provide these data but makes them easy to understand. You get information like your support teams’ busiest hours that help you to plan and prevent mistakes.

You can track the most frequently asked questions and provide answers to them so that your customers can help themselves without any support agent. 

Social Media Presence

Social media is a valuable tool that you can use to provide support to your customers. You get to help your customers when they reach out to you on the platforms that are convenient for them.

You must ensure that your help desk software compiles all your customers’ messages, turns them into tickets, and then send them to your support teams. This improves customer communication and makes it easy for you to attend to your customers on all social media platforms. 

An efficient help desk will allow you to track your customers online and know what they say about you. Not only do you get to help customers that send you messages for support, but you also get to provide support to the ones that tag you or just mention the name of your company.

Third-Party Integrations

The more features your help desk system has, the easier it is for you to provide your customers with quality support. What better way to do this than integrating it with other tools and software?

Most help desk software integrates with third-party tools like CRM software to equip you with all you need to give your customers quality support. You must ensure that your help desk system has the integration feature so that you can combine different tools and give your customers the best support service.

With integrated software, you can turn your help desk system into a command center where you attend to all customer service requests. It helps you solve your customers’ issues on time as you spend less time switching between applications.

An integrated help desk helps you easily control all support operations under a single interface and transfer data between applications. You can store data at once and share it with all the integrated parties.

Self-Service Feature

Most businesses do not have support operators working round the clock. How do they attend to their customers and provide constant support for them? 

Your help desk should have a self-service feature that allows you to provide a knowledge base for your customers to help themselves. This gives your customers a sense of control and guides them on how to solve their issues.

A knowledge base should include information on Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and troubleshooting guides that help your customers solve their problems without a support agent. 

You could provide a video tutorial by using video capture software to show a step-by-step process of how to solve a particular issue.

Not only does a knowledge base help your customers, but it also helps your support team. It gives them information about your products and services that they need to have to help customers solve their issues.

Automated Ticket Management

Ticketing and ticket management are one of the main features of help desk software, so you must choose one that does it well. 

A good help desk software has a fast and efficient email-to-ticket conversion. It must also assign the tickets it has created to the appropriate support agents that deal with such issues. 

Help desk software like Avatar Dialler helps you to assign, sort, and prioritize tickets, allowing you to provide good customer support.

You must ensure that your help desk prioritizes your tickets based on their urgency because you need to solve issues with more severity first. You do not want to leave a severe problem like a breached password unattended just to attend to a customer who does not know where to find their search history.

Support agents should also be able to track the progress of tickets assigned to them. You could use tags like “Open” or “Pending” to monitor your tickets and ensure that you do not leave any issue unattended. 

In Conclusion

Regardless of size, every business requires an effective help desk system. You must ensure you do not leave your customers hanging when they require support service because you must satisfy them.

Customers come to your help desk when they need assistance or have problems, and you must ensure that the services you provide make them feel better rather than worsen the situation. An effective help desk with the necessary features assists you in providing customer service and, as a result, keeps your customers coming back to buy your products and services.

You must select help desk software that meets the needs of both your customers and your support teams. Your help desk software must improve your support system and provide your support staff and service operators with the tools required to provide quality customer service. Here’s a list of some of the best help desk solutions to consider.