Should You Move from Email Support to Help Desk Software?

It’s extremely important for a company to have great customer support. As a startup, you take pride in this feature – it’s what differentiates you from the industry giants. You’re able to give your customers the individualized attention they need and get them back on the website or app fast. You even have relationships with your customers in order to learn what they want and better serve their needs.

When your customer satisfaction levels are at the maximum, and when your product itself has reached new heights, it’s time to take a more proactive approach. This means that their tickets will become innumerable, and much more complex. At this point, plain email support just isn’t enough anymore.

Here is everything you need to know to help you decide on a switch over.

Is it time for help desk software?

When you’ve got just a few emails to manage each day, one of the best options would be to choose an email support system. Just keep track of who’s handling what and make sure that each email gets dealt with accordingly.

Installing help desk software should be a no-brainer when you start getting 20, 30, or 50 emails a day. Here are the tell-tale signs you need to move on:

Go to your inbox to easily search through all of your support tickets. This means you’re less likely to miss anything, and it also makes your team more productive. You’ll be able to maintain a clear view of past sessions so that you can quickly prioritize and assign the best tickets first.

Being too consumed with your personal tasks can lead to customer complaints and concerns going unanswered. Your customer service team, yourself, and the customer should always be able to know what’s happening with a ticket.

“The first step to solving issues that stem from too many tickets is to create a feedback and support process. This helps your customers know they can ask questions and receive resolution quickly, rather than falling through the cracks.” According to Vinay Patankar, Marketing Specialist of Process ST.

If people are leaving your service because they don’t feel like their needs are being met, you need to fix this issue today.

Email doesn’t offer a ton of ways to organize your emails. You can’t create and manage groups, or work collaboratively on a single email. And what’s more, there are limited custom analytics for tracking engagement for each email.

With more people using your product, you’ll have more complaints. The good news is that you can prioritize bigger and more commonly-complained-about problems over smaller and less common ones.

What features do I need?

“Have you thought about how your team could improve their efficiency? Are they having a hard time with your email? Do you want to give them more organization and structure in order to make managing it easier, or do you actually need help desk software? We have options for you with help desk software that allows you to completely customize your workflow and how your clients interact with it.” Says Jeroen van Gils, CEO of LiFi.

Here are the things a help desk needs to get the job done

Help desks allow you to create, distribute, and manage all your customer service tickets. They can be customized to include fields you’re looking for and to make sure that all incoming questions are included in back-and-forth conversations. This is great if you have a lot of complex technical support needs and want everything included right away in the ticket. You’ll also be able to ask for screenshots, URLs, and relevant information from the get-go!

Assigning tickets is a standard part of any help desk. If it’s too difficult to assign tickets to different employees because there’s too much conversation over who handles which tickets, you might need this as a simpler solution.

Prioritizing. Some help desks let you prioritize the order of tickets that are worked on or put some on the back burner without actually closing them.

“A few digital product management platforms have detailed analytics, but most also provide analytics around user queries and updates. You can decide if you want past queries to be just searchable or if you want more in-depth analytics that give you insight into how your platform is being used.” According to Benjamin Stenson, CEO of Norsemen.

Sometimes, you might find that multiple workflows need to be established. Because of this, a tiered support desk may be necessary. If, on the other hand, your ticketing process is generally easier, then a basic support desk would suffice.

Which help desk software should I use?

The Help Desk is our proprietary software application that helps simplify and organize the workflows of many different departments.

We have the best customer service team in the industry. You can get real-time feedback about your queries and will know what’s being investigated more deeply, or anything else you need to know.

To optimize your workflow, consider the following availability and cost effectiveness:

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Zendesk

Pro: The ultimate website building platform. It’s easy to set up and has tons of advanced features, all of which are available to you. With our customer portal, all-screen accessibility, social media monitoring, and 350 plugins, it’s a must-have for your digital business.

Con: The downside of this plan is that you can’t duplicate or split tickets. This means that multiple reps can’t work on the same ticket at the same time.

Price:  Very expensive. It has a tiered pricing plan, but the lowest option at $5 per month doesn’t give you much. Gaining analytics comes at a cost, which is why we only offer access to them on our more expensive plans.

Help Scout

Pro is a new help desk email system. It’s simple to use, and has the organizational tools everyone needs. Plus, you can assign tickets straight from Inbox for easy communication internally.

Con: Its ticket system allows you to customize the experience for each customer while automatically categorizing their emails. There’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing fields and deciding what types of tickets are needed.

Price: The one thing that sets Midroll apart from other podcast hosts is their unique pricing options. There’s the free plan, a standard $20 option, or a premium $40 per month option.

Freshdesk

Pro: Free plan that includes the basics. You can choose from canned responses, workflows, phone integration and even basic analytics reports.

Con: The downside of this tool? It’s not as great for bigger companies that may need a more complicated workflow. The analytics reports aren’t super detailed or customizable, which makes it tough to really dig into why customers are complaining and what you’ve done wrong.

Price: Reasonable. It has 5-tier pricing, starting with a free plan going all the way up to a $70 plan per user per month.

Groove

Pro: Great customer service is important to us. Sometimes simple is better, which is why we’ve built an intuitive form builder that doesn’t require sign-in from your customers. We’ll walk you through each step of the way so you can focus on earning their business!

Con: Sharing is the key to good content. To get started, you can share a draft of an article and get feedback from your team members—and that’s it. If you exceed your allotted number of custom filters and workflows, it’ll automatically disable any unneeded ones to ensure you’re not spending unnecessary time tweaking them.

Price: Inexpensive. $15 per user per month.

Bonus: Proprofs Help Desk

Pro: Its features include an easy-to-use interface, chatbots to meet customer needs, smart reports to measure performance, and track the progress of your agents.

Con: The tool is not integrated with social media. You will not be able to track your social media messages, brand mentions, or even network share insights.

Price: Business owners can focus on creating value for their customers rather than worrying about keeping track of which plan they’re on. All plans come with free features, and the plans are priced at $10/agent/month, $15/agent/month, or $20/agent/month. The choice is yours.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use and quick way to manage and host your SaaS, then Zendesk is a great option. If you’re looking for a ticketing system that can handle more complicated products like enterprise software or websites, then Groove or Help Scout are great options. All of these solutions have free trials so that you can test them beforehand.

How do I get my company to buy help desk software?

You’re not just asking your employees to use a new system. You’re asking them to change many underlying systems. It’s important that you head off potential roadblocks and take proactive steps to make the transition as smooth as possible for your team, management, and customers.

Here’s how:

Inform all your potential customers of the changes that have been made to your services. Make sure you explain why these new changes will benefit them in the long run.

You need to make sure that no one still uses old ticketing systems by equipping your customer support team with all the necessary documentation. Work with your team to come up with the ideal ticketing system.

Help your management get a handle on customer service by using a ticketing system that lets them track how employees spend their time. They can also use the data to help optimize workflows and create better diagnostic tools for the future.

You can get help from your dev team if you think they’re the best ones to handle a bug or system update. You’ll need to have a clear understanding of when it is or isn’t the right time to hand issues over to them.

Set a system to scale

In order to maintain your reputation, you need to provide high-quality service and make everything seamless for your customers. When it comes to customer support, that means nothing will get left unobserved.

Are you starting to feel overwhelmed because there are no systems in place to help you scale? If so, it’s time to step up and create a plan. It will keep the system the same and allow you to focus on providing excellent customer support at any size.