Running a frictionless helpdesk is now a basic requirement for most firms, particularly those in technology or service-based fields. Customers now expect to be treated as individuals, to be kept up to date with any problems they have raised and for companies to tailor product solutions to their unique circumstances. With so much expectation, it’s never been more important to select the right helpdesk software for your business and for even greater control forward thinking organisations are looking to directly sync helpdesk tickets with their Salesforce CRM.
What Does A Best In Class Helpdesk Look Like?
The growth of helpdesks and their capabilities over the last 10 years has been remarkable. We are now accustomed to helpdesk information being universally accessible across the organisational structure, as well as third party software being created to help link separate systems together. If you’re looking for a new helpdesk vendor or even a bespoke Salesforce helpdesk solution look for the following features:
Customer Self-Service – People at work are busy and shouldn’t always have to rely on someone else to answer the phone or respond over chat. Instead customers should be able to swiftly log any issues they may have immediately in some form of self-service ticketing system. Upon entering their tickets customers should receive a confirmation message and unique ID, so they can follow up on their specific ticket at a later date.
Skill Level Matching – Important for the productivity levels of your helpdesk is the ability to be able to direct tickets to the helpdesk team member most qualified to act. For instance, you may want to direct complex helpdesk tickets to the employees with the most experience or certain IT tickets to employees with specialist programming experience. Assignment rules should be created directly within your helpdesk software of choice or if information is being stored centrally then you should be able to route helpdesk tickets within Salesforce.
An Open Knowledge Base – It’s surprising what people can do when we give them the tools to succeed. Any Salesforce helpdesk solution should come with a regularly updated knowledge base, which is applicable for both customers and employees. All learnings and guides should be packaged in an easy to digest format which is broken down into bitesize sections.
Task Automation – Where possible your helpdesk software should look to automate repeat tasks and reduce the time needed for employees to complete basic requirements. Time is precious and by using automation you can swiftly put more time in the hands of your employees, as well as improve their job satisfaction. You should also be sure that your helpdesk solution can integrate with other business platforms seamlessly. For example, if you can sync your helpdesk tickets with Salesforce this will then reduce the need for someone to manually update your CRM records each time a helpdesk ticket updates.
Collating Customer Feedback – The helpdesk experience shouldn’t just end once a ticket has been processed. Follow-up messages are crucial tools for creating feedback loops and seeing what useful information customers have on the overall service. Use follow-up messages to ask customers what they feel could be improved for next time and ask them to rate the overall service. Scoring leads, tickets and customer responses is crucial to providing benchmark scoring metrics that your organisation can seek to improve upon. All the information collated can be used to enhance staff training, company processes and the helpdesk software interface.
Defining Your Helpdesk Requirements
Each company will have different requirements for their helpdesk solutions however it’s important to document what yours are before you begin researching the available software. For instance, are you most interested in:
- Operating a database driven helpdesk, so that all system information is backed up
- Utilising a client facing web-interface to enable self-submission ticketing
- Linking your helpdesk with third-party software like Salesforce; and enabling staff to create helpdesk tickets in Salesforce
- Making sure that your helpdesk has branding capabilities, helpdesks can get confusing when they take customers to a different site with a different look & feel
- Processing helpdesk tickets efficiently and in the timeliest way possible
As you can see, there are lots of consideration to think about when selecting a Salesforce helpdesk solution or any helpdesk software for that matter. We believe in carefully constructing a wishlist for the functionality you require and picking software based on reputation and a competitive feature set.
What About Ortoo?
At Ortoo we build 5* rated productivity apps for Salesforce. Our Q-assign application can be used to sync helpdesk tickets with Salesforce, as well as a whole bundle of other possibilities. Simply put, if you have a helpdesk service and you feel like it’s not integrated with Salesforce then we can help. Explore all the features Q-assign has to offer on our service page.
