Everyone knows that help desk software empowers agents with a wide range of collaborative features. Studies have shown that as much as 88% expect a response within an hour. Hence, help desk software is essential for businesses now more than ever. Eventually, the goal of every business is to keep the customer satisfied so that they won’t leave.

Setting up high customer satisfaction targets isn’t enough. You must constantly strive to excel at customer service. Start with asking yourself:

• Are you proud of your customer service?
• Are your customers always satisfied?
• Do you always have happy customers?
• Are your agents overloaded with piles of tickets every day?

If your answers to these questions are a “No,” it is high time you revamp your help desk software features. An ideal ticketing system with advanced features eliminates redundancy of work and efforts on the part of agents. Having every feature under one help desk will drastically improve your support efficiency. Not only that, but it also helps customers effectively and promptly. It helps you serve an exceptional customer service experience!

What is an Exceptional Customer Support

(Source)

While flying the JetBlue airline, a passenger named Paul Brown casually tweeted about how he didn’t get a chance to grab his Starbucks coffee as he was at the smaller terminal of the airport. To his surprise, JetBlue customer service reps delivered a Starbucks venti mocha to his seat on the plane. Brown was elated with this experience.

It is one of the most excellent examples that other brands can learn from. The key takeaway? Customers don’t always need large gestures. Mr. Brown will surely be a loyal customer for the rest of his life. Plus, the tweets will do their work for years to come. Good customer service will keep your brand on top of your customer’s minds. Believe it or not, it is the simple things that count and produce loyal, happy customers.

It is also important to note that a lot of things go behind making a customer happy. For example, to serve this experience to Mr. Brown, the JetBlue customer support team would have gone through many different things. Firstly they would have had their social media channel in place with a unified interface (or an omnichannel interface). The customer support team was proactive in responding to the problem as quickly as possible. It was only possible because they had the data and information about their customer (Mr. Brown) on-hands.

Turn your customers into loyal customers like Mr. Brown here.

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Help Desk Software Features to Ensure Customer-Centric Approach

You would think that it took so many help desk software features to fulfill one customer’s demand. That’s correct! But once you achieve the maximum customer satisfaction, they’re going to be with you for the rest of the time. That sounds like a good deal to me.

So, the question goes: what are the features of a good ticketing system, and how will they benefit your business? Without further delay, let’s jump into it and find out:

1. Ticket Management Features

Ticket mismanagement is the most common problem for businesses. Especially if you’re still hung up on conventional manual processes. You may lose multiple queries, maintain a streamlined workflow and even miss/forget to update your customers about their ticket resolution journey.

Robust help desk software features can solve this problem indefinitely. With a shared team inbox, process customer requests, manage tickets, streamline your workflow and notify your customers alongside. Some must-have ticketing features are mentioned below:

Help desk software features that you need for ticketing:

• Email to ticket conversion
• Automatic ticket assignment
• Shared inbox with shared access
• Chat and comment within the tickets
• Ticket notifications
• Auto-responders or notifications
• Service level agreements management
• Collision detection
• Unified interface for a single query
• Robust data management to save customer history

2. Collaboration Features

The foundation of any help desk depends on the efficient management of its customer service and how collaborative its features are. Collaborative help desk software features are critical to your help desk software. Team collaboration is a must in building customer-intimate culture. A collaborative interface will empower your overall support. Let’s have a look at various collaborative features in detail:

A. Shared Inbox
A shared inbox is something that each of your support reps would have access to. This way, they would know all the incoming queries and could collaboratively work on them. Through a shared inbox, your agents can comment/chat within the tickets.

B. Collision Detection
Let your agents view potential ticket collisions. An ideal ticketing software would have it sorted. It saves unnecessary communication between agents and promises a standardized experience to the customers.

C. Merge Similar Tickets
Combine similar tickets and send the progress of tickets all together in one go. It would save hours of answering repetitive queries.

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3. SLA Management

Service level agreements define the level of service you expect from a vendor, laying out the metrics by which your services are measured. It also includes the remedies and penalties that would be charged when the service levels are not achieved. It is a critical component of any business trying to ace and provide better customer support. It includes:

A. Simplified SLA Target Creation
You can create targets for the entire workflow like time taken for first response, time taken for ticket assignment, response time, ticket closing time, etc.

B. Lifecycle Tracking
Keep tracking the lifecycle of your tickets. Keep track of the deadlines based on elapsed time, request categories, minimum response time, first-time response, etc.

C. Prevent Potential Breaches
The primary reason why service level agreement is the most useful help desk software feature is that you can predict potential breaches and prevent them. You can define automated escalation actions for each and every commitment. You can also notify the right team member to get the tickets resolved in time.

D. Custom Alerts and Notifications
Set visual alerts and notifications to ensure that those problematic tickets get more attention as the SLA breach time approaches.

E. Measure SLA Performance
Monitor the SLA performances and set more vital targets to deliver a refined and thorough customer service experience.

4. Self-Service Features

It becomes challenging when you do not have support employees working round the clock. For example, at the time of a sale or during the holiday/festival season, an eCommerce business is likely to receive several repetitive queries.

I am sure you do not want your support representatives to get overburdened during their work hours. Self-service allows your customers to gain autonomy and solve their queries themselves.

Self-service is one of the most popular help desk software features adopted widely across industries, countries, and business units.

A survey states that by 2022, around 85% of customer service interaction would be through the self-service medium.

Gartner

There are multiple benefits of having self-service features:

• Boosts social engagement
• Support cost reduction
• Builds a social presence
• Increases customer satisfaction & success

Provide detailed troubleshooting steps for common roadblocks faced by customers and share them with every user. You can add content in the format your customer wants. It can be:

• Knowledge base
• Video tutorials
• FAQs
• Personalized recommendations

Building a self-service strategy also includes building, making your website navigation friendly. You can include advanced search algorithms to ensure that the customers find what they’re looking for. You can also have advanced categorization and sub-categorization features.

Adopt a self-service tool for your organization? We have the perfect solution that caters to all your needs in a personalized manner.

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5. Canned Responses

Tools like canned responses, snippets, email templates, etc., can save you a lot of time. It allows you to pre-create and composes messages for generalized responses.

A. Snippets
You can trigger snippets by entering a code. They are used explicitly in writing an introduction and concluding messages. But using snippets, you can help your support agents during live chats and save them from writing the same thing again and again.

B. Email Templates
Email templates are pre-written messages. The customer support agents work on way too many common issues every day. Templates will help your agents save time as they won’t have to rewrite all details of an email.

6. Omnichannel Communication

Customers hate to wait on calls, being dodged and contacting brands repeatedly to resolve the simplest queries.

Businesses with only a single communication channel usually face this problem.

Omnichannel: An Important Help Desk Software Feature

Brands try to do everything they can to make themselves widely available to customers. But, many still struggle to implement a service strategy that truly meets customers to their specific terms.

73% of customers say that when the brand values their time, that is a good customer experience.

Using an omnichannel strategy brings you closer to your customers and helps you get a deeper context of their problems. Plus, an omnichannel response is a help desk software feature that has become the new benchmark for serving exceptional experiences.

Read more: Omnichannel Customer Support Software: A Key to Ace Customer Support

7. Automation Features

Automation is another help desk software feature. It will be regardless of the communication channel used by the customer. If you integrate automation in your helpdesk, you can ensure an immediate response.

If you use automated chatbots, they will respond to customers even when your team is not online. For example, your helpdesk can directly send a personalized response to customers whenever they register their queries by automating your incoming ticket process. They’ll hold the customer queries until your agents take over.

Since we’re talking about automation, did you know DeskXpand is now available with automated ticketing features? No? Check us out!

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8. Analytics and Reporting Features

Setting individual as well as team goals based on data will help you improve accountability. Set up a dashboard to track the team performances and daily goals. Agents will know how quickly they must answer.

Serve a Responsive CX and Monitor Agent Performance

Customer service managers can leverage analytics to boost employee morale and motivate them to reach expected numbers. They can track their team’s performance and help them if they’re stuck somewhere. This way managers can help boost agent morale and motivate them to reach expected targets.

Here are the three key metrics that you must measure:

A. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
The customer lifetime value is a measure of profits that your company makes from a given customer. It can be calculated by adding up a total revenue earned from a customer and subtracting the initial cost from that total amount.

B. Churn Rate
Customer churn rate helps you identify why customers are leaving. The churn rate simply states the number of customers that stop doing business with a company. This metric is calculated as a percentage of customers your company has lost over a given time. If the number is higher, you need to determine the reasons and change your strategies to reduce it.

C. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The net promoter score measures your customers’ willingness to recommend your company’s products and services to others. NPS helps you understand whether your customers are satisfied with your products or not. It is a good indicator of how loyal your customer base is.

The NPS is a 10-point scale calculated based on the response to the question: “how likely are you to recommend < brand name > to your friends or family?” or even a set of questions. However, the former question is largely popular.

9. Social Media Presence

Social Media presence is an obvious way to improve your customer experience. Social media channel is a breeding ground for both customer service wins and fails. Plenty of companies successfully communicate with their audiences and capitalize on Facebook, Yelp, etc.

According to a study by Conversocial, only 3% of tweets looking for help tagged the company. That means an incredible 97% of Twitter users could be tweeting good or bad things about your brand without you even knowing it! Yikes.

You can find mentions of your brands even if you’re not tagged. You can do this by looking up your company name in the Twitter search box.

Customers of the digital era are likely to be discussing their needs on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You can monitor your direct and indirect brand mentions and buzzwords in your industry.

Build Your Customer Strategy with DeskXpand

Thankfully, technology has made it easier for businesses to improve customer responsiveness through help desk software features. If you’re looking to manage your online reputation, you need to identify at-risk customers, make your support customer-intimate, and improve customer responsiveness; DeskXpand would do you well.

DeskXpand is an automated, omnichannel customer service software that helps companies deliver a cohesive and flexible customer experience across various channels. We are ISO27001 certified customer support solution providers with 14+ years of industry experience. We aim to help brands achieve complete visibility and a high-resolution rate through flexible help desk software features.

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https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/must-have-features-of-a-good-ticketing-system/