How To Setup A Help Desk The Right Way
When a company decides to use a help desk it means only one thing, they’ve grown big enough that they need all the help they might get. Help desk solutions are made to support all kinds of processes but all desk solutions come with one requirement. They need to be configured correctly to work their best.
Hence why we decided to cover the process itself. Word of warning before we start, there’s a lot to cover and many things to take into account. Thus, we suggest that you grab a pen, a piece of paper, and start putting some notes down. Let’s get started!
What Is A Help Desk Software
We’ll start our article with a short introduction to help desk software. To put it briefly, a help desk system is a platform that will allow you to manage incoming customer complaints / questions / suggestions from across multiple channels in one convenient place. These incoming requests are usually called tickets. Typically, the tool will allow you to collect, distribute, close, open, and prioritize said tickets to maintain order. Outside of ticket management, most systems include the following types of features:
● Automations
● Shared Inbox
● SLA Management
● Live Chat
● Omnichannel Communications
● Knowledge Base / Forums
● Analytics & Reporting
Now keep in mind that this isn’t the definitive list and some systems have these features under a different name. Be sure to contact your vendor if you have any questions about the feature set of your selected platform.
Setting Up A Help Desk — Where To Begin?
Regardless of whether your company used a help desk solution in the past or not, your number one task is to compile a list of problems you’d like to solve by implementing a help desk system. If you don’t know what issues you need to address but still want to take full advantage of the tool, we suggest that you start asking yourself the following:
● what potential troubles you will have in the future;
● what your customers say about you, about your service;
● and what your agents have to tell;
Once you’ve learned about these, you need to take a closer look at your current customer support channels and see what issues stick out the most. If you don’t know where to look, then think about your currently used channels, what your customers want to hear from you, how large is the support team, and what is your most asked customer question.
You can also do a short internal survey to find out if your team needs an internal messaging system, what channels they find difficult to manage, etc. Knowing answers to these questions will help you decide what tool you really need, as well as what bottlenecks your current support system.
Help Desk Setup Checklist
Now that you’ve learned where and how to gather necessary data, it is time you learn about the help desk setup checklist. It will not only help you configure everything correctly but will make sure all your corners are well covered.
Check Your Channel Support
And the first thing you need to check is all your incoming support channel needs. These are your sources of tickets and this where your customers will be going to for support requests. Here’s how the algorithm looks like:
1. Mailing
The first thing you need to do is to connect your main support email address. It will be responsible for receiving notifications within the system, as well as a tool to see replies to tickets;
2. Service Portal
A service portal is the next thing you need to take care of. You need to set up a custom web resource where all your customers will be gathering data about your products;
3. Live Chat
The third important pillar is the live chat functionality. If the help desk of choice supports it, we suggest that you place a live chat widget on the most visited pages on your website.
4. Other Channels
And the last thing is social media platforms, widgets, and APIs. Setup these to gain the maximum amount of data.
Setup Your Workflow
Next on the list is your workflow setup process. This one is needed to maximize output and minimize delays and poor quality service. Here’s what you have to do:
1. Contact Forms
Create a contact form using both standard and custom fields to provide the most amount of info;
2. Custom Statuses
Create statuses that will help you determine and streamline the ticket approval and verification process;
3. Automation Rules
If available, create automation rules to send conditional replies in chats, subscription messages, and other customer-related services. Also create rules to organize assignments, notifications, and urgent matters.
4. Customize Emails
As the name implies, unify and customize your email templates.
Ticket Management
And the last part of the help desk setup process is ticket management. This is the most important aspect of your help desk system. Thus, make sure it operates as accurately as a mechanical clock.
1. Reports And Queues
To maximize efficiency, set up all the necessary reports and queues you might need upfront. Once done, share them with your team to use as a reference point.
2. Canned Responses
Create a canned response to a common problem so that your team can focus on things that are more complex.
3. Knowledge Base
Fill out your knowledge base with solutions, FAQs, and suggestions so that you can redirect your customers. This will prove to be invaluable if a large volume of people asks the same questions.
Extra Settings To Take Care Of
Now that you’ve setup up the core features, you can take a look at these extra features you might want to enable. They aren’t crucial to the success of your company but they are nice to have, especially considering that other companies use them as well.
1. Single Sign-On
Streamline account access across your entire organization;
2. Business Hours
Set up business hours so that your customers will know when you will be available;
3. SLAs
Create and determine your service level agreements to avoid unmet expectations;
4. Satisfaction Rates
Enable and set up satisfaction rate so that your customers can point out areas where you lack polish;
5. Integrations
Check if any of your third-party apps support your help desk of choice to unify your workflow even further.
Launch & Test
So there’s that, if you configured everything mentioned above, you are pretty much ready for launch. The last thing you need to do is to test whether the features work the way you want them to. Once you have setup your help desk, you might want to import tickets or emails from your old system. This way the support team will be able to continue working on the support cases that are in progress, as well as deliver consistent support with all the historical data at their disposal.
