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Is Your Helpdesk Actually Helpful? There’s A Better Way To Manage Customer Relationships

Ultimately, small businesses are more empowered with the use of an integrated platform that manages sales, marketing and service automation.

Managing customer relationships from pre- to post-sale is commonplace. But the question is: How well are you managing every customer interaction?

As your company grows it’s important to leverage the right tools such as email, live chat, social media, phone calls, etc. to keep track of every moving piece and avoid data leaks. This ensures each customer’s journey is hassle-free and seamless.

To do this, you’ll need a powerful customer support (i.e. ticketing) platform to centralize all of the conversations you have with customers. Sure, you can manage all of these things individually, but as your business scales so will the problems associated with managing a ton of customer data.

Also, there is often a need to maintain human and continuous interactions while your support reps communicate with the customers. Here, helpdesk ticketing tools acts as a bridge.

 

Productive and personalized customer experiences

There are many stand alone helpdesk ticketing software tools that enable automated responses and handle tickets, but when you run a business that focuses on contact management, campaign creation and sales enablement as well, often there’s a need for a robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The idea is simple: automates sales, marketing and service using a single tool.

 

Photo: © opolja, YFS Magazine
Photo: © opolja, YFS Magazine

This thought gave rise to helpdesk software integrated with CRM.

Some cloud-based CRM tools have started offering helpdesk features along with their marketing automation software. 

This results in a spike in productivity as tickets can be created from any contact point.

This is helpful if  you want to create automate workflows along with predetermined responses to common questions once a ticket is raised by a customer; creating quick and subsequent resolution.

Automated helpdesk software moves your support team out of the drill of running through customer support tickets, categorizing and prioritizing them based on the query, importance and urgency. This helps improve back office efficiency and lessens human error.

If you’re responding to individual customer requests without a support system in place, you’re wasting time and money.

 

Benefits of CRM helpdesk tools

 

1. Categorize and prioritize

Ensure your helpdesk tool offers a dashboard that enables you to categorize, prioritize and assign customer tickets to the right support reps within your team automatically. The goal is to route specific tickets to the right person before they even log-in. A system that uses labels to organize customer tickets into categories (like pro, urgent, free, enterprise, etc.) can also make requests more searchable and streamline the customer support process.

 

2. Ensure support is available 24/7

It’s physically impossible to stay awake 24/7 and field every customer request in a timely manner. This is where automated ticketing software does the heavy lifting. A customer may send a reply to an open ticket at odd hours, and a helpdesk solution can send automated responses to ease peace of mind and share next steps to common questions.

 

3. Spend less time on email composing replies

Typing the same replies again and again drains the energy out of your team and creates an unproductive workflow. With predetermined responses, the right answer is at their fingertips. Ticketing software enables you to customize a replay based on the ticket type; which often leads to faster resolution.

 

4. Offer a smoother support journey

Helpdesk and ticketing software helps you mange the toughest workflows with rules and keywords. Based on priority, send or skip automated notifications. Also, you can alert your support team whenever there’s a query from a high-profile customer.

 

You may perceive ticketing as running the support on an auto pilot mode. However, it has its share of human interaction that is necessary to deliver a great customer experience.

Ultimately, small businesses are more empowered with the use of an integrated platform that manages sales, marketing and service automation. This type of solutions helps to grow interactions with your existing and prospective customers, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows, and provide a personalized and productive customer experience.

 

 

This article has been edited and condensed.


Sandeep Das is a passionate blogger sharing business tips on behalf of Agile CRM. He writes primarily on SEO, social media, CRM, marketing automation and covers the entire gamut of marketing. Connect with @njysandy on Twitter.

 

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