Help Desk Software

Best help desk software for 2023

The help desk you choose can have a tremendous impact on your overall customer experience. Here’s what you need to know when looking for new help desk software in 2023.

What is help desk software?

Help desk tools, in general, provide online businesses of all shapes and sizes with the ability to better support customers. Instead of having to manually sort through a shared mailbox or copy-paste the same replies every time, help desk software makes it easier to respond to customers at scale while maintaining a personal, human touch. With powerful features that minimize repetitive work and maximize productivity, support teams can be more effective with their time when using help desk tools to manage their customer service inquiries.

Not all help desks are created equal

There are hundreds of help desk solutions to choose from, but most just support one or two customer service channels (e.g. email and live chat). Choosing a multichannel help desk system that supports all the channels your business currently operates on centralizes customer communication and makes it easier for your support team to respond to customer inquiries in a quick and personal customer manner. If you provide customer service on phone, email, chat, or messaging channels be sure to find a help desk solution that can support those channels from one system.

Otherwise, your agents will have to continuously jump between different systems to respond to customers wasting valuable time while your data becomes more scattered and your customers are left waiting.

Who should use a help desk system?

Any business that has the need to communicate directly with customers could benefit from using a help desk system, especially those receiving a high number of inbound customer inquiries. These businesses could span from a typical ecommerce business to travel agencies to software companies and beyond. Historically, help desks have been primarily used by the customer service or IT teams within an organization, but sales teams may have the need to use it too depending on your business model.

How do you use a help desk system?

Imagine you run an online shop that sells running shoes. You might receive a lot of emails, chats, messages, etc., from customers about a variety of different topics from shipping times to product-specific questions or perhaps returns. Some might be more urgent, requiring immediate attention, while others are more common and can be answered with a standardized reply also known as a canned response.

Instead of having to manually sort through a shared inbox to prioritize the most important inquiries – a help desk system can do that work for you. Plus, help desk software makes it easy to save common replies as templates so you can answer customer inquiries with just a couple of clicks. In fact, help desks offer many powerful features that can help support teams automatically prioritize and categorize customer inquiries. This ensures the most important questions always get answered by the best-suited available agent as quickly and as accurately as possible.

? From small businesses to enterprise organizations, brands who want to prioritize their customer service experience and create stronger bonds with customers should use a multichannel help desk.

How does multichannel help desk software improve a business?

The customer service experience is a crucial aspect of any business. The way you treat your customers and the experience you provide them with directly influences how loyal they will be and how much money they will spend on your products or services. Fail to meet customer expectations and customers will take their business elsewhere. Rise to the occasion and make a customer for life.

A great customer service experience starts with a great agent experience. Customer service can be repetitive, stressful, and tedious by nature. If the tools agents are using also require lots of manual workflows, it makes keeping up with customers and providing great customer service experiences that much harder. Additionally, support teams forced to work in inflexible, dated systems can expect their agent performance, satisfaction, and motivation to suffer. This ultimately impacts the end customer’s experience too because not only could they be met with a frustrated agent, but their inquiry will take longer to get resolved as well.

By empowering support teams with better tools like multichannel help desk software, agents and managers can get more accomplished in less time, freeing up agents’ time to focus on the customer instead of the system.

See how Dixa’s multichannel help desk software compares to Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Kustomer.

Top features of a help desk

Intelligent routing for customer service software

Automated Routing

Never sort through an inbox again. Automatically prioritize and route inquiries to the right team members based on rules you set.

Improvement

Reporting & Analytics

Track your team’s performance with real-time and historical analytics. See daily stats in your dashboard and display on screens.

Agent performance

Agent Prioritization

Ensure the best suited available agent gets offered the conversation first by assigning agents a priority within each queue.

Excellence

Queue Prioritization

Manage your workload across channels with ease by giving each queue a priority.

Teamwork

Collaboration

Tackle issues as a team and transfer inquiries to other team members with a click.

Quick response

Save your most used replies and insert them with a click into any conversation instantly.

How should you decide what help desk software to use?

Although there are several free help desk software providers out there, investing in your customer experience by finding the best help desk software for your business will benefit you greatly and will provide you with the greatest ROI. Finding free help desk software or cheap help desk software may seem okay initially but will eventually catch up to you. Free or cheap help desk software will most likely offer a subpar user experience resulting in a subpar customer experience. Using inadequate help desk software will always leave room for your competitors to be better than you when it comes to your customer service experience.

When looking for new help desk software, it’s important that you first identify what requirements are essential to function within the rest of your organization’s tech ecosystem. In other words, identify the things that you can and cannot change or compromise on in terms of your setup. After you have identified your “need to have” features and functionality, begin to define what kind of experience you want to provide your customers with as well as your agents. Finally, get an idea of what your budget is but keep in mind that this is an investment that if executed will make your business more profitable in the long run.

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