How To Improve Customer Service With Helpdesk Automations
No matter the industry, region or product — the true goal of all customer support teams is not just to provide assistance when a customer reaches out, but to deliver moments of ‘wow’ to each customer. However, as the importance of great support grows, so does its complexity. Customers can now reach out through emails, calls or live-chat, follow-up on social media, leave reviews on public forums and they expect regular updates to keep track of their issue.
That’s why many companies, from small businesses to global enterprises, use a ticketing or help desk solution to improve customer service. These tools make it easier for support teams to streamline all conversations across channels, keep track of user requests and ensure that they provide effective solutions to customer issues. But helpdesk automation empowers your team to do much more.
What Is Helpdesk Automation?
Helpdesk automation simplifies manual effort and eliminates repetitive tasks, thereby allowing customer service teams to focus on delivering speedy, high-quality support and building relationships with customers. Using automations, you can create workflows to be automatically triggered by specific ticketing actions. So instead of having to manually perform routine tasks such as assigning tickets or escalating issues, helpdesk automations will ensure that they run by default when pre-determined trigger events are encountered.
Why Do You Need Helpdesk Automation?
Customer Support is often a function of multiple tasks, and in some cases involve multiple teams. For instance, a ‘return and refund’ request might be raised as a single ticket, but will actually require action from a couple of different teams — the finance team to process the refund, the logistics team for pick-up of the returned item and the support agent to communicate with the customer, coordinate multiple activities, and collect customer feedback.
With helpdesk automations, common tickets with predictable next steps — like Refund, Return, etc — can be converted into workflow automations that perform multiple actions on a ticket with a single click.
Growing teams can also benefit from helpdesk automations. As your organization grows, you’ll probably find that the way you are currently managing your customer service isn’t scalable, and your team is spending too much time on manual tasks instead of actually solving customer issues. This monotony not only affects team morale and productivity, it also ends up impacting the quality of your customer service. Automations remove the burden of these tasks from your team and allow them to focus on ways to improve the overall customer experience.
Benefits of Using Helpdesk Automations
Now that we know why automation is necessary, let’s look at the scenarios where helpdesk automations can come in handy:
Sort and prioritize tickets automatically
One of the fundamental workflows set up on a help desk is to make sure every incoming ticket gets automatically categorized, prioritized and assigned to the right agent or group based on factors that you define. The tickets can be prioritized by the type of customer – where they’re writing from, what language they’re using, or even based on what the subject says. This way you can make sure the most important tickets are answered first.
Respond to critical issues faster
Prepare for critical events — such as website downtime or incomplete transactions — that require an immediate response, by setting up rules to alert the right people on your team, whenever there is certain activity on your help desk. By automatically triggering a chain of actions as an initial response, you notify your customers that you are aware of the issue and taking necessary steps, while also getting more time to understand and resolve the issue.
Keep pace with increasing ticket volume
Automation can greatly reduce the time spent on processing each ticket when there is a high number of complaints. Especially during times of high traffic, like during a sale or holiday season, your support team should be more focused on solving customer issues rather than time-consuming mundane tasks that will slow them down.
Handle more with fewer agents
There might be times when your support requests suddenly spike, or grow faster than you can hire new agents. When good customer support representatives are hard to come by, automations can ease the burden. By setting up the right number of rules you can manage agent workload and avoid a drop in ticket completion rates.
Keep track of different types of issues
Automations can also help to categorize and create as many workflows as required when your customer support team has to deal with different types and levels of issues requiring the involvement of multiple teams.
Build customer relationships
One of the most important ways to improve customer service is by actually spending time engaging with your customers. Automation frees up a lot of time for your support team so they can focus more on delighting customers and building brand loyalty. Teams can use automation to follow up with customers regularly through automating notifications and ticket status updates.
Freshdesk Automations That Make Customer Support a Breeze
Freshdesk’s powerful automations stamp out drab, repetitive tasks and empower support teams to effectively serve customers. Let’s look at the categories of automation rules you can create with Freshdesk.
Rules that run on ticket creation: You can set up rules that automatically identify new tickets by the type and source of the ticket, tags, categorizes and infers the importance of each ticket based on your requirements, and makes sure the ticket is assigned to the right agent. You can decide whether these ticket assignments should be based on the agent’s workload, skill set or by the usual round-robin format based on your requirements.
Rules that run on time triggers: These automation rules make it easier for you to monitor SLA management by periodically checking the state of your help desk and setting up actions that are automatically triggered by time-based events. For example, you can set up rules to automatically escalate tickets if a customer has been waiting for a response, say for more than the prescribed 12 hours, and make sure that they receive an update.
Rules that run on ticket updates: If you need to keep a close eye on certain tickets, for instance – a complaint from a high-value client, you can create specific automation rules that watch out for these events and alerts you if there is any ticket activity you need to immediately address. Thanks to these event-triggered automation rules, Freshdesk will help you prioritize your workload and ensure that no critical tickets get ignored.
Scenarios: You can create specific rules for certain scenarios that require multiple actions from several teams. They let you trigger all of the necessary tasks with a single click, right from within a ticket. So, every time there’s a ticket about a common process like “Refund”, all you have to do is execute that rules for the scenario “Refund” and the ticket is tagged, assigned and marked as “Processing Refund” without you lifting a finger.
Thank you detector: One of the most common reasons for miscalculating key metrics like Ticket Resolution Time and First Call Resolution, is that tickets are re-opened on your helpdesk when customers leave a reply of appreciation or acknowledgment of a resolved issue. So even though your ticket is actually resolved, they continue to be recorded as open tickets. To avoid this, the ‘Thank You Detector’ – powered by our AI engine ‘Freddy’ – identifies the intent of the last reply from the conversation to determine the status of the ticket. For example, if the last reply contains phrases like “Gracias”, “Brilliant have a good day”, the ticket will not be re-opened.
The Bottom Line
Today, delighting customers means more than just finding ways to improve customer service. Businesses today need to focus on bettering their overall customer experience — from the first interaction, to purchase and finally in support. And this needs to be the key priority for all customer-facing employees.
As the tickets continue to flow into your help desk inbox, automation is crucial in keeping ticket assignment and prioritization away from the support team’s bucket. The bigger picture here is to maintain a consistent experience for all customers which is only possible when agents and admins have the time to attend judiciously to every issue that comes in.
Customer demands are moving at a pace you can keep up with only when you empower your help desk with smart and powerful automations. All these tied in together results in an enhanced experience for every customer.
