The ideal features of an enterprise helpdesk

From email to helpdesk, businesses come a long way. As your business expands, so do the needs of your customers_—_you have to expand your support to social media, you need to be mindful of all the small changes you make to your automation rules, strengthen security, etc. When you’re using a system that works well for small businesses but isn’t designed for scale, it might fail to perform when faced with heavy data.   

To scale your support, you’ll need a system that’s robust. You need a tool that can handle the requirements that an enterprise customer support team has. In this article, we’ll take a look at the ideal features an enterprise helpdesk should have.

The ideal features of an enterprise helpdesk

#1 ability to scale

When you have a growing business, the first and foremost thing you need to look for in a helpdesk is— is it designed to scale? The features that help you scale are:

– Omnichannel solution: Since the digital customer today expects a brand to be present on multiple channels of communication like email, phone, chat, social, and the widget on your website, your helpdesk should have capabilities that let your team provide support on all these channels. Using a single tool to provide support on all the channels will help your team have a complete context of the customer’s issue. Your team can also view the past interactions the customer might have had with your brand and deliver better support.

Also, with customers reaching out from different channels, it might be hard for your admins to allot incoming requests accordingly. This is why you need a system that automatically routes incoming requests to agents based on their availability. It’s a great way to ensure that an agent who is on a call isn’t burdened with chats or tickets.

– Chatbot: Chatbots play great assistants to customer support agents and also improve the customer experience. You can let the bot answer basic how-to questions which take up most of your team’s time. By doing so, your team can focus on resolving complex issues.

– Sandbox: Once you’ve set up your helpdesk, you can’t take chances with changing rules and configurations. There might be things that break or affect other rules. This is why you need to have a sandbox account. A sandbox is a demo environment wherein you can safely test the changes you’d like to make to your helpdesk.

– Audit log: When you have a huge team, it’s hard to keep track of who makes changes on the helpdesk. Sometimes, an agent might delete an important automation rule and it might be impossible to trace the person responsible. But with the audit log, you can keep track of all the changes made on your helpdesk like updating an automation rule, deleting or adding contacts, and more.

– Marketplace: Often, you’ll need to integrate with other tools to extend the capabilities of your helpdesk. It’s important to ensure that you have a marketplace that supports a range of applications.

#2  Personalised support

With a growing customer base, it’s important for your team to maintain a personal touch with customers. This is why you need features that let your team personalize the support it provides.

– Portal customization: To make your support portal resonate with your brand’s identity, you need to be able to customize your support portal. Changing your portal’s look and feel to match it with your brand is something you should be able to do right from your helpdesk. Additionally, your helpdesk should let you fully customize your support portal with CSS customizations.

– Domain customization: As a company, you’d want your customers to reach out to you using a customizable URL than use the helpdesk’s domain. With your helpdesk you should be able to direct customers and agents to your support portal using your own custom URL.

– Ticket form customization: Every business has a set of data that it would like to collect from its customers. So, it’s important to have a helpdesk that lets you customize ticket forms.  Apart from having flexibility with ticket fields, you also get additional features like dynamic and dependent fields.

#3 advanced automations

When you manage a huge team, you will need advanced automations to streamline your workflows. More importantly, you need to make sure that things are running as smoothly as possible on your helpdesk. You should be able to automate routine tasks such as setting priorities, following up on tickets, and other operational tasks. This way, your team can utilize their time better and provide great support experiences for customers.

As an enterprise, it is important for you to react quickly to critical events. Your automations should let you set up rules to alert the right people on your team, whenever there is activity on your helpdesk that requires an immediate response. You can also automatically trigger a chain of actions as an initial response. For example, you can alert a manager if a customer sends in a bad satisfaction rating so that they can follow up immediately.  

Automatic ticket assignment

Allocating incoming tickets to individual agents can become a repetitive and time-consuming task. The following are three different ways in which you can automate the process of assigning tickets:   

– Load-balanced assignment: Define the number of tickets your team can handle at a time and ensure that no one is being overworked.

– Round robin assignment: Distribute work among your team in a circular fashion. This is a great way to make sure that each member of your team is contributing equally.

– Skill-based routing: Sometimes, to resolve some issues you need the expertise of some agents. Instead of manually allocating the ticket each time, you can directly route the ticket to the agent who is most equipped to resolve the issue. This way, your customers can quickly get their issue resolved.

#4 robust analytics

As a big business, you need advanced reporting capabilities to understand where you stand and plan your workflows accordingly. This is why your helpdesk should support robust analytics. Make sure your helpdesk is up-to-date with the industry trends.

– Team dashboards: With a dashboard, you can have a bird’s eye view of the happenings in your helpdesk. This is important because keeping an eye on real-time metrics will tell you if things are running smoothly. The dashboard also gives you a red signal when there’s a bottleneck before things start snowballing. The ideal helpdesk will let you customize your dashboard to monitor metrics that matter to your team.

#5 easy collaboration

As an enterprise, you’ll have to often collaborate within and between teams. Let’s take a look at the other features that you need to collaborate smoothly:

– Contextual collaboration: More importantly, you need to collaborate with context. Being able to work on an issue right from the ticket interface is paramount. Contextual collaboration tops the checklist of features that come under the collaboration bucket.

– Shared ownership: To resolve some tickets you might need help from another team. Instead of stepping on each other’s toes for visibility, you can share the ticket with the other team and still continue to have visibility of it.

– Parent-child ticketing: When you have a huge task at hand that requires different hands to join together, it’s easier to resolve it by splitting it into smaller subtasks. This way, different agents or teams involved can work in parallel and resolve the issue.

– Linked tickets: Sometimes, when there’s an outage or downtime, your inbox will be bombarded with emails from frustrated customers. Instead of replying to the affected customers one ticket at a time, you can link all the tickets and resolve all the tickets in one go.

#6 security

As an enterprise, security is something that you cannot compromise on. To keep your customers’ data protected, you need to have a safety net. Let’s take a look at the features which ensure a robust safety net:

– Data hosting: The helpdesk you’re evaluating needs to offer complete security as well as let you host data in data centers across the globe.

– Access control: You need to be able to restrict access using role-based access, IP whitelisting, domain whitelisting, and SAML SSO.

– Protect customer data: To protect sensitive customer data, you need a helpdesk which is HIPAA compliant.  

Conclusion

When you manage a huge team, you can’t possibly bend your ways to fit into the limitations of a helpdesk. You need a helpdesk that can bend to accommodate your team’s needs. As an enterprise, you need to upkeep the quality of customer support you provide. To do this, you need to have a system that lets you deliver support with ease.  

Are you looking to move to a helpdesk software for enterprises? Sign up for Freshdesk today and start delivering stellar customer support.