The complete guide to help desk automation

Overview

Customer support is an essential aspect of a quality company. Sometimes it’s the last stop for a customer before they take their business elsewhere. That’s why it’s imperative to make sure your customer support processes promote a positive customer experience with:

Fast responses Tailored support Tracked tickets for more efficient service The ability to automate redundant or mundane tasks

It should also do all of this while reducing costs.

Many companies are turning to help desk automation tools to bridge the gaps between good, great, and exceptional customer service.

As per the Forrester Opportunity Snapshot, nearly 70% of customer service decision-makers plan to invest in automation and 73% in CX feedback technology. With the ever-increasing need to deliver great customer experiences, help desk automation has become critical for customer support success.

In this article, we’ll dive deeper into help desk automation. That includes its benefits, what customer support processes you can automate, and how to pick the right help desk automation for your company.

What is help desk automation?

Help desk automation is a technology that allows customer support teams to minimize human agent involvement and streamline workflows by automating service operations. This can include routing, escalation, and ticket resolutions, among others.

Help desk automation improves the agent experience by reducing agent workload while also helping them provide quick and effective solutions for customer issues.

What are the key components & features of help desk automation?

There are several key components and features you should check for when shopping for help desk automation software. These include the following items: 

AI chatbots

An AI chatbot can revolutionize your customer support department. For starters, you can use it to field support tickets 24/7. It can also handle some of the more common or simplistic issues customers face. Over time, the chatbot can improve its efficiency. It learns how your customers like interacting and adapts its chat style accordingly.

Knowledge bases

Knowledge bases can be great self-service guide options for customers who want to find their answers without calling in. A quality knowledge base can take some pressure off human support agents and lead to better response times. This improves not only customer satisfaction but also your employee satisfaction scores.

Workflow automation

With workflow automation, you can automate repetitive or simple tasks through your help desk tool. Some of these tasks include:

• Customer onboarding

• Ticket escalations

• Ticket routing (more on this below)

• And more.

Automatic ticket routing

When a new support ticket comes in, your help desk’s automated ticketing system can route it to the correct department or agent. This feature helps with faster response times and gives you a higher level of efficiency. 

Automated reporting

To judge how effective your help desk software is, run regular reports in real-time to uncover how efficient your department is. Thankfully, help desk automation tools include automated reporting functions that generate actionable data immediately. You’ll always have accurate information to help you celebrate your successes and refocus during leaner times.

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What are the benefits of help desk automation?

Customer support teams use help desk automation to nurture customer relationships and improve the customer experience while reducing agent workload and improving productivity. Here’s how help desk automation can benefit businesses of all sizes.

For the customers

Use help desk tools to grant customers access to more support than ever before. 

By making AI chatbots available 24/7, publishing quality knowledge bases, and routing tickets to the right department automatically, customers save a lot of time and frustration. These automations also take the pressure off human sales associates, leading to quicker turnaround times — ultimately improving customer satisfaction scores and retention rates. 

For the agent

Automate your workflows to perform multiple actions on a support ticket with a single click.

For instance, Freshdesk helps your support team manage customer queries by performing multiple actions like modifying ticket properties, assigning tags, and sending emails without hiring an extra pair of hands.

Creating template answers can help your support agents avoid answering the same questions repeatedly. For example, they can use Freshdesk’s canned responses and insert predefined answers. 

This can help empower them to send faster responses to repetitive customer queries.

For the business

Set up automation rules to trigger notifications and alert the right people on your support team whenever there’s an escalation, an SLA breach, or a poor rating. 

Use smart notifications to receive alerts on Slack or your desktop, even if you’re working in another tab. Automated help desk tools like Freshdesk help you automate redundant work by scanning every support ticket and handling repetitive tasks. 

This further reduces the cost of resolving customer queries and eliminates the need for agents to manually attend to these requests.

Customer support processes to automate

A help desk automation solution allows agents to manage customer issues, collect customer feedback, and improve customer satisfaction metrics effortlessly. 

You can use an automated help desk like Freshdesk to perform a variety of actions that would have otherwise consumed a lot of time and human effort.

Let’s review what you can automate with Freshdesk.

Prioritize & route incoming tickets

Set up automation rules to scan incoming tickets and automatically categorize, prioritize, and assign them to the right agent or group based on factors you define. 

Prioritize tickets by the type of customer, company, ticket status, priority, description, language, subject, or time zone. This way, you can complete the most important tickets first.

Manage workload automatically

Automate ticket assignment, so tickets tagged to specific agents or agent groups instantly route to the relevant team, and distribute the workload optimally. This can also help you make sure every agent will have a balanced queue. 

Additionally, Freshdesk can automatically reassign tickets to agents when someone is taking a break. You can also set up assignment rules based on agent expertise to speed up query resolution. 

Streamline ticket workflows

Create predefined conditions to delete tickets and mark them as spam or delete spam, auto-replies, or out-of-office emails before they appear on the agent’s ticket list. 

You can also alert the right people if a customer shares a poor CSAT rating or flag tickets when an agent’s response doesn’t get delivered to a customer’s inbox. You can even notify managers when multiple agents are working on a ticket that has been open for a long time.

Deflect support tickets

Set up automated workflows to encourage self-service and reduce agent workload so your support teams can focus on more complex tasks. 

Use the ticket deflection functionality within Freshdesk or enable chatbots to redirect customers to your knowledge base, case studies, FAQ section, or community forum where the question has already been answered.

Learn more here from our Self Service Guide.

Industry use cases for leveraging help desk automations

Help desk automation can come in handy for just about any company with a customer support department.

Below, you’ll find three use cases that accurately show how the same help desk software can help companies in three different industries. 

SaaS companies

SaaS companies need great customer support systems. It’s an industry where bugs, outages, and user error can lead to a multitude of problems.

Without IT help desk automation, SaaS users will be stuck on long hold times. No one wants to impatiently wait for a human representative to get on the line and help them.

With help desk automation, an AI chatbot can communicate outages to SaaS customers right away without any hold time. Self service knowledge base articles can also handle user error issues. 

Travel services

Travel industries also need efficient support. Companies like Disney Resorts often see long hold times when vacationers call for general information or to check up on their existing reservations. 

By incorporating help desk automation, customers can provide reservation numbers to AI chatbots to pull up the information they need to review. 

Customers looking for general information can also find expedited help through automated systems and knowledge base articles that answer frequently-asked questions. 

Financial services

Banks are also notorious for long customer support hold times. But with help desk automation software, financial institutions can keep their phone lines free for emergencies and more complicated issues that require a human being.

Automation solutions can handle simple matters like providing account balances or reviewing recent transactions. No one wants to sit on hold for 25 minutes just to get their routing number.

Measuring how effective your help desk automations are

Track your help desk automation solution’s success by examining certain metrics. If automation improves the customer support department, you’ll start to see several changes over time.

Here are a few performance metrics you can use to determine whether your help desk automation service is working:

Customer satisfaction scores

If your help desk automation tool is performing well, then you should have more satisfied customers. Their satisfaction comes from understanding the product well, quick resolutions, and low average wait times when calling in. 

You can measure customer satisfaction scores by sending automated surveys. Many businesses ask customers who recently spoke with support to participate in one. 

A popular option for gaging customer satisfaction is your net promoter score. This requires a very simple survey that asks users to rate your company or department on a scale of 1-10. 

Employee satisfaction scores

Help desk automation de-stresses your customer support representatives and decreases their call loads. Reps are free from dealing with the same repetitive issues since the help desk automation platform has taken over those tasks.

If your automation platform improves your employees’ professional lives, it’ll reflect in their job satisfaction scores. Regularly poll your employees to get a good sense of where their thoughts and feelings are. 

Churn rate

Help desk automation’s ability to increase customer satisfaction (via more access to support and lower wait times) should also decrease your customer churn rate. The churn rate is a metric that measures how many customers your business has lost over a given period.

However, if your churn rate is high, it’s imperative to find the cause. It could be that customers don’t like the resources you’re providing or they’re stuck in a chatbot automation loop. Consider sending automated polls or surveys to lost customers to uncover their core reasons for leaving.  

Retention rate

Your retention rate is the number of closed customers who continue to come back for more.

For example, let’s say a company signs up for a six-month plan using a cloud-based SaaS solution. At the end of the six months, they renew. That’s a retained customer. Quality customer support is a major factor that influences customer retention rates.

Response time

If automation is doing its job correctly, then your average response times for customer support tickets should be much lower. This should create a pattern where hold times and email response times consistently drop. 

Ticket volume

The overall ticket volume is another metric that’s easy to track using the help desk automation tool of your choice. 

It can generate a report that shows the total support tickets created through the system during a given time. If the self-service and automated options you have in place are helping customers solve their problems, your overall support ticket volume will decrease.

How to choose the right help desk automation tool

When considering a help desk automation tool, there are a few questions you’ll need to ask. 

Compare your specific needs to the capabilities and features of the tool. 

Some questions to get you started include: 

• What support channels does this tool work with?

• Can it handle your average ticket volume? 

• How customizable is the tool?

• Does it automate workflows?

• What kind of customer support system does this company have?

• Does it measure your specific success metrics?

• What’s the learning curve like?

• Does it feature an AI chatbot?

• Which existing tools can this system integrate with?

• Does this help desk automation tool fit into my budget?

Best help desk automation platforms- 2024

There’s no one-size-fits-all recommendation for help desk automation software. Ultimately, the solution you choose should fit your specific operational needs and budget. 

Let’s compare help desk automation options you have. We’ll also take a quick look at what Freshdesk offers to help you make a more informed decision. 

Microsoft 365:

Microsoft 365 key features:

• Customizable options for support tickets, including request types, ticket status, and more

• Designed to work with mobile platforms like cell phones and tablets

• Generate customer satisfaction surveys to gauge effectiveness

• Sharepoint to store data

Microsoft 365 pros:

• Allows employees to access system remotely

• Flexible pricing options

• Impressive security features

Microsoft 365 cons:

• General complaints online about support department

• Too many advanced features hidden behind a paywall

Helpscout:

HelpScout key features:

• Integrates with more than 90 apps

• Auto creates customer profiles

• Ability to create custom workflows

• Live chat function

• Knowledge base

HelpScout pros:

• User-friendly

• Enhanced security with 2-Factor Authorization (2FA)

• Multi-language translations for Knowledge base

HelpScout cons:

• Issues reported on merging tickets

• Limited customizations

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk Key Features:

• Omnichannel experience

• Integrations with popular social messaging channels

• Multi-department organization

• Live chat services

Zoho Desk Pros:

• User-friendly system

• Solid customer support department

• Data encryption for enhanced security

Zoho Desk Cons:

• No application for desktop computers 

• Limited free customer support

Why do customers choose Freshworks for helpdesk automation?

Easy to set up

Freshdesk’s intuitive interface allows users to set up automation rules easily and quickly. Moreover, for every rule you create, a summary will be auto-generated while the rule is being saved making it easy for other users to understand the setup.

AI-powered

Freshdesk’s smart, AI-powered automation closes tickets that have been inactive for some time and detects language to understand if a customer has thanked them for the support or if they need further help.

Scalable solution

Freshdesk automation comes with an audit log for you to monitor every rule you create or every activity you perform. You can also test the changes in the sandbox and sync them to your live account.

Collaborate with teams

You may need input from a different team or directly collaborate while resolving customer queries. Freshdesk allows you to set up trigger notifications to remind and alert the right people to solve a ticket in time.

Logical workflows

Freshdesk offers the flexibility to customize combinations of AND/OR conditions and multi-level logical operators to set up powerful automation rules and streamline any complex workflow.