Help desk- ultimate guide for 2024

What is a helpdesk?

A helpdesk is the first point of contact for customers and employees when problems arise. Its primary purpose is to fix customer or employee issues quickly without delay. In many cases it’s needed for IT support, to serve customers needing technical help.

Having a help desk can empower your business to respond to issues quickly and effectively, so you can provide the very best service experience to your customers or employees.

Why are help desks important?

While your support team is a vital part of the customer service ecosystem, they can only do so much without the right tools. Help desks solve this problem by acting as the middleman to give your business an efficient process to support customers and resolve issues. 

Here are some of the reasons why help desks are important:

• Improved customer satisfaction: A more efficient customer service system solves inquiries and issues quickly, leading to greater customer satisfaction.

• Increased efficiency: With greater automation, IT-powered elimination of redundancies, and optimized workload, a help desk boosts both the efficiency of your support team and the overall company.

• Enhanced brand value: As you scale up, so should the quality of your tools and services. With the ability to provide tech-integrated high-quality support to customers, a help desk can enhance your company’s reputation.

• Cost savings: Some issues can often be left in disarray without a proper system to help organize them. By providing self-service terminals and automated responses, service desks can help you save resources and cut down on costs.

Helpdesk for customer support

Unify all of your support channels into one place

A help desk can consolidate support channels such as mail, phone, live chat, messaging, social media.

Customers find it frustrating to begin a conversation on one platform and then get redirected to others, having to repeat their queries. With a help desk app, you can offer a seamless omnichannel experience, preserving context when customers switch channels.

Provide faster support to customers

Customers hate waiting—in the queue, over a phone call, or an email. Our surveys show that 80% of customers agree that they want faster responses from your support team. By taking on simple tickets through automated channels, organizational tagging, and smarter overviews, help desks leave your team with extra time to focus on more urgent and technical issues.

Boost your team’s productivity

While a help desk provides automated responses, there’s so much more that can help your support team. With the ability to create central knowledge bases, set up efficient workloads, and facilitate cross-team collaboration, your support service team is always on the same page, no matter the time or place.

Implement effective self-service options

While personalized service is great, it’s not always the answer. Statistics show that 39% of customers prefer self-service dashboards over speaking with agents and show a preference for resolving issues in real-time by finding their own answers. 

A feature-rich customer help desk lets you set up an accessible knowledge base to find support on demand. From FAQs, guides, tutorials, and troubleshooting, there’s no limit to what you can add.

Engage in contextual conversations with your customers

Help desk tools are primarily built to make support more personable. With an evolving dataset of their preferences and request history, your support team can connect the dots quickly and deliver convenient and personalized services.

Gain critical insights on agent and team performance

Scalability through service desks is important, but so is the growth of your service team. With detailed analytical tools, help desks allow you to track factors such as volume, ticket type, and resolution speed for each agent. This will in turn help you develop and create robust service management reports that can be utilized for upskilling the team and setting higher benchmarks.

The Philippines branch of the global convenience store chain 7 Eleven, leveraged Freshdesk's powerful help desk features like scenario automation, canned responses, support portal, and reporting to boost their team’s performance. They were able to bring down their first response time to a matter of a few hours and also had 98% of tickets resolved within SLA after implementing Freshdesk.

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Why do people use a helpdesk?

No matter the product, there will always be challenges that your customers will face. Whether these are technical or not, having a communicative team that prioritizes support requests is vital for the success of any consumer-first company.

This is why it’s so important to look at these challenges from the other side. While technical innovations, smart workflows, and all those other fancy features can help improve productivity, it all boils down to one thing – customer satisfaction.

Here are a few things to know about your customers before you create the ideal service desk for your company:

Customers have different expectations for different industries. Understand the perception of your product and its impact on their life so that you can deliver the right experience through your support channels.

Customer service expectations have risen dramatically. Modern customer service must deliver the best of both worlds by providing high-quality service at a faster rate. This is where tools such as chatbots and help-desk software can help.

Many customers prefer solutions available on hand rather than requesting help from your team. Modern service desks can also help here by developing a detailed database that the customer can use at any time to resolve issues, while also reducing unnecessary workload on your help desk ticketing system.

The quality of your support should be consistent when using an omnichannel strategy. While it’s important to prioritize the most popular customer support channels, you need to be ready for changes. Once you develop your primary channel, set up infrastructure that allows you to function easily even when your customer base switches their preferred channels.

Separate customer satisfaction and customer service. While many people think these are synonymous, satisfaction is a wider term. It’s defined as the customer’s reception of the overall combination of your product, company image, channels, and service. Try to look at the service quality as an independent metric to get a better idea of your performance, rather than considering it as a supplement to your product.

Features of a helpdesk system

1. Multi-channel support

Today’s customers want their favorite brands to be available on multiple channels, including chat, email, messaging apps, social media, web portals, and phone for immediate assistance. Look for help desks that support omnichannel flow and allow customers to switch seamlessly between the channels for greater convenience.

2. Ticket management

A basic functionality of help desks is to allow your agents to view all your customer queries on a single interface as tickets. Automated ticket routing and assigning, categorizing and prioritizing tickets, managing flexible business hours, and effective SLA management are all key features to note under help desk ticketing.

3. Automation

A major benefit is the automation of ticket management and workflows for streamlined response. 

Examples of simple help desk automation that make a big difference for your agents include Ticket type filters, Canned responses, Autoresponders for out-of-office hours, Agent-assist bots, AI-powered chats, Prompt reminders, Alerts, Notifications.

4. Customization

Help desks need to be an extension of your business and should feel like it. Customizing the look of your business portals helps to create a frictionless customer experience. A robust helpdesk should also let you customize agent roles and access as per their responsibilities.

5. Integrations

When you’re using essential business software like CRM, Slack, G Suite, or Shopify every day, developing a unified solution can help improve efficiency across the board. Most help desks offer direct integrations with common tools that help you gain even more context about your customer’s wants and needs.

6. Help desk analytics

Analytics give you real-time data on ticket trends, helping you visualize vital agent performance metrics like response times and First Contact Resolution (FCR) ratings on an intuitive dashboard. 

You can create curated reports on your team’s performance delivered straight to your inbox. Help desk tools also have mechanisms to tap into customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction using CSAT surveys.

7. Self-service

A smart help desk provides solutions on demand without having to wait for you to get back to them via slower channels. Ideally, this should be available through the option of an exhaustive knowledge base that fits the needs of your business and your customers. That way, it allows your customers to access it easily as FAQs, guides, or tutorials for self-support.

8. Collaboration

Your customer support team will need proper internal and external communication channels. With the right collaboration capabilities, your team can set the context, offer constructive insights on tickets, and make way for other stakeholders to give updates as and when they resolve issues.

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How to determine your help desk staffing needs?

Every organization has different support needs. With the advent of automated tools such as CRM portals and chatbots, our approach to help desk staffing has changed a lot. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Analyze your current dataset to understand overarching qualitative and quantitative themes. This will allow you to look at your business from the inside out and develop a base for better desk staffing.

• Stay in touch with your agents and keep tabs on the challenges they may face regularly.

• Prioritize the channels that your customers prefer for better staffing resource allocation.

• Build a relationship between help desk software and your support staff so they can utilize the tools at hand and boost efficiency.

• Understand the overall functions of your staff. Your team may be working on more than just tickets alone. Factor this into workload planning within your CRM software.

• Finally, stay in touch with your customers. At the end of the day, their word is the defining statement of your service quality. Adapt your strategy according to the feedback.

Characteristics of a good helpdesk

A quality helpdesk is only as good as its execution. Here’s how you can ensure your helpdesk is doing the best it can:

• To start with, you should hire the right people in your service team. Service management is dependent upon how receptive and service-oriented your agents are. Try to identify these traits first, as technical skills can always be trained later.

• Select the right tools. A good service desk such as Freshdesk helps your staff take on problems with ease with fast-track ticket resolution.

• Use metrics to your advantage. When you’re using the right software to support your service team, you’ll obtain greater statistical insights on performance and feedback.

• Communicate regularly with your team and instill the right attitude within them. Your organization should have a customer-first attitude that focuses on greater transparency to avoid customer frustration.

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Types of helpdesks

1. Web-based help desk     

Cloud-based help desk software is built on the software as a service (SaaS) platform. These use a recurring fee-based system to access the help desk software. These services only require an internet connection and the service provider takes care of the rest of the software management.

They also offer great accessibility through channels such as the service provider's website, mobile apps, or a desktop client. Web-based help desks are a suitable option for small to medium-sized businesses looking for a ready-to-use solution with minimal set-up.

2. Enterprise help desk     

An enterprise help desk solution is a type of software that provides comprehensive support and customer service capabilities to large organizations. It is designed to handle the needs of big companies, with a wide range of features that cater to both internal and external customers.

Features of the enterprise help desk include:

• IT collaboration

• Unified asset and account management

• Central knowledge base

• Customizable internal service systems

• Scalable ticketing software

• Performance analytics.

These tools boost efficiency on a larger scale, making collaboration and communication among widely spread support teams easy while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. 

3. Internal help desk      

Internal help desk software streamlines employee service support and offers a centralized platform for service resolution to employees. This separates it from traditional customer-facing help desks and makes it a great tool to streamline internal inefficiencies and smooth out hidden problems. 

Features include:

• Ticket management

• Knowledge base

• Asset management 

• Collaboration tools. 

Using monitoring, tracking, and analytics, it identifies trends and enhances employee service. Businesses of all sizes use it to increase productivity and reduce downtime. 

4. On-premise help desk      

On-premise help desk software operates from the customer's server infrastructure, granting them full control over their data and IT environment. This level of control is particularly valuable for businesses with stringent security or privacy requirements as you maintain complete control over data. 

While they can take time to set up, on-premise help desk solutions can be customized and tailored to your preferred style of customer experience. 

On-premise help desk software requires a significant upfront investment in hardware and IT resources. They also require a dedicated IT team to manage the infrastructure and keep the software running smoothly. 

5. Open-Source help desk      

Perhaps you don’t have the budget to sustain robust help desk software and are just starting with a business that is facing customer service challenges. Open-source solutions shine in these situations by providing community-developed software that can be used by anyone. These are mostly free and can be customized by coding them to suit your business if you can do so.

However, they can be limiting as they are not developed by professionals, making security one of its main drawbacks. You’ll need a team of IT professionals to build an open-source help desk around your business needs if you wish to use it long-term.

How to choose the best help desk?

With hundreds of help desk systems to choose from, it can be difficult to decide which one will suit your needs the best, but here are a few factors to consider:

1. How much does the help desk cost?

No matter the size of the team, budget constraints are a universal concern. Analyze both initial and ongoing costs to see which pricing model would suit your brand. While $50/month/agent might seem reasonable for a two-person team, choosing a credits-based or fixed fee system might be better as your team increases in size.

2. What features does it have?

Compile a list of must-have and nice-to-have features based on customer feedback, industry and your own research. If a must-have feature isn’t included in the selected help desk software, explore other options. 

3. How easy is it to use?

Teams can change frequently as new employees come in and existing ones leave. While a highly technical system may fit your company, consider the learning curve. 

4. What is the support provided to your team?

Quality support is an invaluable asset. Consider factors like available support channels, tiered support options, and the quality of support documentation and tutorials. Test your provider’s customer service responsiveness so your business doesn’t suffer in an urgent situation.

5. What apps does the helpdesk integrate with?

Consider the tools your company regularly employs. Integrating these tools with your help desk can streamline processes and save time. For instance, integrating your help desk with JIRA can facilitate engineering escalations if your development team relies on it. If your team frequently uses Zoom for video calls, having seamless integration within the helpdesk interface can be highly beneficial.

How to implement helpdesk software?

Once you’ve chosen the perfect help desk for your organization, here’s how you can implement it:

1. Define your goals: Set up a clear vision for what you want your help desk software to do. This should align with the needs and preferences of your support agents.

2. Assess your current strategy: Before you set up your process, consider the main weaknesses of your current one. This will help you hit the ground running.

3. Consult professionals for setup: Let someone in your team who has experience with both the current process and software installation manage the setup. Alternatively, facilitate collaboration between the help desk provider and your support team so they can work on it together.

4. Asset Management and Testing: Before you start processing new tickets and customer requests, ensure the old database has been fully carried over. Also, it’s a good idea to run some mock tests before you work on real clients.

Learn more about Freshdesk and the right way to do customer support management