Good customer support is essential in the business world. The job of a help desk is to create an environment where customers have someone to turn to when they need assistance. It’s important to create a system that gives end-users quality assistance while being cost-effective for a business.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing customer service in the modern age. Companies are using help desk software to create automated responses to customer inquiries, giving employees more time for higher-quality interactions with customers and other tasks.
In this article, we’ll run through best practices when looking for a help desk solution that is ideal for your business, whether you have a small startup or a large enterprise. These are the essential features of help center software that can provide excellent customer service and empower a support team to do its best work.
Usability.
This is one of the most important elements of a successful help desk. If end users can’t navigate through easily or quickly, then it’s not going to be very helpful for them. A help center should be intuitive and easy to use for the least tech-savvy person of a customer base.
Companies should also create help center software that automates and personalizes responses based on user actions from previous interactions and support history. This ensures that customers get answers that meet their needs, in a very easy to use and efficient manner.
Keep the end-user in mind when analyzing the usability of a help desk solution.
Scalability.
Scalable help center software is critical for any business that wants to grow. It’s particularly important in industries where information is constantly changing, like the mortgage or education industry.
Scalable help center software automatically keeps support materials and a company’s knowledge base accurate and updated by way of PDF crawling. That means that it’s no longer necessary for human agents to keep track and modify a knowledge base when regulations, products, or even the company’s own internal processes change.
Instead of asking a team to do the painstaking work of creating support materials from scratch, businesses can create a help center that generates documents and FAQs automatically based on software crawlers. This ensures that knowledge base articles are accurate and up to date every time they’re viewed.
Escalation.
If a user is prompted with the option to solve a problem without speaking to an agent, they’re much more likely to do it themselves. That’s why self-service is essential for overnight or holiday support when there are fewer agents available. It also helps reduce wait times during busy hours and creates a better customer experience. Making it easier for users to find support materials and answers on their own can create an ongoing positive reinforcement in the customer’s mind.
But let’s say the user cannot find the answer they need in a self-service fashion. The ability to escalate support to human agents is an essential feature of a modern help desk. If the answer isn’t in the knowledge base, the question needs to be escalated to a human member of the team to quickly intervene. That customer service agent can start a live chat to resolve the issue quickly. This creates a more pleasant experience for the user knowing they can always get their issues resolved promptly.
AI-native.
Integrating AI into a help center ensures that customers get fast, accurate responses to their questions.
Technology like natural language processing (NLP) enables the help desk software to understand what customers are saying. That’s important because when users ask questions they don’t always use formal language or use the correct keywords. Machine learning (ML) lets the help desk create actionable insights from support interactions and uses those insights to improve customer service over time.
Next steps.
A help center should have an easy-to-use interface, create knowledge base articles that are accurate and up to date automatically, and automate personalized customer service responses based on previous interactions.
This can be tough to develop because it requires an agile product development cycle, and it’s easy to create software that’s incompatible with existing support systems.
Instead of building a help desk from scratch, companies should look for help center software that is customizable and can easily be integrable with existing software. This enables businesses to create a customer-centric support system that can scale as they grow, without having to change platforms every time their needs evolve.
To implement a software help center that will effortlessly handle the vast majority of support requests and create efficiencies across the board, choose a platform that has all the features listed above.
How can Capacity help?
Capacity is a support automation platform that allows companies to create a support and knowledge base system for their individual needs. We specialize in helping businesses provide the very best in customer support while freeing up their teams to solve complex problems.
Our software help center solutions incorporate chatbot functionality, create actionable insights from support interactions, and scale with your business.