16 Must Have Helpdesk Software Features

Everyone knows that helpdesk software empowers agents with a wide range of collaborative features. Eventually, the goal of every business is to keep the customer satisfied so that they won’t leave. Studies have shown that as much as 88% of customers expect a response within an hour. Hence, helpdesk software is essential for businesses now more than ever.

Setting up high customer satisfaction targets isn’t enough. You must constantly strive to excel at customer service. Start with asking yourself:

• Are you proud of your customer service?
• Are your customers always satisfied?
• Do you always have happy customers?
• Are your agents overloaded with piles of tickets every day?

If your answers to these questions are a “No,” it is high time you revamp your service desk features and revisit your ticketing system requirements. The ideal ticketing system requirements consist of advanced features that eliminate redundancy of work and efforts on the part of agents. Having all features under one helpdesk will drastically improve your support efficiency. Not only that, but it also helps customers effectively and promptly. It helps you serve an exceptional customer service experience!

What is an Exceptional Customer Support

(Source)

While flying the JetBlue airline, a passenger named Paul Brown casually tweeted about how he didn’t get a chance to grab his Starbucks coffee as he was at the smaller terminal of the airport. To his surprise, JetBlue customer service reps delivered a Starbucks venti mocha to his seat on the plane. Brown was elated with this experience.

It is one of the most excellent examples that other brands can learn from. The key takeaway? Customers don’t always need large gestures. Mr. Brown will surely be a loyal customer of Starbucks for the rest of his life. Plus, the tweets will do their work for years to come. Good customer service will keep your brand on top of your customer’s minds. Believe it or not, it is the simple things that count and bring loyal, happy customers.

It is also important to note that a lot of things go behind making a customer happy. For example, to serve this experience to Mr. Brown, the JetBlue customer support team would have gone through a number of things, including data integration, a streamlined workflow, an omnichannel interface, etc. Firstly they would have had their social media channel unified with service desk features (a true omnichannel interface). They would also have proactive service policies in place as the customer support team was proactive in responding to the problem. It was only possible because they had access to data and information about their customer (Mr. Brown) on-hands.

Turn your customers into loyal customers like Mr. Brown here. You only need to figure out the right ticketing system requirements to get started.

Helpdesk Software Features to Ensure Customer-Centric Approach

You would think that it took so many helpdesk software features to fulfill one customer’s demand. That’s correct! But once you achieve maximum customer satisfaction, they’re going to be with you for the rest of the time. Sounds like a good deal to me.

So, the question goes:

• What are the features of a good ticketing system?
• How do you find the right ticketing system requirements for your business?
• How will they benefit your business?

Without further delay, let’s jump onto it. Here are the 16 must-have features that should be a part of your ticketing system requirements:

• Ticket Management Features
• An Intuitive User Interface
• Multi-Language Support
• Collaboration Features
• Escalation Management
• Customization Options
• Self-service Features
• Canned Responses
• Customer Satisfactory Survey
• Omnichannel Accessibility
• Help Widget and Live Chat
• Workflow Automation
• Analytics and Reporting Features
• Third-party Integrations
• Social Media Presence
• Security and Compliance Feature

1. Ticket Management Features

Ticket mismanagement is the most common problem for businesses. Especially if you’re still hung up on conventional manual processes. This makes ticketing features as the most important ticketing system requirement. You may lose multiple queries, maintain a streamlined workflow, and even miss/forget to update your customers about their ticket resolution journey.

Robust helpdesk software features can solve this problem indefinitely. With a shared team inbox, process customer requests, manage tickets, streamline your workflow and notify your customers alongside. Some must-have ticketing features are mentioned below:

Help desk software features that you need for ticketing:

• Email to ticket conversion
• Automatic ticket assignment
• Shared inbox with shared access
• Chat and comment within the tickets
• Ticket notifications
• Auto-responders or notifications
• Service level agreements management
• Collision detection
• Unified interface for a single query
• Robust data management to save customer history

2. An Intuitive User Interface

When you deploy help desk software, you expect it to make the life of your customer service department a little easy.

That is why make sure you know everything about the help desk software before you select one.

Here are a few things you must consider before making a decision:

– Whether it matches your business’s requirements or not?

– Whether your customer service department is able to use the software properly or not?

– How many features does it have, and are they actually helpful or not?

– Is the help desk software easy to set up and use?

Always select a help desk software that has a flawless user interface.

Because even after offering numerous features, it is of no help when the user interface is hard to understand.

An intuitive and easy-to-use interface will help you save time, work more efficiently, and improve the customer experience.

3. Multi-Language Support

In the multi-lingual world, one of the most crucial ticketing system requirements includes supporting multiple languages. Developing customer support that only supports a single language hardly makes sense. A great way of improving CX is through talking their language.

Brands must strive to make communication smooth. Businesses should ensure that their ticketing systems are compatible with a wide range of languages. Even if you do not require multi-lingual support, including it in your futuristic plan will surely help.

4. Collaboration Features

The foundation of ideal ticketing system requirements lie in your end goals. It depends on the efficient management of its customer service and how collaborative the processes are. Team collaboration is a must in building customer-intimate culture. Collaborative help desk software features are critical to your help desk software.

Collaboration Stats to Look Forward to in 2023

A collaborative interface will empower your overall support. Make sure you have these collaborative features as a part of your ticketing system requirements:

• Shared Inbox
  A shared inbox is something that each of your support reps would have access to. This way, they would know all the incoming queries and could collaboratively work on them. Through a shared inbox, your agents can comment/chat within the tickets.
• Collision Detection
  Let your agents view potential ticket collisions. An ideal ticketing software would have it sorted. It saves unnecessary communication between agents and promises a standardized experience to the customers.
• Merge Similar Tickets
  Combine similar tickets and send the progress of tickets all together in one go. It would save hours of answering repetitive queries.

5. Escalation Management

Service level agreements define the level of service you expect from a vendor, laying out the metrics by which your services are measured. It also includes the remedies and penalties that would be charged when the service levels are not achieved. It is a critical component of any business trying to ace and provide better customer support. It includes:

• Simplified SLA Target Creation
  You can create targets for the entire workflow, like time taken for the first response, time taken for ticket assignment, response time, ticket closing time, etc.
• Lifecycle Tracking
  Keep tracking the lifecycle of your tickets. Keep track of the deadlines based on elapsed time, request categories, minimum response time, first-time response, etc.
• Prevent Potential Breaches
  The primary reason why service level agreement is the most useful help desk software feature is that you can predict potential breaches and prevent them. You can define automated escalation actions for each and every commitment. You can also notify the right team member to get the tickets resolved in time.
• Custom Alerts and Notifications
  Set visual alerts and notifications to ensure that those problematic tickets get more attention as the SLA breach time approaches.
• Measure SLA Performance
  Monitor the SLA performances and set more vital targets to deliver a refined and thorough customer service experience.

6. Customization Options

Interact with your customers at a personal level by customizing your ticketing system as per your requirements.

Customize every little thing from adding your logo to the domain to creating customizing ticket fields. To make the process easier, you can use a user-friendly logo maker tool to design a unique and professional logo.

You can also create and customize profiles for support executives as per the level of access that they have. 

With the help of customization, you can create contact forms with customized fields that only ask for specific information from your customers.

By doing so, you can make your contact form less complicated and easy for the customers to understand.

Thus, keep your brand identity intact with the help of customization, as the more the helpdesk is customized, the more it resembles your brand.

Read More: A Complete Guide To Escalation Management

7. Self-Service Features

It becomes challenging when you do not have support employees working round the clock. For example, at the time of a sale or during the holiday/festival season, an ecommerce business is likely to receive several repetitive queries.

I am sure you do not want your support representatives to get overburdened during their work hours. This makes self-service a crucial addition to your ticketing system requirements. Self-service allows your customers to gain autonomy and solve their queries themselves. Self-service is one of the most popular helpdesk software features adopted widely across industries, countries, and business units.

There are multiple benefits of having self-service features:

• Boosts social engagement
• Support cost reduction
• Builds a social presence
• Increases customer satisfaction & success

Read More: Seven Benefits of Knowledge Base Software

Provide detailed troubleshooting steps for common roadblocks faced by customers and share them with every user. You can add content in the format your customer wants. It can be:

• Knowledge base
• Video tutorials
• FAQs
• Personalized recommendations

Building a self-service strategy also includes building, and making your website navigation friendly. You can include advanced search algorithms to ensure that the customers find what they’re looking for. You can also have advanced categorization and sub-categorization features.

Adopt a self-service tool for your organization. We have the perfect solution that caters to all your needs in a personalized manner.

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8. Canned Responses

 

Tools like canned responses, snippets, email templates, etc., can save you a lot of time. It allows you to pre-create and compose messages for generalized responses.

Snippets

You can trigger snippets by entering a code. They are used explicitly in writing an introduction and concluding messages. But by using snippets, you can help your support agents during live chats and save them from writing the same thing again and again.

Email Templates

Email templates are pre-written messages. The customer support agents work on way too many common issues every day. Templates will help your agents save time as they won’t have to rewrite all the details of an email.

9. Customer Satisfactory Survey

As customers can make or break a brand, knowing their perspective toward your service is very important.

This is where the customer satisfaction survey, a built-in helpdesk software feature, plays a crucial role. 

It enables you to create and send surveys without any hassle to help you gather customer feedback.

With the help of this feedback, you can effectively track the performance of your customer service agent/department.

You can also get a better understanding of how satisfied your customers are with your service.

So, by gaining insights into all these factors, you can take corrective action without any further delay and make sure to offer your customers the best service possible.

10. Omnichannel Access

 

Customers hate to wait on calls, being dodged, and contacting brands repeatedly to resolve the simplest queries.

Businesses with only a single communication channel usually face this problem.

Omnichannel: An Important Helpdesk Software Feature

Brands try to do everything they can to make themselves widely available to customers. But, many still struggle to implement a service strategy that truly meets customers to their specific terms.

73% of customers say that when the brand values their time, that is a good customer experience.

An omnichannel helpdesk system strategy requirements brings you closer to your customers and helps you get a deeper context of their problems. Plus, an omnichannel response is a helpdesk software feature that has become the new benchmark for serving exceptional experiences.

Read more: Omnichannel Customer Support Software: A Key to Ace Customer Support

11. Help Widget and Live Chat

 

90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as essential or very important.

This statistic has made it crystal-clear that responding immediately to customer queries is very important and can enhance customers’ experience as well.

Help widget and live chat is one such ticketing system feature that allows you to offer quick solutions to your customers.

Let us know how it can offer instant solutions.

By integrating your knowledge base and FAQs, you can let your customers find out the answers by browsing within the help widget.

You can also attach the contact form with the widget so that your customers can reach out to you without any hassle by just filling it out.

So, in simpler words, the help widget feature can make it easy for your customers to find out solutions.

The cherry on top is that customers can also start a chat from the help widget in case they have any kind of urgent query.

12. Workflow Automation

 

Automation is another helpdesk software feature. It will be regardless of the communication channel used by the customer. If you integrate automation in your helpdesk, you can ensure an immediate response.

If you use automated chatbots, they will respond to customers even when your team is not online. For example, your helpdesk can directly send a personalized response to customers whenever they register their queries by automating your incoming ticket process. They’ll hold the customer queries until your agents take over.

Since we’re talking about automation, did you know DeskXpand is now available with automated ticketing features? No? Check us out!

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13. Analytics and Reporting Features

 

Setting individual as well as team goals based on data will help you improve accountability. Set up a dashboard to track the team’s performance and daily goals. Agents will know how quickly they must answer.

Serve a Responsive CX and Monitor Agent Performance

Customer service managers can leverage analytics to boost employee morale and motivate them to reach expected numbers. They can track their team’s performance and help them if they’re stuck somewhere. This way, managers can help boost agent morale and motivate them to reach expected targets.

Here are the three key metrics that you must measure:

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The customer lifetime value is a measure of profits that your company makes from a given customer. It can be calculated by adding up the total revenue earned from a customer and subtracting the initial cost from that total amount.

Churn Rate

Customer churn rate helps you identify why customers are leaving. The churn rate simply states the number of customers that stop doing business with a company. This metric is calculated as a percentage of customers your company has lost over a given time. If the number is higher, you need to determine the reasons and change your strategies to reduce it.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The net promoter score measures your customers’ willingness to recommend your company’s products and services to others. NPS helps you understand whether your customers are satisfied with your products or not. It is a good indicator of how loyal your customer base is.

The NPS is a 10-point scale calculated based on the response to the question: “how likely are you to recommend < brand name > to your friends or family?” or even a set of questions. However, the former question is largely popular.

14. Third-party Integrations

When choosing a helpdesk software, it becomes very crucial to see whether it integrates with other third-party tools or not.

Let us see an example to know why you should select a helpdesk software that integrates with other third-party tools.

Assume you have selected helpdesk software that best suits your business requirements and is also affordable.

But, just lacks one feature that could help you the most.

In such scenarios, integrating the helpdesk software with other third-party tools becomes important, as your requirement of wanting that one feature gets solved quickly.

So, always keep in mind to select a helpdesk that integrates with other tools effectively.

Read More: How Customer Service Analytics Can Help Companies Put the Customer First

15. Social Media Presence

Social Media presence is an obvious way to improve your customer experience. Earlier in this article, we noticed that Jet Blue Airways was able to track Mr. Brown’s tweet almost instantly. This helped them provide what they say, exceptional customer service to Mr. Brown. Social media channel is a breeding ground for both customer service wins and fails. Plenty of companies successfully communicate with their audiences and capitalize on Facebook, Yelp, etc.

According to a study by Conversocial, only 3% of tweets looking for help tagged the company. That means an incredible 97% of Twitter users could be tweeting good or bad things about your brand without you even knowing it! Yikes. You can find mentions of your brands even if you’re not tagged. You can do this by looking up your company name in the Twitter search box.

Customers of the digital era are likely to be discussing their needs on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You can monitor your direct and indirect brand mentions and buzzwords in your industry.

16. Security and Compliance Feature

According to a report, security breaches have risen by 11% since 2018.

Your helpdesk software can be a treasure for hackers as it contains all the sensitive information of the customers and also of all the members who are accessing it.

Hence, it is very important to make sure that all the information is safe and sound, and this is where security comes in.

For the start, to enhance security, the helpdesk software can let you offer role-based permission to limit access.

In addition to creating strong passwords, helpdesk software also offers two-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access.

So, now you know how important helpdesk software is; it safeguards all sensitive information and prevents it from breaching by offering quality security.

Build Your Customer Strategy with DeskXpand

Thankfully, technology has made it easier for businesses to improve customer responsiveness through helpdesk software features. If you’re looking to manage your online reputation, you need to identify at-risk customers, make your support customer intimate, and improve customer responsiveness; DeskXpand would do you well.

DeskXpand is an automated, omnichannel customer service software that helps companies deliver a cohesive and flexible customer experience across various channels. We are ISO27001-certified customer support solution providers with 14+ years of industry experience. We aim to help brands achieve complete visibility and a high-resolution rate through flexible helpdesk software features.

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