32% of customers walk away from a brand due to a single bad customer support experience.
It is not difficult to understand why a seamless customer experience should be a primary concern for businesses. Answering questions efficiently and round the clock, comply with special requests, and deliver customer satisfaction. While you might think that spreadsheets and shared inboxes are a cost-effective and straightforward way of handling customer requests, their drawbacks become apparent once your business starts to expand.
Besides, for small businesses, factors like speed, convenience, consistency, customer-centric support, and so on are of sheer importance. These factors help them stand out in the market. Any business’s prime objective is to improve the caliber of customer experiences they provide. Especially for small to medium businesses as they need to build trust and a solid reputation to get the attention of their customers.
But providing all this during customer interactions sounds tough, right? There is always so much to take care of with fewer resources. And you’re more likely to miss something or the other. Well, if you are a small business or a startup, you might relate to the problems. And this is the right time to avail the benefits of a full-fledged SMB customer support software or helpdesk from an established vendor. In this blog, we will look at the various reasons small and medium businesses need helpdesk software.
SMB Customer Support Software: A Brief
An SMB customer support software can be defined as:
Software that enables small and medium scale businesses to bridge the gap between the customers and support agents. It is an inclusive tool that helps companies to assign, manage, organize, and track customer problems accurately.
So, how does an SMB customer support software exactly work? How can a tool make it easy for a company to manage all the queries? An SMB customer support software allows you to manage everything from a unified dashboard. Its robust features help businesses streamline all customer-facing queries from a single platform.
Customer queries from different channels are registered in the form of tickets. It automates specific manual tasks. For example, ticket registering, ticket assignment, follow-ups after the resolution, sending notifications, etc.
You can categorize issues based on priorities, comment within the ticket, shift from one channel to another (without starting all over again), and manage everything as you need.
1. Improves the Customer Satisfaction Rate
Small businesses have to ensure that they meet the needs of their existing customers while also trying to gain new ones. As per a report by Forrester, acquiring a new customer is five times costlier than retaining a customer. An SMB customer support software can centralize the complaints and queries from all channels to one place.
Having a unified interface ensures that everything is easily accessible and the service level agreements aren’t breached. This makes it easier for support managers to view and resolve the queries based on different parameters such as priority, due date, and other metrics. The sooner you provide a resolution, the happier the customers. Hence it increases your customer satisfaction and retention rates.
2. Harmonize Your Support From a Centralized Interface
A help desk provides an all-in-one dashboard ideal for small businesses who are used to sharing an email inbox. The support manager and agents can see all the customer queries and requests coming from various channels from a centralized dashboard.
Besides, a centralized interface also refers to providing omnichannel support. Omnichannel support means all your channels are interconnected at the support end. This way, customers can reach you from the channel of their choice, but the agents will receive these queries in the form of tickets through a single interface.
A centralized interface changes everything! It improves transparency, collaboration, and productivity all at once. Centralization is an important aspect that we considered while developing the DeskXpand customer support software for SMB. The idea was to allow people to make the most of their work from a single interface. We’re sure it will change your support game. Find out more about DeskXpand’s SMB customer support software.
3. Helpdesks are Scalable
For small businesses and startups, scalability is of primary importance. As the company grows, the customer base grows, and eventually, the number of queries also grows. And hence, companies ideally should have a customizable SMB customer support software in place that you can build upon over time.
An ideal SMB customer support software understands the specific business needs (catering to that particular industry), requirements, and constraints faced explicitly by SMBs and provides a flexible and budget-conscious solution.
A helpdesk also brings all your tools, data, and systems together and enables you to provide support from a single interface. An ideal helpdesk will integrate with your social media platforms and project management software and work in your favor as you grow your business and require more technical support.
Read more: How to Choose the Best SMB Customer Support Software
4. Increase Team Efficiency and Transparency
The quality of your customer support ultimately depends on the competency of your team. If your customer support agents fail to provide timely resolutions or are not confident enough to assist, it will negatively impact the customer experience levels. This happens because customers’ expectations are usually very high and they feel down when brand representatives or support agents fail to meet those expectations.
Therefore, as a business owner or a customer support manager, it is your responsibility to empower your customer support team through reliable helpdesk software. This is where the prominence of an SMB customer software snowballs as it enables you to group service requests of different kinds easily. An ideal tool will ensure that the query is assigned to the right agent and set the due dates as per the SLAs.
Helpdesks also provide a transparent workflow within the team. When everyone knows what their colleagues are doing, the work gets better. This applies to both: agents and the support manager. Transparent workflow is also essential because:
- Your agents will have a clear idea about their work.
- They also know what they’ll be working on next.
- They can set up weekly or monthly goals.
- If someone else is dealing with or is stuck with a problem and needs help, the manager can easily find out where they’re stuck and who can help.
- Priorities are defined, and this helps agents plan their schedules accordingly.
- Agents can avoid potential collisions.
As a result, when your support agents are empowered with these tools and features, they’re more likely to deliver prodigious solutions. Eventually, your team efficiency will improve drastically.
5. Helps You Make Data-Driven Decisions
For small businesses, a data-driven tweak in the process can lead to huge improvements. A help desk can be a game-changer for your business as it would allow you to monitor SLAs, response times, ticket inflow, and many such analytics features. An ideal helpdesk solution can help your agents gauge the service quality and also make decisions to optimize your support process.
Every business aims at increasing revenue and making profits. Adopting a helpdesk that lets you make data-driven decisions can considerably affect and increase your revenue as well. It can help you find out the loopholes in your support workflow and fix them. Once you’ve fixed these loopholes, your team is all set to provide exceptional customer service. This means more happy customers!
An ideal helpdesk software will help you serve exceptional customer support and will eventually result in happy customers. This translates to higher brand recognition, loyalty, and eventually repeat customers. And if you get repeat customers, you can boost your revenue and profits.
Get an Ideal SMB Customer Support Software Today
Speed and consistency is the most important thing while dealing with customer issues. An ideal customer service team would always aim at responding to and resolving customer conflicts productively and effectively. And only the right helpdesk software can help you achieve this.
DeskXpand is one such help desk. A robust omnichannel customer support software built explicitly for SMB lets you reap all the benefits mentioned above. DeskXpand is built by ISO27001 certified experts with 14+ years of industry experience. We aim to help you achieve complete visibility and attain a high-resolution rate. Take a demo and find out for yourself.
