Does the following situation sound relatable?
You and your support agents give your best in handling customer support. However, despite all efforts, there’s a dip in customer satisfaction.
Customers are frustrated waiting to get a query solved. They are annoyed because their ticket is assigned to someone who doesn’t have relevant skills.
So, how exactly do you handle the support process in a way that’s:
(a) quick from customers’ perspective, and (b) doesn’t leave your agents burned out?
The not-so-secret ingredient is automation.
It has the power to take all the drudgery and make the support workflow efficient, quick, and accurate. Leading to happy customers, productive agents, and a profitable business.
I know the word automation does sound too ‘oh-god-it’s-too-advanced-and-robot(y)-thing’, but honestly, it doesn’t require massive changes. Just the right helpdesk management software with automation functionalities to remove manual processes!
This post is prepared with the aim of answering all your questions about helpdesk automation. Keep reading!
Have a quick glance at topics on helpdesk automation:
- A Brief Introduction to Helpdesk Automation
- Typical Challenges That Automation Helps Overcome
- Top 9 Helpdesk Automation Ideas
- How to Win Customer Support with DeskXpand
A Brief Introduction to Helpdesk Automation
Automation is everywhere! It enables users to achieve a wide range of tasks. From ordering pizza, checking luggage at the airport, planning a vacation, booking a doctor’s appointment, and beyond.
And the customer support industry is no exception.
We are at a breaking point in customer service as more companies are turning to automation in the form of chatbots, self-service, and other helpdesk automation tech.
In 2022 and beyond, automation is not an option anymore. It has become a necessity.
Helpdesk automation removes the drudgery from your support processes and allows your team to spend more time resolving more complex queries. This means they can get customers back to work faster and give them better job satisfaction.
In short,
- Advancement in technology (specifically, automation) continues to transform customer support interactions. After all, finding specific data from a puddle of information that the internet provides has become utterly important.
- Help desk automation is much needed to streamline all this information and help customers find exactly what they’re looking for.
DeskXpand is on a journey to help businesses deliver exceptional customer support. With features like ticketing, self-service, automation, omnichannel support, analytics, and so much more, we can help you simplify your support process.
To explore our product in-depth, and to see how it works as per your business logic, take a personalized demo! Click to get started!
Typical Challenges That Automation Helps Overcome
The first step to ensure that your helpdesk runs smoothly is to know about the most common problems. This section covers all about some of the most common challenges in the helpdesk and how automation in the helpdesk can help solve them.
A. Long Ticket Resolution Time
One of the most important support metrics you need to measure to deliver a great experience is average ticket resolution time.
Today, customers expect businesses to listen to and solve their problems instantly. So, the need to troubleshoot queries increases dramatically.
Help desk automation, by reducing manual tasks, helps bring more speed and efficiency to the workflow. Even if your business sees a pool of new requests, you can be assured that things will fall into place – on time.
B. Time-Consuming Workflow
Your agent has to spend a lot of time addressing each question, and in this process, time and productivity get sacrificed.
For instance, phone calls generally take up much time, even if it’s for a very basic query. What if you have an extensive knowledge base in place that customers can leverage?!
A helpdesk software gives you the ability to clear all your doubts using FAQs, videos, etc.; having such capabilities can reduce unnecessary costs, and enable agents to focus on other important tasks.
(The many benefits of helpdesk automation)
C. Handling Requests from Different Channels
Without a proper workflow in place, it becomes challenging to handle numerous requests from multiple touchpoints.
You may be offering assistance via channels like messaging, social media, emails, etc. Every channel accounts for a special conversation, which means you need to have different agents handling the process.
With a helpdesk like DeskXpand, you can get omnichannel support for enhanced customer experience. It lets you manage multiple channels from a single interface.
It can also empower your support agents by saving them from time-consuming processes and repetitive tasks.
D. Common Human Errors
With human touch involved, mistakes are bound to happen. For instance, you assign a particular ticket to the wrong agent.
Other errors include closing a ticket without confirmation, sharing duplicate replies, etc. Helpdesk automation helps avoid blunders.
Instead of manually assigning tickets, you can automate the whole process to avoid any confusion and enable a fair distribution process among agents.
Revolutionize your helpdesk with DeskXpand. Take a personalized demo to explore all the functionalities!
Top 9 Helpdesk Automation Ideas
Let’s explore top helpdesk automation strategies that will help you rise above your legacy mundane processes and free your employees to focus on more value-inducing things:
1. Automated Ticket Routing
Ticket routing is one of the most crucial aspects of the helpdesk process. However, efficiency and speed are lost because of manually handling ticket assessments.
With an automated helpdesk, you can assign tickets to relevant agents who are most capable of handling them. It ensures that every single support ticket is in safe hands and is redirected to the right person.
For example, technical issues will need to be assigned to agents with technical expertise. Or, billing queries will get assigned to agents who have relevant knowledge about return policies and procedures.
Secondly, you can also set ticket properties like type, priority, status, etc. on every incoming ticket.
(An easy way to create tickets with DeskXpand)
2. Automatic Ticket Conversion
As a brand, you might have multiple customer-facing channels. Customers reach out to you from various platforms, whether it’s email, live chat, feedback forms, and such.
In order to merge all the queries in a single dashboard, you need the right helpdesk automation tools. With service desk automation, you can enable ticket conversion.
This way, with ticket conversion, you can reduce redundant tasks and enable quick resolution.
3. Automated Alerts & Notifications
Notifications and alerts are important to keep all the stakeholders informed about everything that is going on.
In order to automate support and offer seamless customer support, you will need to keep your agents and customers well-informed all the time.
Automatic alerts and notifications can reduce your agent’s efforts.
You can send notifications whenever a specific customer task or condition is met.
You can send these notifications in the form of emails or desktop notifications and enable users to track the progress of a ticket.
Click to learn more about ticket management with automation.
Know more about helpdesk automation
4. Canned Responses
If your agents need to draft a fresh response every time they’re on a call with the customers, it’ll kill their productivity.
Canned responses are pre-formatted messages that customer support agents use to respond to similar customer issues.
Canned responses play a vital role in enriching conversations by delivering accurate and quick information. They are important to reduce response time, increase engagement, and achieve a high satisfaction rate.
Let your support reps type the responses once, save, and reuse them to offer a smooth experience!
DeskXpand is now available with its latest helpdesk automation features. Opt for DeskXpand, help your agents with everyday mundane tasks, and let your customers enjoy impeccable and fast service.
5. Automated Reports
If you measure your team’s performance manually, it can lead to unavoidable errors, biases, and improper analysis.
With helpdesk automation, you can gather precise metrics and get a holistic view of your team’s performance.
Admin can receive automatically generated reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and track progress accordingly.
You can generate and receive insightful reports on key aspects like:
- Ticket Volume
- Number of Tickets (open, closed, escalated)
- Average First Response Time
- Average Resolution Time
- First Contact Resolution
6. Ticket Escalation
Every customer expects a resolution immediately at the time of first contact. However, the processes on the support end are more complex than customers assume them to be.
And it isn’t always possible to resolve a query right away. Plus, agents also need to escalate issues to higher authorities when they do not have the expertise or authority to handle a customer issue by themselves.
And doing this manually will create more problems than it solves.
Therefore, it would be better to have an automated process that escalates specific support queries to the right/relevant people.
Admins can create ticket escalation rules that will automatically escalate tickets to the appropriate members of your team. For example, a request refund query can be automatically escalated to the support manager who has permission to initiate refunds.
7. Self-service Knowledge Base
One of the easiest ways to automate the helpdesk is to leverage a self-service knowledge base.
With the help of a knowledge base, FAQs, video tutorials, etc., you can help customers get quick answers to their queries.
Do you know 40% of customers prefer self-service over human contact?
Your customers need not wait to have a conversation with a support agent. This significantly helps in reducing the number of tickets and response time and enables quick customer support.
Self-service is one of the features that we take pride in. With DeskXpand, you and your team members can create a knowledge base with all the necessary information.
You can then bifurcate articles into various subcategories based on your products, services, etc. Click the link below to explore functionalities like article templates, secure access, and so on.
Know more about the customer self-service helpdesk
8. Widget & Live Chat
By combining self-service with help widgets, you can solve customer problems more efficiently. With chat and widgets, your customers can get answers to their questions quickly.
9. Customer Satisfaction Survey
Customer feedback is important to track and improve your progress. Creating customer surveys the traditional way takes time and effort.
Instead, you can have the Best help desk ticketing software that offers in-built functionality to make surveys. Without any fuss, you can create and share them.
You also have the ability to curate multiple questions related to your service, product, interaction with an agent, etc.
How to Win Customer Support with DeskXpand
Industries across all major sectors and niches are acknowledging the pivotal role of service desk automation in helping them solve the crisis.
Industries are anticipating the growth of automated solutions and acknowledging the need for helpdesk automation for their business. DeskXpand’s automated helpdesk provides built-in automation functionalities that will do away with all your redundant tasks. The admin can automate well-orchestrated support workflows, tickets as well as responses.
It is built by functional experts and developers with certifications in their respective fields. We are an ISO27001-certified portal development company with 15+ years of development experience. We build products that you can customize according to your present and future needs. Sign up for your free trial now!
