Read our tips and discover how help desk service automation can boost productivity
Manual tracking of the work of the customer service team becomes cumbersome and time-consuming, especially when you have a large team. In addition, manual management of service desk software can result in human errors and delay business operations. This is where help desk service automation comes to the rescue.
Read this article to learn some practical tips to boost productivity by making a few changes.
Service Desk Automation: A Quick Overview
- Help desk service automation strategies are designed to improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and boost productivity. This can decrease human efforts and assist businesses in reaching their top service excellence goals. Most businesses have adopted services desk but are not making the most of their automation capabilities.
Companies can deploy automation ideas such as automated communication and ticket processing without losing the human element. For example, with the help of service desk automation, organizations can fine-tune their ticketing process to avoid tedious and repetitive manual tasks. As a result, customer issues can be resolved with minimum effort. In addition, it allows companies to escalate tickets, send and receive automated notifications, and much more.
Service Desk Automation Tips To Boost Productivity
Follow these automation tips to help your employees focus more on critical activities.
Automated Ticket Assignment
- If you have difficulty manually assigning tickets among support agents, go for an automated service desk. Support tickets are assigned to the most capable and relevant agents with the help of automated ticket routing. In addition, it ensures that every ticket is in safe hands and qualified to handle them.
For example, technical support tasks are assigned to agents with technical expertise to manage them. In the same way, billing and related tickets are assigned to agents having relevant knowledge. The automated ticket assignment feature helps automatically assign tickets to available agents. This ensures even distribution of tickets and prevents their piling up with a single agent.
Enable Email Forwarding
- Businesses receive multiple customer-facing emails from different accounts. Therefore, service desk software needs to merge all these email inboxes into a single dashboard. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, or Office 365 email service, it is easy to set up email forwarding to your help desk inbox.
The email forwarding feature allows you to automatically redirect or forward customer support emails to your help desk inbox. Once all support requests are under a single platform, it becomes convenient to prioritize urgent support tickets and add tags, or labels, in real time. Moreover, this practice ensures that every ticket is solved.
Automated Notifications
- It is crucial to notify agents and customers to automate support and offer seamless customer service. The predefined automated messages and alerts are sent to the customers and agents when a specific condition is met. These notifications are sent in the form of text messages or emails. The automated alerts enable customers to track the progress of a ticket. An automated help desk software can provide several conditions under which email notifications can be sent and received.
Some popular types of automated notifications include:
- An auto-response when a customer creates a new ticket
- Providing user response-related alerts to customers
- Providing customer response-related alerts to users
- Notification of ticket assignment
- Alerts on an internal note
- New tick notification
Automated Incident Escalation
- Every customer wants to have his issues resolved at the first contact. Some issues are more complex and need to be assessed quickly. Sometimes, the agents do not have the expertise, authority, or knowledge to handle a customer issue alone. In this case, agents escalate tickets to higher reps. However, manual ticket escalation takes time and creates more issues.
Agents may not know the steps to escalate the issues or to whom they should escalate the issue. An automated process escalates the support incident to the right people in real-time. Therefore, it is imperative to create ticket escalation strategies that automatically escalate the tickets to the members in your hierarchy appropriate for the task. For example, when a customer requests a refund, the ticket will be automatically escalated to the customer service manager to initiate refunds.
Leverage A Knowledge Base
- Another excellent tip for service desk automation is creating a self-service knowledge base. It acts as a hub to create, store and share relevant information with customers. A study suggested that about 77% of customers enjoy using a self-service portal for resolving their issues.
A knowledge base can help your customer service process by:
- Allowing customers to solve their significant issues on their own.
- Reducing ticket volume and saving your agents’ time.
- Ensuring smooth and pleasant customer service experience.
In addition, optimizing the knowledge base for keywords also aids in improving customer experience. It enables users to search for FAQs and self-help articles related to their issues.
Use Canned Responses
- Creating a fresh response for similar customer requests every time can decrease productivity. Canned responses created with the help of an automated service desk save you valuable time and energy.
Predefined messages used by customer service agents to respond to similar customer issues are referred to as canned responses. A response can be typed and saved once to offer quick assistance to customers. Help desks offer pre-created canned messages that can be edited as required.
Automatic Updates
- If you constantly worry about your ticketing system’s security and want to ensure the use of the latest version, automated help desk service has your back. Web-based and online help desk systems offer automated security updates. This means organizations do not need manual security updates or worry about buying expensive, updated software versions.
With help desk service automation, security and software updates are automatically installed without downtime. Regular security updates can keep your valuable data safe and protected. In addition, customer information, communications, shared responses, ticket history, and other crucial data are automatically backed up on the cloud. Automated helpdesk workflow allows you to achieve more in less time.
Rise above the mundane processes by seeking help from the pros. Contact us today if you want to experience minimal downtime and more productivity in your business. Keep track of all the complaints and their recurrence by hiring our help desk services. Outsource My IT is a professional help desk services provider in Fairfield, New Jersey. For more information, give us a call at 973-638-2722.
