Helpdesk definition, benefits and objectives for eCommerce 

Whether you’re a customer looking to troubleshoot a product bug or an employee trying to connect to the company VPN, nothing is more annoying than not being able to contact a company when you need help.

In today’s time-constrained world, both customers and employees expect seamless support interactions that make them feel valued. An essential but frequently disregarded element of first-rate internal and external customer service is a help desk.

What does a help desk do?

Many businesses have their own definitions of what a help desk is depending on what their help desk is for. Providing IT support, whether to external clients or internal clients (employees) who need it, is typically the main responsibility of a help desk. It is, however, a more general term that some businesses use to refer to a customer advocacy, support, or service team. A help desk can also be the software that a customer uses to communicate with one.

What differentiates a service desk from a help desk?

The service desk is sometimes used in place of a help desk in businesses. Others claim that a service desk differs from a help desk because the latter is an evolution of the former and places a new emphasis on giving end users quick, individualized service. What matters is how well your support team supports you, not what you call them.

Why is a help desk so important?

A help desk can be useful for businesses of all sizes and types, from large multinational corporations that provide support to millions of other companies in numerous languages to small consumer-facing businesses that must quickly address customer inquiries without hiring a sizable staff of support agents, especially for eCommerce Customer Support Services. Although having a help desk has many benefits, the following three are the most important:

increases customer satisfaction :

The most obvious benefit of a help desk in Ecommerce Support Service is customers whose problems are easily and quickly resolved.

Improves employee satisfaction:

While focusing on the demands of external clients makes sound business sense, strengthening the assistance offered to internal clients—your employees—can be equally beneficial. 

Actually, there is a direct correlation between happy employees and happy customers.  Nearly two-thirds of employees, according to Gartner research, think that their company struggles to consistently excel in customer experience because of extra work. It makes sense because finding a ladder to reach support requires time away from serving the needs of customers.

Helps a company grow and scale more successfully:

The long-term success of a business depends on having satisfied customers and satisfied employees. Losing customers makes growth much more challenging because they won’t be loyal for very long if they don’t feel supported. 

How to determine whether you need help desk personnel?

The IT division of your is a vital part of your operations, supporting both internal teams and clients. Unfortunately, they are prone to overbooking, which causes the help desk to have a backlog of support tickets. Use the staffing calculator to keep track of your help desk staffing needs and make decisions about when to add more team members. This formula shouldn’t be used in place of a typical workforce management staffing calculator; it should only be used as a guide. Teams will also need to consider things like agent breaks, multiple shifts, and different client demands.

7 characteristics of a quality help desk

There are two levels to an effective help desk. 

Your help desk staff members are on the front lines, interacting with customers directly, but the company needs to give them the tools they need to do their jobs well. The first step towards success is putting a few essential components at both levels into practise:

1. Strong people

Any help desk’s secret ingredient is its staff.Make sure to include team members who have a focus on the customer, a capacity for empathy, and interpersonal customer service skills.

2. A reliable ticketing process

You require technology to assist your workforce and increase their chances of success. Support tickets are interactive records that give a support team a way to monitor the progress of customer requests, enable several agents to collaborate on difficult issues, and provide each client with a context-specific view of their service experience. These features come together in a ticket management system.  An omnichannel ticketing system allows a help desk team to keep track of, prioritize, organize, respond to, and resolve each ticket.

3. Powerful tool for tracking issues

Because it enables it to efficiently keep track of issues and bugs users encounter with software, an issue tracker is a crucial tool for an IT help desk. This ensures that users get status updates in a timely manner and that the support agent, engineer, and manager can track the problem until it is resolved.

4. Self-service

Because it enables users to locate solutions on their own using a knowledge base, discussion board, or AI-powered tool like Answer Bot, self-service is a natural complement to a help desk.

5. Analytics

The customer service desk can provide a wealth of insightful data and metrics. You can only accomplish this, though, if your help desk software has an easy-to-use analytics tool. Deep insights into everything from the efficiency of their teams to the degree of customer satisfaction are advantageous to help desk managers. When distributed throughout the organization, it can provide insights into the problems that customers face and what product categories need further development.

6. Customer feedback

Customer feedback is necessary for every help desk interaction especially in E-commerce Support Services. Help desk software can incorporate feedback into the process by enabling a support team to automatically contact customers after they have resolved an issue to gauge how well they have done. Even before a customer completes a survey, help desk staff can forecast customer satisfaction using AI.

7. Applications, automation, and integrations

Every help desk is different. Automation, apps, and integrations enable help desk staff to customize their work environment. This makes it possible to automate tasks like closing tickets after a predetermined period of time, matching an agent with a conversation based on expertise, and filling out tickets with prewritten responses known as macros.

Conclusion:

Integrating your help desk system with your internal tools, like Slack, makes collaboration easier. And, if you’re a global business, you’ll likely need your help desk to support translation apps.