Introduction to Zoho Desk
Help Desk is a department in an organization that is in charge of providing the support needed by customers while using the company's product or a service. Customers contact the help desk when they have a question or a problem and a product expert addresses the question and resolves the problem.
Help desk is managed by the product experts from the customer support department who address customers' queries or issues. Most companies give out an email address or a toll-free number to contact these experts. Nowadays, companies have opened various channels like chat, SMS, social media, webforms, and community forums to help customers reach the help desk anytime, anywhere.
Help desk software organizes customers' requests and helps to resolve them in the quickest way possible. It automates most of the steps in this process as possible. Help desk software consists of three parts: Ticket Management, Automation Suite, and Reporting and Optimization.
Ticket Management: The software pulls customer emails from an email address and lists them in a single place. It allows a help desk executive to easily answer and log calls from customers. It enables customer support executives to listen and respond to customer feedback on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Automation Suite: The Automation Suite allows a help desk coordinator to ensure that questions from customers are redirected to employees who can answer them satisfactorily. It enables the coordinator to monitor when a support executive hasn't responded to a ticket, when a ticket is taking too long to get resolved, or one of the several other possible cases.
Reporting and Optimization: This is the most important function of customer service. It pulls pertinent information about the critical aspects of the help desk. Managers can understand parameters such as load on the help desk team, turnaround time, and resolution rate of each executive from these data. Metrics like these give managers a quick perspective on how things are faring and let them make amends for the better.
Why Zoho Desk?
A web-based help desk software like Zoho Desk can give you the ability to manage your customer support activities efficiently. In addition to the key functionalities to manage tickets, offer multiple channels for support and service, provide easy branding and customization and essential automations like SLA and workflows, there is quite a lot more in Zoho Desk. All these put together ensures that you give great customer support experience.
Essential Functionalities of Zoho Desk
Connecting with your customers via multiple touch points
Collect customer requests via phone, email, social channels or web form and set priority to the incoming tickets. Additionally, the community forums provide your customers a platform for discussion with the ability to convert a forum post into a ticket.
Making use of various tools for agent's productivity
Improve the resolution time and customer service by creating an internal repository of solutions and articles that agents can refer to. This Help Desk Solution for your support teams will allow your support staff to provide appropriate solutions for customer tickets effectively and save valuable time otherwise spent drafting the same solutions repeatedly.
Providing a Help Center
Help your customers proactively before they contact your support team by building a self-service customer portal. This portal can be totally customized according to your brand's needs and includes the essential components with a comprehensive knowledge base, a community platform and a portal to submit, view, and track ones own tickets.
Automating essential and repeated tasks
Send acknowledgment emails on receiving tickets from your customers, assign tickets to agents based on various criteria and notify customers and agents sending notifications via email or SMS. Additionally, you can create SLAs to define ticket due dates and escalate them to multiple levels when they fall overdue.
Create Standard and Customized Reports
Take stock of your help desk activities and important facts about your support center's performance using in-built reports. Measure specific aspects of your ticketing process by generating custom reports effortlessly. You can determine the average resolution time, the number of tickets closed per agent per day, the number of tickets opened and more.
Maintaining a secure database
Do you receive sensitive information from your customers? Take charge by defining profiles, roles, and groups in Zoho Desk. Configure data-sharing rules and field-level security to ensure your proprietary information stays protected.
Accessing contextual information from Zoho CRM
Close your customer loop from sales to support by integrating with Zoho CRM, an industry-leading customer relationship management application. You can import your contacts and accounts information from Zoho CRM for contextual support service and view support tickets raised by your leads, contacts, and accounts from within Zoho CRM.
Another important point that you should be aware of before getting started with your Zoho Desk account is the browsers and the versions that support Zoho Desk.