The quality of the customer service your company provides cannot only make or break your reputation; it can have a significant impact your bottom line. According to the [24]7, Inc. 2016 Customer Engagement Report, almost half (47%) of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day of experiencing poor customer service, and 4 out of 5 respondents would take the same action within a week. Thanks to social media the stakes are even higher, as a negative review can go around the world in minutes. As customer expectations increase, improving customer service is not only vital, it’s an investment in your organization’s future, and your help desk plays a crucial role in this effort. Centralizing and automating your help desk’s processes is extremely important. So is maintaining optimal technology performance, and improving productivity for the people who rely on your products and services. With that in mind, here are three simple tools you can quickly implement to improve customer service and resolve customer issues quickly:
Ticketing Management Tool
End-user trouble tickets come in many forms: questions about how to do something, workstation problems, network and app performance issues. When trouble tickets arrive at the help desk, they then have to be analyzed and categorized as high-priority, low-priority, or somewhere in-between. Keeping track of, prioritizing and handling high volumes of tickets is extremely challenging but there are ways to make it easier. By using a ticketing management tool, you can automate and organize help desk tasks, which will allow you to resolve end-user trouble tickets quickly and contribute to improving end-user productivity and customer satisfaction. Some key aspects of a ticketing management tool include:
- Ticket creation, routing, and escalation. These functions ensure tickets travel the shortest, fastest route from the time they arrive until they are resolved.
- Priority and tier level assignments (i.e. urgent, high, medium, low; tier 1, tier 2, etc.). These labels can keep critical and timely issues from falling through the cracks.
- Technician assignments. This capability allows help desk admins to make the most of staff members’ skill sets, their areas of specialization, their availability, the need to address a particular issue more promptly, and ticket priority.
- Ticket status, tracking, and updates (i.e. open, closed, escalated, in research, etc.). Features like these provide your customers with up-to-the-minute status information.
- Conversion of email service requests into trouble tickets. Tracking this and other metrics can provide meaningful insights to guide the future direction of a product offering or service being supported by the help desk, or for evaluating the IT help desk function as a whole.
IT Asset Management Tool
Your help desk has the necessary task of tracking and documenting hardware and software IT assets. Trying to do all this manually is a tough job that takes a lot of time.
An IT asset management (ITAM) tool helps you stay on top of this process and get the following tasks done more quickly and efficiently by:
- Discovering and tracking IT assets. This function increases efficiencies and productivity by automating search and tracking for your IT assets.
- Creating regular reports of the assets’ status. Keep the help desk team apprised of asset status with this ability to generate up-to-the-minute reporting.
- Tracking assets’ problem histories by linking them to problem tickets. Linking problem histories to problem tickets provides critical continuity and offers insights on larger problems.
- Maintaining records of assets’ procurements, accounts, licenses, and agreements. Automating the maintenance of asset record keeping improves productivity and allows you to provide updated information in minutes.
Remote Desktop Support Tool
A remote management tool lets help desk technicians have remote access to end-users’ workstations, which means your IT staffer can save lots of valuable time otherwise spent in walking to another floor — or another building – to deal with a problem. This tool allows you to remotely:
- Troubleshoot and finish administration tasks on servers and workstations. The ability to perform remote troubleshooting and to complete tasks provides increased productivity and offer flexibility to your IT help team.
- Reboot systems, start and stop services and processes, copy and delete files, and view and clear event logs. Being able to reboot systems and perform other essential tasks remotely simplifies the work of your IT admin and service technicians, which can result in faster resolution of service tickets.
- Manage Active Directory® environment and Group Policy. This function provides complete control of your AD environments ad allows you to manage extended AD objects, manage multiple AD domains from a single dashboard, and easily export AD properties, system configurations, and software information in an easy-to-use CSV or XML format.
Allow employees to solve frequent, simple problems
We’ve all been in your customers’ shoes and have had to wait hours to get the smallest problem fixed. It’s frustrating and unpleasant, and no one appreciates being in that position. You can change that in your company by giving your employees tools that let them automate and improve help desk processes and make a real difference for the customer. You’ll empower your employees, contribute to reducing the volume of help desk tickets, and make your client base happy.
If you’re looking to save time for your customer service staff, you might also want to check out Passportal Blink. This particular tool can take a lot of repetitive work off your team’s plate, without reducing the quality of the customer service you’re providing.
Blink offers an automated solution for customers who are requesting a password reset. It will walk them through that process typically in just 60 seconds or less.
That way, your support staff has no need to handle password reset tickets, and your customer base gets what they need quickly. Blink also works with Microsoft Active Directory, Azure AD, Microsoft 365, and Windows.
IT professionals are busy, pressured, active in well-connected professional networks, and eager to share their opinions with colleagues and friends. Everything you do to improve customer service is an investment—from the speed and efficacy of your help desk to the latest product updates and new service offerings. This approach will pay off by attracting new customers and retaining those who are satisfied with the service you’ve provided.
SolarWinds Help Desk Essentials Pack – Free Trial
Start improving IT service management and turn a corner on customer satisfaction in the process. Download a free trial of SolarWinds® Help Desk Essentials Pack, a two-in-one combination of SolarWinds® Web Help Desk® and Dameware® Remote Support.