Improving Customer Service: Helpdesk Automation
Introduction
In the past, customer service primarily involved resolving customer inquiries. Nowadays, customer service is a crucial part of evaluating Customer Experience (CX). As its importance grows, the required technologies and complexities increase as well. Customers make inquiries not only through the homepage but also via phone and email, resulting in a diverse array of inquiries.
Many companies use helpdesk solutions to effectively respond to customers and provide the best possible customer experience. Helpdesk automation significantly enhances the capabilities of customer service teams.
What is Helpdesk Automation?
Helpdesk automation builds processes for tickets, simplifying tasks like ticket assignment and summarization. This reduces the workload of routine and repetitive tasks, allowing customer support teams to focus on actual customer issues, respond more quickly, and provide a better customer experience.
The Necessity of Automation
Customer issues are not simple. They involve multiple teams. For instance, if a customer requests a refund, the finance team, distribution team, and customer support team must all be involved. Using helpdesk automation, processes like ‘refunds’ are automated, so if a refund ticket is created, the process is handled automatically.
As companies grow, customer service demands increase exponentially, often becoming overwhelming before the organization can scale. Time is commonly wasted on administrative tasks rather than actual customer service. Helpdesk automation helps manage the increasing customer service load, eliminates time wastage on administrative tasks, and improves the overall level of customer service, bringing the company closer to providing the best customer experience.
Advantages of Automation
- Ticket Classification and Prioritization: Automatically categorizes incoming inquiries and sets priorities, assigning them to the appropriate personnel. Tickets are prioritized based on customer type, inquiry channel, language, topic, etc.
- Rapid Response to Major Issues: Quickly alerts staff to issues requiring immediate attention, such as website errors or payment processing problems, and automatically informs customers that their issues are being addressed.
- Handling Increased Inquiries: During peak traffic times or sales periods, automation reduces administrative processing time, allowing staff to focus on resolving customer issues.
- More Processing with Less Staff: When hiring new staff is difficult, automation helps manage workloads and maintain response rates.
- Tracking Diverse Issues: Automation categorizes various workflows and assists the customer support team in collaborating with other teams to resolve issues.
- Strengthening Customer Relationships: Automation increases time spent with customers, boosting satisfaction and brand loyalty. Support teams can maintain relationships through follow-up actions and regular status updates on inquiries.
Freshdesk’s Automation Features
Freshdesk’s automation features reduce tedious and repetitive tasks, enabling support teams to assist customers effectively. Key features include:
- Ticket Creation Rules: Automatically recognizes and categorizes new tickets, sets their importance, and assigns them to the appropriate staff.
- Time-Based Triggers: Periodically checks helpdesk status and monitors SLA management.
- Ticket Updates: Sets notifications for specific tickets, such as complaints from VIP customers, to ensure important matters are not missed.
- Scenario Rules: Allows for the setting of rules for specific scenarios, enabling all necessary actions to be completed with a single click.
- Audit Detection: One reason key metrics may not be accurately measured is that tickets remain in progress due to responses like thank you messages. The AI engine ‘Freddy’ recognizes the last conversation and determines the ticket status.
Conclusion
Modern customer satisfaction goes beyond mere service improvement. Companies must enhance the overall customer experience from the first contact through purchase and support. Automation plays a critical role in ticket assignment and prioritization, ensuring consistent experiences for all customers. Therefore, a helpdesk with robust automation capabilities can provide a better experience to meet increasing customer demands.