4 Ways Automation in Helpdesk Can Improve Customer Service

Providing support to your customer is an extensive task. You and your support agents are constantly on your toes to understand and resolve queries. 

Moreover, customers have become extremely impatient. They need their queries to be solved quickly. That’s why you need to have processes that help streamline the customer support experience. 

Automation is the next big thing. It is helping businesses make their support workflow efficient, reduce manual tasks, increase productivity, and ultimately ensure customer satisfaction.

In this post, we will discuss all helpdesk automation and how it can help you improve customer service. 

An Overview of Automation in Helpdesk

Automation is transforming how businesses conduct their operations. When it comes to automation, different sectors are likely to see rapid development in 2022 and beyond. 

What is automation? IBM defines it as a term for technology applications where human input is minimized. As you can see, the purpose is to reduce mundane manual work. It ultimately helps you and your employees focus on other important tasks. 

Automation in customer support is not a new thing. Over the past few years, there has been a tremendous increase in the support provided by automated technology.

Helpdesk automation aims to reduce human errors and enable businesses to achieve their top goal of customer support.  

Signs That You Need Helpdesk Automation

Many entrepreneurs consider automation to be extremely complex and ask whether they really need it. Here are a few questions you need to ask to ensure that helpdesk automation is the right for you. 

• Do you spend hours on manual administrative tasks?
• Do you struggle to fetch queries manually?
• Every time you need information or data, do you do that manually?

If the answer to such a question is yes, then that’s a sign you need the power of automation. It helps in making your workflow more efficient and enhances customer satisfaction. 

By prioritizing automation, you can improve your team’s productivity, and easily handle large volumes of tickets. Explore all the benefits of automation in the helpdesk in detail. 

Benefits of Helpdesk Automation

Have a look at the advantages of automating your customer support.

Enables You to Speed Up the Response Time

It is very important for businesses to respond to queries quickly. No customer likes delayed responses. They expect you to escalate a query as soon as possible. 

When you are able to achieve that, you can easily achieve greater user satisfaction. Automation helps decrease the time it takes to accept and solve a query. 

Reduce Human Errors

Of course, to err is human. However, in providing support to customers, no! With automation, you can eliminate potential errors. For instance, you can bring more accuracy in finding the right information. 

Deliver a Smooth Experience to Customers

Automation helps you streamline your workflow and processes. This can play a major role in reducing time and providing quick responses. That ultimately enables you to deliver a smooth experience. 

Ways Automation in Helpdesk Can Help You

Automate your ticket routing process

Manually assigning tickets for you and your support team is challenging. For example, you assign a ticket to the wrong agent who doesn’t have the right expertise to solve that particular issue. Further, there are high chances of errors happening. 

Automation in the helpdesk can enable you to assign tickets to a person who is the most capable. For example, a ticket that has to do with a payment issue goes to an agent who is good at handling the problem. It ensures that the ticket goes in the right hand and is solved in a timely manner. 

Here are some of the advantages of automated ticket routing:

• Reduces the average time an agent takes to share the first response to a customer. 
• Brings speed and accuracy to your ticket routing system.
• Avoids unnecessary human errors.
• Creates consistency in the process of ticket distribution.
• Enhances agent productivity and thus focuses on other important tasks. 
• Gives quick responses and thus improves customer satisfaction.

Give automated notifications

Notifications are predefined automated alerts or responses. Notifications can help you offer a seamless experience to your customers. You send emails to your customers to both customers and staff members. Here are different types of notifications you can send:

• Auto-respond to customers on new tickets
• Notifications to agents on new ticket generation
• Notification to a particular agent when a ticket is generated

Take maximum benefit of the knowledge base

Creating a self-service is one of the best things you can do to handle customer support. Most customers use a knowledge base to solve their queries. You can reduce a lot of time to respond to tickets simply with a knowledge base. 

A knowledge base enables your customers to self-serve answers, thus reducing the high costs involved in recruiting more support agents. Below are some reasons how a self-service knowledge base can benefit your business:

• It helps customers resolve issues themselves.
• It is beneficial in reducing ticket volume.
• The knowledge base also helps save the valuable time of your agents.
• It enables you to deliver a smooth experience to your customers.
• By providing consistent information across all channels, you can build customer loyalty. 

Canned Responses

You get tons of queries every day and answer each one. Canned responses are predetermined responses to common questions that can ease your process of answering each question. Many businesses have started using canned responses to enjoy the following advantages:

• Easily manage a large number of customers.
• You can save a lot of time and offer more convenience to your support agents.
• By providing immediate answers with the help of a canned response, you can keep your customers happy. 

It is also important to note that you cannot make the entire conversation canned and sound robotic. For the best customer experience, it is good to ensure personalization in every message you send.  

Additional Section – List of Industries That Can Use Helpdesk

Irrespective of the industry, the helpdesk benefits in keeping both customers and employees happy. Here are the most common use cases of helpdesk software: 

eCommerce

eCommerce helpdesk helps you quickly solve queries for any channel or marketplace you sell on. You can also monitor and organize all the queries in one place. You can leverage response templates and notifications to improve the overall customer support experience. 

HR helpdesk

HR helpdesk is a centralized source of information. It allows companies to manage incoming requests from employees and provide them with a solution according to the standardized policy of the company. Apart from that, the HR ticketing system enhances employee engagement and helps scale HR operations. 

Travel

Travel is a very dynamic and competitive industry. A helpdesk can help take the drudgery from mundane, repetitive tasks and helps your business be more competitive. A helpdesk’s multi-channel capabilities can help you provide exceptional customer support.

Apart from these, there are various other industries that can benefit from a helpdesk. They include manufacturing, education, retail, hospitality, and so on.  

Concluding Remarks

Smooth customer support is highly essential to enhance customer satisfaction rates and foster customer loyalty. 

The latest trend in automation can help you take your customer support to the next level by streamlining different processes and providing prompt responses to your customer. From ticket routing to sending surveys to your customers, you can benefit from automation in the helpdesk. 

After reading this post, we hope you have got enough information on how you can get started with automation in the helpdesk.