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How to Setup a Functional Help Desk

Last Updated: March 2024

Whether you’re looking to scale your business or simply looking to ramp up your customer support game, you’ll have to rely on a help desk. It could be that you already have a help desk setup, but it keeps leaving you asking for more. Wherever you stand in your business endeavors, setting up a functional help desk should be your immediate next step. Setting up a functional help desk takes your business’s customer support experience to the next level. Here’s the catch – if done aptly. But if you think it takes lots of manpower, hours of work, and countless complicated tasks, it doesn’t have to be that hard.

Why Do You Need A Functional Help Desk?

Keeping a support process backed by the right software can help you approach any internal as well as external problems at the right time and solve them duly. Help desk software can gather communications and problems from multiple channels in one place. It gives you a direction of execution by helping you organize, prioritize, track, and resolve any request that comes your organization’s way. Here are the pros that would get you started on setting up a functional help desk right away.
  • Manages all queries and betters organization productivity
  • Helps you define key metrics, and also helps you chase them
  • Makes it easy for customers to find solutions to their queries
  • Minimizes the resolution time and spikes instant replies
  • Boosts your CSAT scores.

Get Started With Setting Up A Help Desk

Now that you know the benefits of a help desk software, let’s get you a functional help desk.

1. Pin down the goals you want to achieve

You need a defined set of goals while creating a help desk. Get connected with your support team and chat with them. Ask them what are the issues they are currently facing and jot them down. These are essentially the goals that you want to achieve and create. Here are some goals you might want to consider:
  • Reduce friction for customers and your employees
  • Keep repeated tasks in check and automate them
  • Better reporting and KPIs
  • Everything your support team needs and cleans out unwanted things

2. Pick your communication channels and team roles

The first step of setting up a help desk will be to make a list of all the communication channels that your target audience uses. These can be email, SMS, social media, any forums, chat support, or channels you want to expand to, and more. You also need to figure out your support team’s roles for the help desk process. There are different levels in help desk management – admin, agent, and even users who want self-service. Assign such roles in your help desk setup. Pin down the kind of support requests you are likely to receive and the manpower you will need to tackle them.

3. Allow your customers to help themselves before your team jumps in

Make a note of the questions your customers ask most often and create a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page. This will cut off the resolution rate by a massive range, with most of the queries solved within the FAQ page. Additionally, you can also deploy a chatbot and automate a response process. This will rightly navigate the customers to the right solutions and also solve a majority of them automatically. Another great idea is to create a community forum. Participants of the community would be able to help each other or better yet, new customers will be able to find resolutions themselves.

4. Jot down your observation of the process

It is now time to document how you wish to achieve your defined goals. This would help your present team member and future members be in sync with the support process. This document should contain the standard procedures of your help desk and ticketing system. You need to document the kind of tags your team will use, a standard template for frequent responses, workflow and responsibilities, escalation, internal and external query management, and more.

5. Test the setup you plan to execute

Now that you have defined how to run a help desk, it is time to test it. Use your email and other accounts you use to send your team some queries. Test the workflow, any automation, FAQ pages and forums (if any), customer types, internal vs external management, resolutions, and more. Double-check all the details you have worked on before going live.

The Ultimate Help Desk Checklist Template You Need

We want to make it easy for you to get started, so, we have compiled a checklist that will help you get started now.
  • Communication channels – Set up and integrate all the channels you want your customers to contact you from.
  • Set up your workflow – Here, you need to create a contact form, put a ticket approval process in place, work out default email templates and notifications, and set SLA (service-level agreement) rules and business hours.
  • Ticket support – Define a process of how your team members receive tickets, and who should receive what kind of ticket. This will allow easy and quick distribution and resolution.
  • Automation – Set some canned responses and deploy chatbots to deliver resolutions to repeated queries.
  • Others – Check advance settings you can deploy like customer reviews, integrations, sign-in options, and more. Keep your support agents in check and monitor their performance. Lastly, test the process, and provide any training your team members need, to make the pivot phase of the software a success.
The next step is always work-in-progress. Here, you should always strive to get better. Keep improving your setup by optimizing the entire process. Ask feedback from the customers as well as your internal team and work on them. If you do the process right, you can provide an amazing customer experience to your customers. Need a hand with customer service support? We at Helplama have the expertise you and your business need. With the right customer support setup process followed by the right touch of local lingo, we can make the process of customer query resolution hassle-free and efficient for you. Check out how our Zero risk model works.

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