The Ultimate Guide to Buying

Customer Help desk Software

Top 3 Points to Consider to avoid a Bad Decision!

What does a modern customer expect? Have we been successful in establishing customer relationships? How should we strategize a customer service policy aligned with the business goals? Many questions come up when we think about customer management and support. Running a business is not easy, one needs to think and rethink certain decisions, take a closer look at various aspects and envision the progress. Competing solely on products and prices is a passé, customer acquisition and retention is the way to lead.

Here we discuss top three areas to focus on while looking around for customer support help desk software-

1

Integration and Pricing

Businesses cannot simply buy and take what someone says with a pinch of salt, especially when it matters to their customers, employees and sensitive information. Companies should always opt for comprehensive customer help desk software that allows seamless integration with their existing and new third-party systems whenever required. This integration should not come at a cost of loss of data, performance, features or money. For instance, data from marketing, accounting, sales and customer support department should be synchronised within the software, payment gateways and mailing interface should be integrated for quick accessibility. Cross-functional working, centralisation and information sharing can be achieved when there is a smooth integration of all the systems, saving costs and time. A cloud-based customer support software charges as per the subscription plans, choose it wisely as there is a huge scope to save upfront costs and hardware investment.

2

Customisation and Automation

Customisation is the key factor to gain maximum ROI (Return on Investment) using CRM software. Since customer relationship is inter-related with all the aspects of the business, customising features as per the need helps to achieve goals. A tailored solution works far better than a generalised product! Reasons are pretty obvious- you need not pay for what is not in use, you can configure things in synchronisation to your business processes and terminologies, brand it for a consistent experience as per the target audience impression and control it. One should be able to customise and define automated rules to take actions as per priorities, allocate and schedule tasks, repetitive activities, control sharing, accessibility, hierarchy, design, data-field capture validations and send notification reminders. Automation permits effortless administration and customisation increases usefulness of the platform.

3

Mobile access and Self-Service

Let your freak flag fly high as your customers engage with you, be your advocates, bring referrals and speak for you around! Mobile is ruling and it has made everyone habituated to accessing things instantly. Just like mobile-friendly websites are important, so are mobile applications or mobile compatible software. Cloud-based software and mobile applications are replacing the “on premise” device dependent culture. Mobile apps foster an “access anywhere and anytime” approach for the users. End-users enjoy a smart self-service platform on the application and employees can carry out their work-on-the-go and provide support as they receive requests. Empowered customers stay longer and associate with the brand. Self-service apps are the best medium to connect them to your business. Mobile access depicts a source to pool and analyse the customer behaviour, trends, identification of issues and loopholes in the systems and consequently take decisions.

Service as a software (SaaS) deployment with mobile functionality for important CRM features is catching up the trends. According to the estimates, SaaS deployments of CRM will make up 80-85% of the entire market by 2025.

Customer service determines the future of customer relationship; hence it needs to be amazing and superior. Apart from the above-mentioned areas to consider before purchasing a customer support help desk software, here are some of the questions that are often popped up in a person’s mind:

Will the issues be resolved faster?

Customer service aims to maintain relationships by addressing their concerns on time. Primarily, a company looks to buy CRM solution or customer help desk software to ensure fast resolution of the issues. Customer service software with a rich knowledge base, captured interactions, documents, predictive analysis, and history; makes it possible to step up your game in no time & attend queries.

Can we consolidate information centrally?

Data is important and so it is presumably beneficial to get your head around it! Using a CRM platform enables to have a unified view of all the information and analyse it in a better way. Irrespective of the communication medium, device, attending agent and customer location, etc., the information is available centrally and accessible to the authorised users.

How easy it is for the users to get acquainted to customer service technology?

Customer management can be simplified only if the users feel as ease to engage through the platform. Whether we talk about the service desk or contact centre software for customer support agents or it is about self-service applications for the end-users, it should be quickly adaptable based on user-friendliness concept. It usually requires minimum training and skills to learn using it.

How will a customer support software be able to save time and increase productivity?

Customer help desk software assists in answering more calls in a day, increasing the first-time fix ratio and enhance customer experience. Customer service agents can answer to the queries in a better way using the pre-populated templates, schedule tasks, search and access information and thus save their time. Also, self-service capabilities for the customers help in a long way.

Does the customer help desk software actually deliver a consistent experience?

Yes, customer help desk software is packaged to provide a customer with a consistent experience across all mediums and empower agents as well. Every interaction is treated with attention, answered and solved as per SLA policies and at every stage, the customer gets notified of the progress and over that, they can track every detail using the self-service channel.

Is the system scalable and flexible to meet dynamic requirements?

One of the main requirements of small-medium enterprises is to know if their chosen software be able to meet their future needs. It is easy to scale the cloud-based platform with minimum efforts without affecting the ongoing work. It provides flexibility in terms of pricing, operational preferences, branding, visibility, and features.

Is the technical support and help available 24x7?

If the system or work comes to a halt, it can lead to customers frustration and cost an arm and a leg to the business. Ensuring a great technical support for your employees from the software vendor is extremely important yet snubbed factor! While we understand this, our clients are always delighted to contact us at any point of time for their apprehensions & so are we to help them.

Set the record straight with a solution that has the ability to combine all elements and help you to understand, develop and manage your customers. Customer service, unlike old times, has grown to encompass active, self-motivated and interactive support than just solving issues. While this shall remain the trend, future of CRM will see more collaboration and automation. To know more about the implementation and effects of cloud platform with customer help desk software, speak to the industry experts. Find the latest updates and interesting statistics on our Facebook, Twitter, Google plus and LinkedIn accounts.

Make your Move now!

iTouchVision is one of the world’s leading cloud-based service provider with innovation & excellence at its base. The company has made its presence in all business verticals with its technical & operational capabilities to enhance the working of private & public sector organisations. Our products, ranging from Web-based software to Mobile applications have made their mark globally to transform the way work is completed.