How to build best in class support desk?

• What is behind the success of business leaders?
• How support plays a vital role in branding and customer experience?
• Do you know the pain points of your current customers and what they think about you?

The answer to all the above questions is your support desk.

Customer satisfaction is the primary measure of success for any company and the effective way to reach customers is through a dedicated support desk working hand in hand with them. Support desk or customer service desk is essentially a single point of contact for customers to reach out to your organization with their grievances, know the status of your response and also provide valuable feedback on what they like and what they do not in the service operations. Based on industry, support desk works in different forms viz. Customer Support, Help Desk, Service Desk, Part Desk, Customer Relationship Management, etc. They work closely with customers – troubleshooting their problems, assisting customers in right use of the product, addressing customer grievances and providing right solutions.

Best in class support desk softwares have following characteristics:
• They act as single point of contact (SPOC) to avoid conflicts and delays.
• They manage call monitoring.
• They manage timely responses, status updates and resolution of problems.
• They are equipped with knowledgeable resources to handle in-depth product information and FAQs.
• They offer proactive support for spotting reoccurring issues, identifying root cause and resolving it.
• They have well defined escalation procedures for effective management of responses.

What is the impact of support desk? – Many service professionals understand that good support does matter and the NO or BAD support can harm reputation of company and even lead to huge losses. No support or Bad support leads to –ve customer word of mouth. –ve word of mouth may impact purchase decision, switching to competition or in worst cases legal suites and claims.

Deploying a support desk helps to know where is the customer ticket, how long it has been in queue and what the lead time to response and closure is. This helps companies in knowing who have been resolving or who can resolve what type of issues, at what level and by what time. This helps to define KPI for different levels and type of calls to optimize response and resolution time.

Support desk plays a vital role to develop customer loyalty as customer feels he is closely connected to the company and this invariably drives company to deliver amazing results.