Customer Self-Service | | Published July 25, 2017

5 Must Have Features of a Good Helpdesk Ticketing System

In your search for the help desk application most suited for your company, look for the following 5 features of a good helpdesk ticketing system that make the best customer support solutions stand out from the rest.

1. Self Service

Your customers don’t just encounter problems when they’re at home or at the office staring at their computer. They have issues arise 24/7, late at night, during a night out, or while hanging out at the park with the kids. The longer they have to wait to interact with you the longer the problem percolates.

That’s why you need to have constant availability. A help desk ticketing system with many self-service options means customers will be able to get a wide variety of answers to their problems at all times. FAQs, forums, and easy to use ticket submission is all vital to customers’ happiness.

2. Customer Access

Nothing is more infuriating for a customer as submitting a ticket to never receive a response or update from anyone for weeks on end. Time seems to tick by slowly as your nerves get more frazzled by the day. When you do finally hear back the response is almost never enough for your satisfaction. However, if you’re able to follow the action as the ticket gets checked and answered, you feel like you’re at least being taken seriously. Time goes by way faster if you’re “in the know.”

3. Collaboration

Some problems are not as simple as inserting a standard reply. There are times customers have stumbled upon some truly rare and bizarre scenario with your product or service. If this is the case, you want an easy way for your agents and customers to collaborate. A chat or social networking system is a bare minimum, as is the ability to submit screenshots or screen recordings so you are all on the same page with the problem.

4. Powerful Search

Your team members shouldn’t have to spend all day rifling through pages of notes to find what they need. Nothing is worse for a dedicated customer service agent than knowing they have vital information for a customer but they just are unable to locate it. Even though everything may already be in your knowledge base, you do have to be able to find it.

If you have a powerful enough search engine, though, all those problems go away. Type anything into the search engine and it searches every square inch of your entire knowledge base, including the wiki and even chats.

5. Access to Products

Your company probably sells more than one product. As a result, customer issues can become confusing to team members if they lack that product knowledge, especially when new ones are regularly introduced. Rather than having them spend all day memorizing the entire catalog, why not just have instant access to a product database available through your helpdesk ticketing system? This way a team member can view the particulars of a product and walk the customer through what needs to be done to fix the issue.

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