Proactive Help Desk Strategies for Your Team
In the modern help desk era, sometimes waiting around for your customers to reach out to you isn’t good enough. Competitors are pestering your customers with emails and phone calls on a daily basis, yet some help desk teams are limited to only communicate with customers in their ticket queue which ignores a huge opportunity. After all, your business development team worked hard to acquire your customers, so why should communication slow so substantially once they sign the dotted line?
Here’s how to make your help desk team more proactive with customers and, more specifically, to understand why help desk conversations shouldn’t always be reactive in nature…
Don’t go too long without “checking in” with all your customers – It’s easy for businesses to assume that silence means happy customers and healthy relationships. While this may be the case sometimes, it’s important to remove assumptions from business as much as possible. Utilize help desk software to keep track of exactly how long it’s been since a customer has contacted your help desk and determine a specific timeframe for when you need to see how a customer is doing. Some companies follow up every month, while others reach out on a quarterly or biannual basis. The benefit of “checking in” is that it prevents issues from becoming so huge that they become irreparable and the customer leaves.
Let agents follow up in their own way so they feel more comfortable – With the reliance on human communication becoming less prominent thanks to advancing technology and help desk automation, it’s more important than ever to make every interaction count. One way to do this is to let help desk agents follow up in a way that’s comfortable to them AND your customers. If an agent is happy and comfortable, it shows in their conversations and it’s more likely to encourage customers to “open up” about their true feelings in relation to your business. Whether it’s phone, email, or even video chat, creating a comfortable conversation leaves a positive and approachable impression of your business. This is important because it makes you seem less daunting to a customer when a real issue pops up and they need to reach out.
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Leverage data to identify future concerns while addressing current issues – While having comfortable conversations is important, making sure the conversation benefits customers is the true defining success of help desk teams. An issue arising isn’t an ideal situation for businesses, but a help desk team should approach the situation looking to make the most of every conversation they have with the customer. Fixing the existing issue is obviously the top priority, but a great help desk team can take a mundane conversation and make it memorable by leveraging help desk metrics to assist the business even further. For example, an agent may notice when helping a customer and looking at their metrics that one of the products they use frequently has a new version. Instead of ignoring this and waiting for the old version to cause problems, the agent should alert the customer so they can upgrade to avoid future issues.
In short, make your help desk team more proactive with customers by keeping track of all your activity and utilizing this information to make smarter decisions. Don’t be afraid to reach out to speak with a customer if it’s been awhile, even if nothing is urgent, to prevent larger issues from surprising you. Make the conversation comfortable and set a positive future tone so the customer knows what to expect from your help desk team when a real issue pops up. Lastly, make customer conversations count by doing what you can to prevent future issues with data analysis to create smarter interactions. Deploying a proactive help desk strategy for your team will save a company time, reduce overhead costs, and create happier customers.
