Understanding Help Desk
Video: Why Use a Help Desk
Customer support agents have a hard job. All they want to do is to solve customer issues
accurately and efficiently, but many times, the confusion of multiple channels, lack of a
systemic prioritization method, and limited context all hinder achieving their goal. What
do customer support agents need in order to provide a delightful customer experience? A
help desk.
A help desk is a system that allows teams to intake, triage, troubleshoot, solve, and
improve upon customer issues. It's the foundation for exceptional customer support.
With the aid of a help desk your customer service agents are able to focus on what
matters most: providing a delightful experience for your customers.
There are five elements of a help desk: intake, triage, troubleshoot, solve, and improve.
Intake is how you receive support inquiries. Intake channels can depend on your
customers and your industry, but these are the four most common methods: call, email,
live chat, and forms. Being available on multiple channels at once might sound
overwhelming, but with the right help desk, you can make it work. When to use which
medium depends on staffing, urgency, and context.
Phone support is best used with customers trying to solve urgent or in-depth problems.
Phone support allows your customer service agent to give your customer highly
personalized, real-time support. However, phone support takes up a lot of time for
both your customer service agent and your customer, and is therefore, one of the more
costly mediums. Email is one of the most popular support channels. Email is best used
when help isn't needed immediately, as sometimes it requires a bit of back-and-forth.
Email is helpful in that screenshots and other context can be included, as necessary, and it
provides a paper trail.
Live chat takes the immediacy of calling and combines it with the ease of email. It should
be used if customers have immediate, but relatively simple inquiries. Live chat is efficient
as it enables customer service agents to support multiple customers simultaneously.
However, similar to email, it can be hard to convey appropriate messaging via text, as
opposed to a phone call.
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Forms are great to use if you don't have the bandwidth to staff phone or live chat
support. Forms typically generate an email or phone conversation, and allow a customer
to identify the best way to be contacted. Like email, there may be a longer wait
period for you customer to receive their answer with forms, therefore they shouldn't be
used if immediate help is needed.
When determining your intake strategy, think about the mediums through which your
customers currently reach out, and if there might be a preference for specific channels. If
you're unsure, do a little research on your target persona, as well as a
deep-dive into how customers currently contact you.
With HubSpot's help desk, you're able to manage all issues and channels in one place.
Your job is to make it easy for customers to reach out to you, HubSpot will make it easy
for you to reach back out to your customers.
After receiving an inquiry through any of the mediums you offer, the next step is to triage.
When you triage, you categorize the inquiry by topic or priority, and route it to the right
person or team.
Two triage steps
1. Organize
2. Prioritize
Triage Step 1: Organize
Customer support inquiries can be overwhelming. Using filters to organize your inquiries
makes them less overwhelming.
Filters allow you to see the intake assigned to you and sort by a number of factors such
as agent assigned, medium through which the intake was received, date the intake came
in, and whether it's open or closed.
Triage Step 2: Prioritize
• Severity of issue
• Company size or revenue
• Service level agreement
Triage by severity of issue
Your support organization should have a universal way of internally identifying the
severity of issues. Some companies use severity category labels like "urgent, high, minor,
and low," along with clearly defined rules as to what issues belong in which
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category. For example, if a business cannot carry on daily operations because of the
issue, it probably deserves to be in the "urgent" category. Whereas, if improving a minor
detail was suggested, but the business can carry on as usual, that issue can
most likely go in the "low" category.
Triage by company size or revenue
Companies that generate a lot of your revenue, or are heavily invested in your
organization, often expect a bit more from you
Triage by service level agreement
A service level agreement, or SLA, is a commitment between a service provider and a
client. The terms of the SLA outline the amount of time a customer support agent has to
respond to the client. SLAs should be the same for all of your clients.
Now that you know what you should be focusing on, let's get to work. Before solving the
issue, follow the three steps of
troubleshooting:
• Understand the issue
• Find relevant context
• Diagnose the problem
Troubleshoot: understand the issue
To understand the issue-at-hand, ask for a specific example of where your customer is
stuck. Are you able to recreate the issue? Screenshots and gifs are great resources here.
Troubleshoot: find relevant context
Once you have an understanding of your customer's goal, gather relevant context. Review
their CRM records. Have they brought up this issue before? If so, talk to the agent who
helped them previously and see if you can uncover other necessary information. Are any
other customers experiencing the same issue? Ask your customer questions, but be
mindful not to ask questions that can be easily answered by quick research. Putting more
work on your customer means they have to exert more effort getting their issue fixed — a
leading cause of customer disloyalty.
Troubleshoot: diagnose the problem
Taking what you gleaned from the relevant context, it's time to diagnose the problem.
Remember, successful solutions provided the customer an actionable outcome. While it
may be necessary to obtain information from another internal party, offering your
customer a viable workaround in the meantime can be helpful. Be thoughtful though,
sometimes workarounds can cause more hassle than help.
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Finally, the stage your customers have been waiting for: solve. After you've
troubleshooted, clearly present your solutions to your customer. When preparing your
solutions presentation, be sure you can answer these, three questions:
1. Does the solution help the customer accomplish their goal?
2. Is the customer happy with the solution?
product, service, and you, their champion problem solver.
3. Are they ready to continue working on their own?
Take every support inquiry as an opportunity to improve your product or service. For each
inquiry, take detailed notes for your team to gain better insight about customer pain and
understand how to effectively take action. Use customer support
inquiries to improve the customer experience by creating reports on inquiries received,
inquiries closed, inquiry category, customer effort score, and response time.
Looking at the number of inquiries received per day, week, or month can help you
determine staffing needs. Additionally, these reviews can identify inquiry-spikes, which
could indicate a critical issue needing your immediate attention. Reviewing inquiries
closed per agent reveals data and individual agent productivity. Reflecting on inquiry
categories help you make informed and strategic decisions about self-service options and
team upskilling needs. This report is also helpful for product and user-interface teams who
have a comprehensive understanding of where clients struggle most.
Average customer effort score. Knowing how your clients feel about your customer
support provides great opportunities for improvement.
Average response time. How long does it take for you to handle a customer support
request? Currently, the average time is over 12 hours. Yikes!
By regularly updating and reviewing these reports, your teams will understand what's
working well and what needs to be improved, in order to continue to delight your
customers.
Video: HubSpot’s Help Desk in Action
Within HubSpot’s Service Hub, you have access to a help desk, which consists of tickets
and an inbox. These two tools help you intake, triage, troubleshoot, solve, and improve
upon customer issues. Because you can integrate multiple channels into a single app, that
help desk will enable your support reps to work with greater efficiency.
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This video will provide a high-level overview of what HubSpot’s help desk looks like, and
its basic functionality. Hopefully, it will also spark ideas about how your team can
leverage HubSpot’s help desk.
We’ll start with inbox, which provides access to live chat, your team email, Facebook
Messenger and WhatsApp integrations, chatbots, and form submissions. You also have a
customizable sidebar that gives you the context you need to have personalized
conversations with your customers. The inbox makes emailing and chatting a breeze, with
email templates, snippets, documents, knowledge base articles, and more. If a customer
begins their conversation on chat and moves to email, you won't skip a beat; you're able
to switch communication modes with a click of a button, while keeping the conversation
open on the same thread. No more providing inconsistent help or asking customers to
repeat themselves. Even if you have a team that doesn't work out of HubSpot, it’s not a
problem. With conversations API, you can retrieve information about customer
communications, as well as post new messages to those conversations, without ever
having to log into HubSpot.
Next, let’s talk about tickets, your record of each customer issue. You can create and route
tickets manually or – my preference! – automatically. Additionally, you can automate how
ticket statuses are updated, customize and organize the properties that show up on your
tickets, and mark certain properties as mandatory, so that support staff know exactly
what's required from them before closing out a ticket. Many support reps will start their
day in tickets, as you can easily see tasks, reminders, and SLA notifications to ensure
you're delivering exceptional service to your customers. By the way, it’s recommended
that you create a ticket for every email that hits your customer support email address.
This way, you’re ensuring that no customer issues will become lost, or overlooked.
Now, let’s talk about the benefits of using these two tools together. If you recall, the help
desk enables you to intake, triage, troubleshoot, solve, and improve. Let’s talk about
intake, first. If you create a ticket for every inquiry that you receive, you’re able to work
out of either tool. We recommend working out of the inbox if you’re focused on live chat or
phone; and tickets, if you’re focused on email. Tickets is a place to manage customer
inquiries that require longer term follow-up. If an inquiry can be resolved with a single
chat session, you can efficiently do so out of the inbox.
HubSpot’s help desk also helps you triage. To ensure your support reps are answering the
inquiries that are meant for them, set up routing. This ensures that customer inquiries are
equally distributed among your team. If a rep receives an inquiry they need to pass along,
or simply would like help with, they can mention people on either the ticket record or as a
note in the inbox. These mentions are for internal use only.
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Next, let’s talk about troubleshooting. Because HubSpot’s help desk is deeply integrated
with the CRM, any previous customer interactions or context is at your fingertips. If that's
not enough to inform a solution, consider scanning through past tickets to see if similar
problems have arisen, and how other reps have handled it in the past. You can also access
knowledge base articles and other resources to help the customer.
After your customer’s issue has been resolved, it’s time to solve (or close out) the ticket;
you can do so from either the inbox or ticket. Once you close the ticket, you can set up
mandatory properties, like a solution, to document relevant information.
Finally, it’s time to improve your processes. HubSpot’s help desk has robust reporting to
help you understand things like conversation totals, ticket average response time,
most-viewed knowledge base articles, SLA breakdowns by rep, and more. You can even
create dashboards per rep to use as coaching resources.
A help desk that's deeply integrated with your CRM ensures alignment between marketing,
sales, and service. And that’s what helps you to address customer service better than ever
before.
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