Help Desk Software: This may be the most important post you’ll read all year. Listen, up, a bit of context first. We all have had bad customer support experiences.

No matter how good a help desk software maybe – if your strategies on choosing the perfect fit for your business are not based on this 5 point checklist…

Then you may be severely denting your business armor.

What does great customer service mean to your company?

In the midst of every feature that screams out to you on a help desk vendor’s website or on a sales call, you can see the constant voice within your head scanning all these features with a “What’s in it for me?” scanner.

You will find that the “Why” of great customer support is drowned out by all these shiny features. But if you’re putting in dollars to invest in this help desk software, there must be a checklist of items you can tick off.

A checklist that energizes your helpdesk team with tools that help them achieve high levels of performance. Which brings us to…

The 5 Point Checklist to choosing the ideal Helpdesk CRM

#1. Ensure you can create folders for every department

Kapture helpdesk CRM, for example, gives you an option to create a folder and add helpdesk agents to this folder.

Each folder can be assigned a custom SLA.

You should also be looking for a vendor that lets you create ticket filters for each platform where you add keywords to these filters which indicate a priority alert.

#2. Ensure you can create task queues for each platform

Task queues are one of the key ingredients to a support team that has quick turnaround periods. You ask why?

Before I tell you why first let me paint you a picture of a typical support desk. We see eight agents with headsets lined side by side, Now a few of them are on call, a few on chat but there is just one helpdesk agent who is free.

When the CRM receives a ticket, it quickly looks at your helpdesk queue and sees that this agent is idle. Immediately – the agent gets a notification that a ticket has arrived.

This auto allocation feature runs on a round-robin basis, which means it allocates tickets to free agents. Ensure this feature is available in a task queue because the CRM needs to have context on how to assign tickets to the agents that have been added to the CRM.

3. Ensure that you can configure chat templates to trigger welcome messages or even converse with the customer

Chat systems that trigger welcome messages have a higher chance of converting leads. In the world of support, a live chat system is in itself a 24/7 support engine. When a customer engages with a chat system on your website ideally, it should begin a conversation.

Your vendor must have an AI-enabled chat system that is capable of conversing with customers automatically.

This is possible through chat templates that can be set up within the helpdesk CRM.

#4. Ensure that you have access to Multichannel ticketing

A customer today prefer to connect with business over their preferred channel of choice.

And also, this means, your helpdesk vendor should be equipped with the ability to hook up the helpdesk to phone calls, chats, emails, social media messages and SMS.

Once this integration is complete, helpdesk agents can focus on only one software to respond to tickets from multiple platforms.

#5. Ensure you can set up escalation protocols

Escalations protocols must be set up to deal with irate customers.

But when you are dealing with high ticket volume, the help desk must be configured to auto escalate tickets that have breached SLA.

Here your vendor needs to equip you with the ability to add escalation protocols – platform or department wise.

You can add the email id’s and contact numbers of the team leads or higher-ups that need to be alerted when a ticket has been escalated.,

Conclusion
Making a commitment to great customer support begins with choosing the best helpdesk Software.

Your choices have to begin with the ‘Why’ of great support in your company.

Building a culture of ticket management where customers know if they do business with you, they can get in touch and expect prompt responses and resolution will help you beat your competition alive.