I’ve written a lot about how Pyrus helps move work forward. I’ve shared ideas about how Pyrus can help to manage a remote team or delegate effectively. I’ve also highlighted some specific software solutions Pyrus offers. For instance, the Pyrus Accounts Payable Solution inspired several blogs on AP, like this one. Today, I’m turning to another major software solution you should know about. That’s the help desk.
What Is a Help Desk?
Just in case you’re not familiar, here’s a quick overview of the help desk. As this article notes, companies often need a help desk to address customers’ needs. It doesn’t matter whether your company provides software as a service, apps, or tangible products. In any case, customers are likely to have questions and issues arise as they engage with your products. Additionally, help desks can also be used by a company for its own employees, as this article describes.
Whether a help desk is serving customers, employees, or business partners, it needs to perform several key functions. For instance, it needs to easily handle common issues or requests. That’s the kind of issue you anticipate many users running into. The ideal help desk solution also allows its users to solve their own problems as much as possible. This means providing a robust knowledge base for users to access. In the modern day, artificial intelligence also increases self-service, but more on that later. A good help desk solution should make sure issues are resolved quickly. At the same time, it should keep costs low. Striking the balance between these needs is what makes a great solution stand out.
Why It Matters
This article from Entrepreneur explains that modern day companies are expected to provide personalized service. Whether you’re thinking of your customers or employees, that’s the gold standard. This means that people aren’t interested in reading a thick manual to solve an issue. They also won’t want to scroll through endless online content, searching for an answer. Instead, they want to have help tailored to their specific needs. That’s where your help desk solution needs to shine.
The pandemic has further increased the need for a well-oiled IT help desk to serve employees. Now that they’re working remotely, IT issues abound. This Forbes article elaborates on this shift. For example, a fully remote workforce is much more likely to encounter challenges with VPN access than an office-based team. Onboarding new employees also now means a host of tech issues. Every new employee needs to learn and get access to all the necessary software tools. Moreover, the need for troubleshooting assistance remains.
Lastly, the help desk can actually help the agents in customer support, or employee support. Since those workers are now remote, they need a way to collaborate and communicate about issues they’re addressing. A great help desk solution can make this seamless.
Internal Uses for Help Desk Solutions
Though we’re likely all familiar with the need for great customer service, there’s another huge angle to the help desk. This tool can do a lot for HR, as outlined in this article. For one, a help desk solution can increase employee productivity. First, it can include training videos about various technical skills for employees to access. HR can send reminders for employees to learn these skills and work more efficiently. A great help desk solution can also help employees resolve issues themselves. The best way to do this is to incorporate conversational AI. If that sounds scary, don’t panic. You may know it as a chatbot or virtual assistant. A chatbot can reference your knowledge base and, if needed, route a request to a live agent.
Help desk solutions also serve HR in other ways. For instance, they can automate some of the screening process for job applications, which I discussed in this earlier post. They can also support with onboarding, as described above. A great help desk solution might be able to generate welcome letters with key information about log ins and company policies. Speaking of policies, those don’t need to be boring old packets. A help desk for employees can include videos and images to illustrate company policies. This will keep employees more engaged as they learn the ropes.
Best Practices for the Help Desk
So how do you make sure your help desk solution stands out? This Forbes article makes the case for using an existing software solution instead of building your own. That’s because it takes a lot to make a good one! You’ll want to let users search for the information they need. At the same time, AI-enabled chat support will eliminate the need for searching if users choose to engage with the chatbot. Overall, you want a high quality experience for your users that’s consistent across the board.
On your end, a great solution needs to support collaboration between team members. It needs to make sure that the team resolves issues quickly. A solution that incorporates AI should make everything run more smoothly, as noted here. It should also help you make data-driven decisions by analyzing processes. If the software you choose integrates with social media, that’s a huge plus! Then you can address issues that customers raise on various channels, not just your website.
Even if you choose an existing solution, though, you’ll have to build the knowledge base. That will include the content your users need specifically. Be sure to anticipate issues that might arise thoughtfully. Conduct user research in advance, perhaps by releasing a beta version first. And maximize the amount of content you can incorporate in the help desk.
Why Pyrus
The Pyrus Help Desk Solution makes it easy to get everything you need out of your help desk. First, it allows you to receive and respond to requests from various channels. This includes online chat, email, and social media like Facebook and Instagram. Next, the Pyrus solution automatically designates different levels of urgency based on SLAs. (That’s the service level agreements that clients have with your company.) Pyrus can also grant different levels of access to different agents based on their roles. You can create rules in advance that will divide tickets evenly among team members. This will help your help desk move quickly.
Pyrus increases the speed of issue resolution in other ways too. It lets you customize templates for users to fill. You can also use template answers to send lightning-fast responses. And at the end of the day, you can see rich data in Pyrus dashboards. This will let you track incident handling time, response rate, user satisfaction, and other key metrics.
Pyrus is easy to incorporate into your help desk team’s process. It integrates with CRM softwares and can be accessed anywhere, on desktop or mobile. So what are you waiting for? Get the Pyrus Help Desk Solution and let Pyrus move your work forward.
