By Douglas Hanna

I don’t know why, but our industry is obsessed with helpdesks. Every part of the customer service experience revolves around the helpdesk, its queues, and its features. Perhaps our industry’s obsession is a result of engineers and similarly minded technical people starting and developing the whole ‘helpdesk-centric’ culture that hosting professionals and customers experience daily. Regardless of the cause or the reason of our helpdesk centricity, the hosting industry’s obsession with helpdesks isn’t going away. With that in mind, let’s try to make the best of our both loved and hated helpdesks.

Preserving the customer service experience.

Helpdesks are fine, fantastic even – when used properly. They must be used in moderation and the customer service experience mustn’t focus around the helpdesk, but instead focus around the customer. Those are the two keys of using a helpdesk and still preserving the customer service experience. If you can follow both of those rules, the customer service experience won’t suffer.

Here are some quick and easy ways to get the most out of your helpdesk.

Use queues.

It is surprising how many companies don’t use queues to their full potential. Most have queues for sales, support, and billing, but there is more involved with running a web hosting company than those three departments. Make queues for specific issues (i. e. Email Issues), time periods of the customer experience (i. e. Fraud Verification), or for tickets that may require certain access (i. e. Root Access Required).

Do not make customers hunt for the right department! The front-end of your helpdesk should only show the standard support, billing, etc. queues – the more detailed ones should be sorted by representatives. For example, say a ticket comes into the sales queue about a problem with fraud verification. The sales representatives would then move that ticket to the fraud verification queue so it can be dealt with. This move would be transparent to the customer (more about that later).

Create a management review queue.

Elevations don’t have to be complicated. Most companies only make them complicated. Make a simple “management review” queue (call it what you want). If your helpdesk supports the feature, use tagging instead. Implement the feature and instruct frontline representatives to mark a ticket for management review if a customer is angry, the representative needs a supervisor to approve something, if there is a special request, etc. That way, managers can quickly go through elevations and deal with them as needed.

Move smoothly.

When moving tickets between queues or departments, try to make the process as smooth as possible for the customer. Here are some ways to do that:

• When moving tickets from one major department/queue to another (i. e. from technical support to billing), there is no need to mention it. In all likelihood, the response time will be about the same, so you might as well make it transparent to the customer.
• When a ticket is moved to another department/queue, the representative should use the helpdesk’s note feature to indicate that it was moved (where from and where to).
• When a representative from the new department/queue, notices a ticket has been moved, he or she should say something like “Hi, my name is Betty! I work in the billing department and would be glad to assist you with your billing question.” Then at the end of the message, include a simple note like “If you have any other billing questions, just email us at billing@companyxyz.com.”

These are just a few simple, easy things to make the transfer process much easier.

Use consistent signatures.

Warning: this is purely cosmetic, but does make a subtle difference. It’ll make your company look more organized and professional. A lot companies have very different email signatures among employees and departments. This isn’t acceptable. Stick to a standard format and use it across the whole company. A few tips:

• Use a good closing like best regards (my personal favorite), kind regards, or sincerely. Thanks is also acceptable for more casual companies.
• Have representatives use both their first name and last names.
• If representatives don’t want to use both their first and last names, just have them use their first name. Using first name and last initial is not good.
• Try to have signatures include something like “Thank you again for contacting Company XYZ. Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions, comments, or concerns.”
• It is okay to vary the closing and the “thank you, if you need more help” messages slightly. That way, the representatives aren’t complete clones. It’s like having uniform shirts in slightly different colors – you can still tell the various employees work there, but people don’t look exactly the same.

Have queue supervisors.

Assign one person (best a supervisor or senior employee) in each shift to oversee a particular queue. Even if it is a small queue, this person should be responsible for overseeing how it operates during their shift. They should watch how many open tickets there are, deal with elevations, help move tickets, and of course, respond to tickets like any other representative. It doesn’t have to be an ultra-formal system – just the customer service manager or whoever is in charge of the helpdesk asking so and so to watch over the queue for the night or whatever. Keep it simple and it’ll work out fine.

Remember.

The most important thing is to remember that the customer service experience is designed to make the customer happy. It should focus around the customer’s convenience and not the company’s or the employees’ convenience. If you always keep the customer’s priorities and goals in mind when working in customer service or designing customer service systems, it is hard to mess up.