A personalized IT help desk service isn’t just for making happier customers — it can help your team become more efficient too.
When it comes to the IT director, there are two key concerns — to close more calls, and to do so as quickly as possible. Employees throughout the business have almost exactly the same priorities, but they also want to feel as though you share their concerns. They want a personalized service.
Here are five things you can do to close more calls and help your customers feel loved:
-
Know your colleague’s name and preferences
Personalized service relies on knowing your customers — at the very least you should know their name. Better still, you should understand their preferences — how do they like to be addressed? What have they told you about themselves and their technical problems in the past?
Although typically regarded as a sales and marketing function, customer relationship management (CRM) techniques can be applied to internal IT service provisions too. As an IT director, you should communicate the importance of recording information about every interaction to your technician team. It will help them to identify “quick wins” that allow them to solve technical issues more efficiently.
Ideally your help desk toolkit will interface with other systems — like CRM — allowing you to build a complete picture of each service user. Your team will then have everything they need to close calls quickly, to the customer’s satisfaction.
-
Automate the discovery process
Service users hate being on hold as your technicians set-up a remote desktop connection. Even the ones who say they don’t mind waiting would rather be doing something else.
The more proactive work you can do, the better — especially if it speeds up service delivery in future. Running network discovery and silent remote support software installs will allow your technicians to connect as soon as the customer calls. This instantaneous connectivity delivers a more personalized feel, giving the impression that you value your users’ time and want to make their lives easier.
Again, your choice of remote support tool will be vital — can you scan the network for available devices and install remote agents without manual intervention?
-
Escalate more efficiently
Establishing robust, efficient escalation procedures is vital to pushing customer calls through to successful conclusion as quickly as possible — which is what you and your service users really want. These frameworks need to be integrated with your support tools too, using automation wherever possible to streamline handover and prevent key information being lost between technicians.
You may decide that some service users are more amenable to specific help desk agents. You should consider routing and escalating calls using this insider knowledge to help improve the customer’s experience.
-
Use reporting to identify trends — and fix problems early
Regular reviews of support call history will identify trends and recurrent problems that consume disproportionate amounts of resources. Resolving these issues will free up your technician’s time so they can resolve more issues, more quickly. It will also boost end user productivity simply because they do not need to call you.
You can get ahead of the actual call process too, classifying incoming support calls according to the technology or challenge in question. Sorting your inbox using labels such as ‘Topics’ allows for calls to be allocated to the engineer with the most experience in that field. Again, you save your customers time, for which they will be most grateful.
-
Hands-off remote access
More than simply identifying problems on the network, you also need to fix them. And if you can do that without involving your customers, so much the better. Their productivity is unaffected and you can close tickets at your convenience.
Choose a remote support solution that allows you to connect to, and administer, network devices remotely, and without end user intervention. You will find that this hands-off approach reduces the time required to solve problems because you can cut out the pre-amble chat — and you don’t have to talk non-technical staff through installing apps, or connecting to remote servers.
Your client may never know about these proactive efforts, but they will help you solve more cases in advance.
The secret to personalization? Using technology more effectively
Effective personalization is about using what you know about your customers to improve the service provided. An effective remote support tool allows you to put that knowledge to work, providing assistance to users in whichever way they prefer — or even without their input at all.
Takeaways
Ultimately, your team needs a remote support tool that:
- Allows them to collect and use customer preferences and details.
- Automates the discovery process to reduce the time to start providing assistance.
- Simplifies the process of escalating calls for faster resolution.
- Allows you to identify trends and problems using historical reporting.
- Can deliver remote support without end-user intervention.
