Managing a small business productively with a limited workforce, budget constraints and competing priorities is always an uphill task. Since you need happy customers to strengthen your foothold in the market and expand eventually, providing amazing customer service is crucial to differentiate your business from the competition. However, when you have a limited staff, you can't always make them answer phone calls, offer online support or do other mundane tasks while more important issues cry for attention. So, the best way is to automate and simplify the entire process (or at least, as much as possible) where customers' issues and problem are attended to quickly and resolved. Before you invest in any customer support desk software, here are some features you would want to make sure it has:
Multichannel customer support
Customers these days need support services to be convenient, easily accessible and fast. At the same time, they need these features irrespective of whether they are seeking help and support from your website, via email, Twitter or Facebook, or by using a wide variety of gadgets such as a tablet, smartphone or simply an old-fashioned phone. So, having a software that lets you provide support from multiple channels (such as live chat, voice call, email, social media etc) across different devices and platforms would help you resolve issues quickly and retain your customer base.
Prioritize tickets and resolve issues
Multiple calls from the same customer or calls with varied problems often get allotted to different support reps. With you ideal customer support desk software, any help ticket, when opened, would let all team members see the ticket and the customer, in addition to other information like customer information, the customer service rep working on the ticket and its status, internal notes about the issue and other communications between the team. Thus, when customers call back and their issues are assigned to support agents different from those who handled it earlier, they can quickly see the relevant information and status of the problem and get to work fast to resolve it. Getting all necessary information at their fingertips would also help customer desk personnel prioritize tickets and tackle them accordingly.
Self-service portal for customers
For customers who prefer to troubleshoot issues on their own, you can set up a knowledge base with video tutorials, FAQs, product documentation, tips and tricks and more to help them. You may even create a community where they can talk with each other to share ideas, ask questions, and help in case someone has a similar problem that they have already resolved. This will not only reduce your ticket volume, but also help you build a committed customer community with emphasis on self-service. Such a portal could be even useful to get quick feedback from your customers that would help you better your products/services. Automating repetitive customer service tasks and seamless integration of the software with social media platforms (to ensure every private message on social media gets converted to tickets and all such ticket responses are sent to the customers as messages on their social media account) are some other features that would make life easy.