When it comes to customer service, customers have high expectations — they want convenient communication options, 24/7 availability, and fast responses. And if that isn’t enough for support teams to manage, customers also want to feel like their request is the only one that matters.
How do leading customer support teams meet these rising expectations for all customers? These businesses all share one thing in common: a best-in-class help desk, it is. What makes a best-in-class help desk? That’s what this guide is all about.
What is help desk software?
Support teams use help desk software to organize and manage customer inquiries, support tickets, and service requests efficiently. By providing teams with a centralized platform to handle customer interactions and provide timely assistance, help desks play a big role in enabling businesses to improve customer satisfaction while hitting critical key performance indicators (KPIs).
12 must-have help desk features
Customers want to be treated like humans, not tickets, and with the right tool, your team can deliver personalization and speed.
Choosing a help desk system can seem overwhelming, but by prioritizing these key features, you can focus on solutions that have the core capabilities your team needs to streamline workflows, respond to customers faster, and provide better customer experiences.
1. Omnichannel inbox
Juggling many support channels can lead agents to become unorganized and bogged down with queries, leading to slow or even no response. Omnichannel inboxes solve this. Teams can manage messages from all channels in one unified interface, so they don’t have to bounce between apps but instead can organize and respond to messages faster. Omnichannel inboxes make for smoother processes internally, so customers have smoother support experiences externally, and the better experiences customers have, the more likely they are to be loyal customers long-term.
Front, a modern help desk solution, provides an omnichannel inbox that enables teams to manage all customer requests in one centralized platform that looks and feels like the email interface they know and love. Whether an email, social media message, live chat, text, or WhatsApp, teams won’t miss a message, and customers will always get answers.
2. Advanced roles and permissions
As your team grows and changes, every team member plays a unique role. For example, maybe you have a team lead who is responsible for organizing the inbox and ensuring team members are meeting SLAs. Or perhaps you have a few teammates who are solely responsible for responding to messages, but not for any other operational work.
How do you ensure that everyone can see and do exactly what they need to do? That’s where advanced roles and permissions come in. Advanced roles and permissions make it easy for admins to control what every teammate can do and see, so they don’t have to worry about too many cooks in the kitchen.
Set your team up for success by creating custom roles and permissions. Your team dynamic is unique to your company, and with Front’s custom roles and permissions, your inboxes fit the way you work.
3. Real-time collaboration tools
Without collaboration features, help desks become clunky and siloed, resulting in missed support requests, slow service, and unhappy customers. With collaboration features like in-thread comments, auto-shared drafts, and easy escalations, teams can work together seamlessly, increase visibility, and ensure no customer request slips through the cracks.
Front is built to keep teams in lockstep. With essential collaboration features like internal discussions and advanced features like AI summaries, customer support teams are equipped with all the tools they need to work together, work faster, and help more customers.
4. Automated ticket routing
Automated ticket routing is exactly what it sounds like: automatically having tickets routed to the right individual without having to manually sort through the inbox and assign. By leveraging auto-routing, conversations make it to the right people, and no one’s time is wasted. Instead, teams can handle high volumes of requests while maintaining a personal touch since they have more time to focus on the customers, not the operational work.
With Front, teams can automatically route requests to the right team member based on keywords, priority, and customer data, leaving no agent overwhelmed because workloads are distributed evenly and properly.
5. SLA tracking
People want replies fast, and speed to respond can make or break your relationship with potential customers — so much so that a reported 50% of customers are less likely to spend money with a company that takes longer to respond than they expect. That’s why SLAs (Service Level Agreements) can make all the difference. Establishing SLAs is a crucial step to make sure your team doesn’t miss customer requests. And by achieving those SLAs, your team shows that they are reliable and even position your company to win against competitors.
Front’s SLA rules are like guardrails for your inbox, so your team can ensure every customer receives a quick response. Simply set your response time goal and specify when breaches should apply, and Front will take care of surfacing urgent conversations — even before a breach happens.
6. Message templates
If you’re looking for areas for your team to optimize time spent, drafting responses is one of them. Typing the same replies over and over is a huge time suck, but with message templates, you can eliminate some of the manual, repetitive work. Does your team have a resource, link, or message they send often? They can create a message template and save them for the whole team to use.
Front’s message templates make it easy for teams to keep consistent, accurate messaging, hit response time SLAs, and get new employees started quickly. Create individual or shared templates, so each team member can optimize their day-to-day workflows.
We’ve pulled some examples from our support team so your team can get started today. Take a look 👇
ebook: 5 support message templates to improve your team’s CSAT
Customer service message templates are an essential tool for achieving exceptional service at scale by ensuring your team’s responses are consistent, fast, and accurate. Are you using the right ones? 💡
7. AI capabilities
AI is transforming how customer support teams work, enabling them to do more with less. By choosing a help desk system with an added layer of AI, teams instantly gain superpowers and can do things like summarize long threads, draft replies using context from previous messages, and auto-tag conversations.
Front’s AI features are built to maximize efficiency without sacrificing personalization. With automation tools like 1-click macros, and AI-powered agent assistance features AI Summarize, AI Compose, and AI Prioritization, teams can speed up time-consuming tasks and make the most out of their days.
8. Analytics and reporting
In order to provide the best experience for your customers, it’s important to identify areas of improvement, both for individual support agents and the team as a whole. By tracking metrics like ticket volume, response time, and resolution time, teams are able to optimize their processes to ensure they are their most efficient while customers are getting timely support. Teams should also track customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and customer feedback, so agents can better understand customer preferences and provide personalized service to every customer.
Front’s detailed analytics and reports provide actionable insights, so teams can make data-driven decisions to improve their processes. Users can easily monitor both team and agent performance, measure key metrics, and identify the biggest areas of improvement.
9. Third-party integrations
Your team has a shortlist of essential tools they use daily, and toggling between those tools all day long is taking too much of their time. Instead, increase team and business efficiency by integrating all the apps in their tech stack into one platform.
Front’s 110+ integrations and open API make it easy to connect platforms, sync customer data, and save teams time from juggling multiple channels. Whether a project management tool, CRM, or other messaging app, users can seamlessly integrate their favorite tools with Front so their team has the context they need all in one place.
10. Shift scheduling
Teamwork makes the dream work. When one team member is wrapping up, another is jumping in. In order to manage shift transitions smoothly, ensure existing conversations are taken care of, and new messages aren’t missed, shift scheduling is a must.
With Front’s shifts, your team can handle shift transitions with confidence across multiple offices or time zones. Conversations will only be assigned to on-duty teammates, guaranteeing new and continued messages are handled to completion.
11. Customizable workflows
We’ve mentioned several times now that several tasks in your team’s day-to-day are time sucks — that’s where workflow automation will come in and be the biggest game changer. Consider all the operational work that your team does every day that could simply be automated and eliminated from their daily to-do list — think follow-ups, message routing, and tagging. Take these redundant tasks off the team’s plate by setting up workflow automations.
Front’s no-code workflow automation is easy to set up and customize as your team and business needs change. Users can automatically trigger follow-ups, route messages, and automate other operational tasks, saving teams time so they can focus on requests that require more thought and personalization.
12. Multi-language support
No matter where your customers are writing from or what language they speak, they deserve an answer. A help desk with multi-language support will empower your team to read and respond to all customers with confidence.
Front supports multiple languages when reading and composing messages, so your team can read and respond to almost any language.
Selecting the right help desk software for your business
The right help desk system will completely transform how you support your customers. Here are a few things we recommend taking into consideration before making a decision:
Assess your business needs
Whether you’re a small business or large, you’re receiving 10+ emails a day or 1,000+, or your budget is strict or you can spend thousands on whatever tool you want, you can find a tool that works for you. That’s why it’s important to spend time outlining what your team and business needs to provide exceptional customer service. It may also be helpful to create a list of “nice-to-haves” so that as you start to research and trial tools you can consider solutions that check all the boxes while also providing your team with a few extras to enhance their experience on the backend.
Prioritize integration capabilities
Choose a platform that can easily integrate the tools your team is using day-to-day. By bringing information from all their essential tools into one platform, they won’t waste time navigating between tools and instead, they’ll have all the information they need at a glance.
Look for user-friendly and scalable
Prioritize finding a help desk solution that is quick to set up, easy to use, and customized to fit your business needs. Whether you’re a one-person startup or thriving enterprise, your help desk software should grow with you, and your team shouldn’t have to spend their days trying to figure out how to use it.
What does “easy-to-use” and “customizable” look like?
There are several tools on the market that have cluttered, confusing interfaces. Seek out something that is clean and intuitive, so as you bring on new team members, they aren’t overwhelmed with trying to navigate the platform.
And as your business grows, your needs change. By choosing a help desk with features like customizable workflows and an open API, your platform can be uniquely yours and scale with you at every stage.
Validate vendor support and resources
In case your team does need help with navigating your new help desk tool, you want to make sure that they’ll be able to get the help they need. Do research, read customer reviews, and look over available resources on their website to determine if the support and resources they provide will meet your team’s needs. For example, what’s their support team’s average response time? Are other customers satisfied with the service they provide? Do they provide in-depth resources on their knowledge base if your team prefers self-service help?
Even better, consider companies who are transparent about all of the above. Front makes their Support Report public so people like you who are searching for this information can use it to inform big buying decisions.
Hit your help desk KPIs with Front
Your customers have high expectations when it comes to the quality and speed of their service, and your team doesn’t have to struggle to meet those expectations. With the right help desk software features, they can efficiently manage customer communications while simultaneously exceeding individual and team KPIs.
Front provides more than just a feature set — it’s a complete customer service platform built to make teams and customers happier. With must-have capabilities for customer support teams, including an omnichannel inbox, no-code workflow automations, extensive integrations, and more, Front is one of the best help desk software tools chosen by over 9,000 teams from businesses of different sizes and industries.
Ready to empower your customer service team? Try Front today.
Written by Jordan Vanden Heuvel
Originally Published: 25 October 2024