31% of businesses have fully automated at least one function. —McKinsey
A source from Netsuit business portal
Keeping customers happy and satisfied is the key responsibility of every customer support department. It is hard to fulfill the job when your team does not have the right tools required for the job.
The helpdesk ticketing system is the soul of your customer service and a means to engage with the customers. Even after having proper helpdesk software, it is necessary to have a proper workflow that can help your customer support team to perform tasks in a quicker and easier way to provide a seamless customer service experience to your customers.
Workflows can assist to streamline and automate repetitive business operations, reducing the possibility of mistakes, and enhancing overall productivity. This, in turn, has a significant impact on your business.
What is a help desk workflow?
According to the red hat survey, businesses invest in workflow management in order to improve the agility and efficiency of their agents.
A helpdesk workflow describes the stages or procedures that employees must take in order to smoothly resolve client inquiries and complaints. A streamlined and simple approach improves customer service efficiency and productivity while also ensuring a pleasant customer experience.
Optimizing the helpdesk workflow regularly is important in order to get a positive result for your business.
An automated Help desk software is essential for your business so that your customer support team doesn’t get caught up with lengthy and complex processes. This leads to an increase in the volume of tickets, an increase in average handling time, and slow responses.
Examples of helpdesk workflow
A workflow can help in making your agent’s task easier and smoother. A predefined workflow saves the time of the agents as they are aware of the process and steps to follow.
Here are a few examples of help desk workflows that are used in organizations.
Example 1: Arrange tickets
Arranging and organizing the tickets in a sorted manner helps in reducing the resolution time and also saves the agent’s time. It differentiates the tickets and eases their search while looking for tickets.
Label the ticket: Labels can be added by agents to differentiate essential tickets or to aggregate comparable tickets under the same label. For example, if numerous customers have reported the same issue with a product, such tickets might be classified as a ‘Common issue.’
Prioritize the ticket: It is really important to know which tickets need to be resolved immediately and which can wait for a while. Agents can mark tickets as ‘High,’ ‘Low,’ or ‘Normal’ priority based on their urgency. Any customer assistance ticket’s priority is set to ‘Normal.’ A red marking is automatically put to distinguish high priority tickets from regular tickets.
Set ticket status: Every step of a ticket’s lifespan is referred to as a status. By default, every ticket created in a helpdesk is tagged as ‘open.’ The ticket is then marked as resolved,’ occasionally ‘pending,’ and finally ‘closed.’ The status of a ticket reveals whether or not the customer’s problem has been resolved, and if not, why. Agents can set the status of the ticket after it is resolved or not.
Example 2: Merging duplicate tickets
Won’t it be annoying and time-consuming for the agents to go through the same ticket again and again?
If your agents are working on a case that was started by a specific customer ticket and then get another ticket from the same customer, you may instruct the automated HR service desk to merge the two tickets for more simplified agent assistance.
Assume you’ve set up automatic alerts to produce support tickets on your service desk, and it captures and creates the ticket automatically using the customer’s phone number. If a user receives another complaint from a different channel while working on a specific ticket, the automated service desk now allows them to determine the nature of the issue and auto-merge it with the existing case for better help.
This avoids support agents from having to deal with two distinct cases from the same customer, resulting in an unnecessary delay in providing help to the affected employee.
Example 3: Automatically read and tag tickets coming from different channels
Manually reading and tagging each ticket according to the issue can be challenging for the agents. The helpdesk system automatically reads and tags tickets by filtering them according to the keywords used in the message or mail.
The helpdesk system comes with workflows to read and extract text from emails for tickets with a templated message body.
These extracted tags may be assigned to an agent and then to custom fields on the ticket. This allows you to report on these fields, build queues, utilize notification templates, or further automate your Ticketing software by employing these auto-populated custom fields.
Helpdesk workflow template
Preparing a workflow diagram is the first step to creating an efficient and productive workflow. Creating a diagram gives a basic idea about the process and the steps needed to be followed in order to resolve a query.
Diagram of workflow example given below:
Ways to improve help desk workflow process
Using a workflow to map out your operations helps you to gain a clear, top-level perspective of your business.
Even if you have a well-established set of business workflow, do you know if they are producing the desired results? Are the procedures as effective as they might be?
There are several ways by which you can improve your workflow process.
1. Establish Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A service level agreement (SLA) is a written agreement between a service provider and a client that specifies the services requested as well as the degree of service expected. It is a type of written promise between a business and a customer.
It is critical for your company to establish reasonable and achievable SLAs that your customer service representatives can adhere to while managing consumer requests. For example, guaranteeing your consumers that their problem would be fixed in an unpractical time may build unrealistic expectations.
SLAs can be used as a good base for laying down realistic and efficient help desk workflows.
SLAs act as goals of customer service and workflows can be formulated according to them.
2. Automate the workflow
“Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks”- Amber Rudd
Manual methods, on the other hand, are notorious for inconsistency and may sap your productivity. On the contrary, an automated help desk process can assist your staff in doing more in a time-constrained setting.
Some of the workflow processes which can be automated using a ticket management system are-
- Assigning of tickets
- Labeling and prioritization of tickets
- Setting automated emails and notifications
- Automatic creation of tickets according to keywords used
Automation of these workflow processes can be implemented using the ticket management system to save time and improve the efficiency of the agents.
Kapture allows you to create an automated and customizable workflow for your chatbot. You can easily create a chatbot workflow according to your needs.
3. Ticket escalation matrix
There may be times when an agent is unable to resolve certain issues due to the unavailability of resources. The right agent needs to take over the issue so that it is resolved quickly.
The escalation process can be influenced by the agent’s level of experience, the severity of the issue, and the length of time it may take to resolve it. It’s all about striking a balance between the need for quick first-contact fixes and the requirement to properly handle the customer’s problem.
A well-balanced ticket escalation process can help in formulating a reliable workflow process for the help desk ticketing system.
Kapture’s one suite allows you to create your own customizable escalation matrix. It allows you to escalate the issue to the most appropriate and suitable agents according to the matching conditions defined by you in your help desk ticketing system.
4. A knowledge base for your agents
There may be times when your agent is unable to solve a problem due to a lack of knowledge about the product or situation.
We all are aware of the saying “Knowledge is power”. When your agents are well trained and highly knowledgeable about the possible scenarios, it is easier for them to resolve the issue quickly.
Helpdesk system workflows can be made depending upon the existing knowledge of the agents. If the agents are not well-trained, the workflow will be lengthy and complex.
Kapture one suite comes with a knowledge management system that helps your agents to learn and train in a faster and better way.
5. Customize your workflow
Helpdesk systems come with easily customizable workflows and you can customize them according to your agent’s needs and requirements.
Setting up the terms and labels which will be used for the tickets, what will be the clients called (for example if your business is related to medical devices you may like the dashboard to show your customers as “physicians” or “hospitals”.), automated emails sent to customers, classify customers according to their buying behavior and a lot more.
A helpdesk system should be easily customizable and should not require any developer’s support, this makes it flexible and easy to use.
Kapture’s one suite gives you the power to create customizable and automated workflows for your help desk agents.
How can Kapture help?
Helpdesk workflows can ease the lives of the agent and also increase their productivity.
Kapture’s one suite comes with all features that can create customizable and automated workflows.
You can customize the dashboard and keep the options according to your workflows, change the names of the options according to your business needs. Kapture is flexible and easy to customize and you don’t need to be a tech expert to create a workflow in our software.
Talk to our product squad to know more about help desk workflow.
About the Author | |
 | Ankit Kochar |
| Ankit Kochar is a content writer at Kapture CRM who loves to write creative as well as informative content. He has worked as a creative and academic content writer in the past and has a keen knowledge of writing reports, essays and dissertations. His current field is helping him research and hone his SaaS knowledge. | |
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