3 Benefits of Help Desk Automation

Automation has been a huge phenomenon in recent years, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. From manufacturing to management and order processing, there are tools that can automate routine tasks in every area of business. This applies to customer service as well. If your help desk is not using some form of automation, it’s not operating as efficiently as it could. Keep reading to learn three benefits of help desk automation.

What is help desk automation?

Help desk automation means using tools that can perform simple customer service tasks which are repetitive and time-consuming, such as ticket routing and answering questions. Some of those tools include chatbots, customer satisfaction surveys, alerts and notifications, knowledge bases, self-service portals, etc.

By automating routine tasks, support teams can massively decrease their workload and focus on more complex issues. But that’s only one of the benefits your support team can achieve with help desk automation. Let’s take a look at the three main benefits of implementing automated tools.

Benefit #1: better employee morale

Working at a help desk is not easy. You have to respond to a constant stream of customer questions and requests in a timely manner. Some of them are very similar and keep coming back in large numbers, but they all need to be addressed nonetheless. Providing the same answers and solutions day in and day out is anything but rewarding. This hurts employee morale, which leads to a drop in productivity. Besides, routine tasks keep support teams busy while the more important requests or problems are yet to be addressed.

By using a help desk automation tool, support teams won’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over. Customers can find the information they need on their own in a knowledge center or get an answer from a chatbot. Employees will then have more time to do what they do best: helping customers on a personal level.

Benefit #2: better customer satisfaction

Did you know that 88% of customers expect a response in no less than an hour?

With this statistic in mind, you can guess the big problem caused by manual tasks, like data entry and ticket creation. If your support team is busy typing or copying-pasting information, they won’t be able to respond to customers quickly. On top of that, we should keep in mind that unhappy customers are more likely to switch to another company, so it’s essential to provide stellar service at all times.

The solution here is to use an automation tool that takes care of simple but repetitive processes. Imagine having the customer’s information and request automatically pulled from your inbox and put into your system as a new ticket. You could start addressing that request immediately, meaning your response time just got a lot lower than before. You also won’t have to worry about data entry mistakes or some customer emails falling through the cracks.

So help desk automation improves customer satisfaction by lowering response times, eliminating human error

Benefit #3: better organization overall

Working in a disorganized environment hurts productivity. If employees always have to look for the information they need or keep track of each action in a workflow, resolving customer tickets will take a longer time.

The right help desk automation tool will unify communications and make it easier to manage processes. For example, when an agent completes a step in a process, the agent who is responsible for the next is automatically notified. Also, agents receive notifications for support requests from different channels: website, contact forms, email, social media, etc. This removes the need to monitor each and every platform. Furthermore, agents can review customer profiles and ticket history in one single platform, so they don’t have to search for old emails or discussions.

These are just a few examples of what you can achieve with help desk automation. The improved organization means less time spent on tedious tasks and more time providing human expertise. Naturally, this results in better customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In conclusion

Automation is here to stay so you might as well leverage it to boost your competitiveness and bottom line. You don’t have to keep relying on old and inefficient processes, especially when it comes to providing customer service. When your team is able to quickly respond to customer emails and requests, you can turn good experiences into great ones and even turn around a negative experience.

If you want to learn how to get started with help desk automation, consider reading our blog post “5 Ways to Hack Help Desk Automation with Mailparser”.

Thank you for reading!