Research by Deloitte and Touche reported that businesses that prioritize customers are a whopping 60% more profitable than those that don’t. And that 1 in 4 customers would pay 10% more just for better customer service as per ShepHyken’s 2021 Achieving Customer Amazement Report.
Inefficient or absence of customer service tools like help desk ticketing software can guarantee more customer acquisition – for your competitors!
Here are the top 5 frustrations customers can have with your help desk ticketing system and ways to solve them.
5 Frustrating Help Desk Things and Ways to Avert Them
See if any of these holds true for your business.
1. Lengthy automated voice menus (no agent in sight)
Customers reach out to your customer service department only when they are displeased and need immediate assistance. More often than not, they’d want to speak with an agent asap.
And for them to go through a lengthy automated voice menu in the IVR that won’t lead anywhere (at least not quickly or easily) is just going to make things worse.
Solutions
- Design your voice menus so customers can easily connect with a live agent.
- Use automation to aid agents, not for them to alienate customers.
- Create an omnichannel experience to ease the conversation.
- Let customers know asap the next availability of an agent if there’s none at the moment through a ticketing system.
2. Getting transferred from one department to another
One of the most annoying things customers go through is when they’re asked to go from one department to another — here, along with the delay in query resolution, they also have to repeat their pain to agents multiple times.
Moreover, this leaves a negative impression on your customers, such negative experiences with time are likely to repulse them.
Solutions
In this case, deploying a help desk ticketing software can help in the following ways:
- Notify your customers automatically as soon as their query is received through its ticketing feature.
- Agents can tag their peers, so they are informed about the issue and the customer.
- Categorize queries and automatically route them to the relevant agent or department.
- Agents should explain the present situation in detail to the customer so that they understand why they need more time.
- Agents should ask permission to transfer the call and ask if the customer needs any answers from them before transferring.
3. Slow response times
According to Forrester, 66% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. The first response time, or FRT, is the most vital KPI to track customer happiness. As the name suggests, First Response Time is the time it takes for a business to reach out to a customer after the latter has reached out with a query. The lower the average FRT is, the better customer experience you’re delivering. So, how do you deliver fast response times?
Solutions
- Investing in help desk software with a ticketing system will also help here. Automatically sending tickets upon the receipt of queries reduces FRTs to bare minimum.
- Invest in technologies like live chat and chatbot; however, live chat will need a live agent present, and chatbots can only answer FAQs. But, both these tools can be integrated with a ticketing system. When an agent is unavailable for live chat or a query needs to be routed to an agent from a chatbot, tickets can be sent.
4. Uninformed help desk agents
This issue occurs less often than the rest but is the most frustrating one. It is the job of the sales and support staff to help people with information and resolution, and it is a major drawback for a business when their sales or support staff is unable to do so.
This doesn’t mean that your agents need to provide an immediate response to all the queries, or they cannot put the customer on hold or can’t transfer the call to a different agent. It means that when a customer has gone through all of this but still hasn’t received the answer they were looking for.
Solutions
- Train your staff.
- Create a collaborative infrastructure for your agents with an IT ticketing system.
- Have a cloud-based knowledge base library.
5. Not being called back
Not calling a customer back or delaying in doing so is frowned upon. Generally, delaying a call for more than 24 hours is a bad practice.
Doing either of these things can erode a customer’s trust in your brand. It makes them feel that your business is unreliable, doesn’t care about its customers, and just has a subpar way of doing things in general.
Solutions
- A ticketing software can help here as well, as it has the feature of including a reminder/alert to notify agents of outstanding tickets.
- Offer to call feature on live chat and when an agent is not available, send a ticket through a ticketing system giving details on when they’ll get a callback.
- Deploy an Automatic Call Back tool; here, the customer adds their number, and the system calls them as soon as a live agent is available.
Conclusion
No business needs any statistics to know how the cost of new customer acquisition is more than the cost of retention. We hope this article helps you create happy and loyal customers. For more customer retention best practices and strategies, stay tuned to www.returncustomer.com.