One of the key elements of a good CRM system is the Support Ticket component that powers your Helpdesk with Support Tickets. Often, when a business dives into the world of CRM, they will focus on the pre-sales side of things. Getting to grips with Leads and Opportunities. The next step normally involves bringing sales to a conclusion using a combination of Quotes, Orders and Invoices. Once the sales process is in place, many businesses look at the post-sales Support Ticket.
This is quite a broad term, and in this post, we’ll explore how utilising support tickets can be applied in different scenarios.
The three phases outlined above are not mutually exclusive, and in an ideal world, you will be using all three. Combining the entire customer journey into a single system brings your entire business under one roof. This helps you offer the best service to your customers.
What is Helpdesk?
Although it contains the word “Help”, the name “Helpdesk” is not always reflected in a positive light. It often conjures up images of complaints or firefighting customer problems. But it can be so much more than that. It can be a place for clients to raise those general “how-to” questions. It could be a place to store details of scheduled maintenance. Think of your CRM as a place for you to record interactions with clients. For example, Opportunities are where you log details of potential business. If you follow that principle, the Helpdesk is your audit that shows how you have assisted your clients
The integration of a Helpdesk with Support Tickets allows businesses to efficiently manage client inquiries and improve overall satisfaction.
The Helpdesk provides a rich source of data to help you improve your customer service. By reporting on common faults, you can see if there’s anything you can do to pre-empt these. Typical questions could be answered with a quick video tutorial. You might even create a webinar to offer an extra educational resource. When you launch new versions, you have a ready-made list of customers who would benefit from the enhancements.
Here are three scenarios where the Helpdesk module will help you with your Account Management:
1. Tech Support
If you sell and maintain a technical product, you will need to offer help at various levels. Whereas traditionally this might have been a walk-in centre where you could bring your tech product, today this often means remote support.
If we’re talking about something like a cloud-based CRM, then I talk from experience, so these words come to you firsthand!
The Beginner
You will always have clients and prospects diving into your world for the first time. What might seem logical or intuitive to you may not be the same for someone new to your system. It is easy to log enquiries and link FAQs to your answers, providing your new clients with a knowledge library.
The Explorer
This person is likely to dive into the deepest, darkest corners of your system to come up with questions that will test your skills to the limit! But that person is effectively your best product-tester, to the point of being a brand ambassador. Their endeavours will help ensure that those less-used areas are well documented and remain user-friendly.
The Bug Hunter
Yes, things can and will go wrong. It may be no one’s fault, but the gremlins work their way into your system and need to be eliminated. No matter how much testing you do on new features, there may be a scenario you overlooked. Once this issue is logged, you can pass it to your tech team for resolution.
2. Onsite Repairs
There are many businesses that rent out equipment. Either to private firms or the general public. A coffee machine rented to a local café or a satellite dish on the side of your house, there are countless examples. The equipment owner rents it out and manages stock and maintenance as part of the service agreement.
Stock Maintenance
This is pretty obvious – keep the machine topped up so it doesn’t run out. This comes down to the old supply-and-demand. Make sure your vending machine doesn’t run out of chocolate, leaving hungry customers to take their business elsewhere. You could use reports or stock-warning levels to see when a machine needs restocking.
Regular Services and Upgrades
If you offer six-monthly health checks or annual upgrades, you’ll need to get these pre-arranged using scheduled activities and ensure the work is done.
3. Telephone Hotline
Call centres exist up and down the country to help deal with emergencies, answer complaints or look after day-today communications with clients. Generally, there’s less advanced planning that can be done, although if product or faults, or delays in a new service launch become apparent, then you can gear yourself up to pre-empt these.
GDPR: your data, your rules
We’ve always put data protection at the heart of OpenCRM. So with the introduction of GDPR, we’ve added new tools and features so you have the control you need to implement your policies and achieve compliance. find out more
In all the above situations, logging those queries as tickets on your system gives you tangible information you can analyse to help improve your customer service.
Having looked at the “what” and “why” of customer service, I want to focus on the “how”. Here are some tools available to help you deliver the best possible service.
Who’s in Charge?
When a problem comes in, someone needs to take ownership. This helps your team see who is dealing with the issue and gives your client a point of contact. Depending on the nature of the support tickets that come in, you might have different users who are experts in different fields or ticket categories.
To make your lives easier, establish some user assignment rules in your system. If a ticket comes in that falls under “account renewals”, you reassign it to the relevant sales manager. You might prefer to allocate tickets to front-line support in the first instance, so they can determine the best course of action in each case. In this case, you could apply a round-robin rule so that inbound tickets are distributed equally among your support team. The end goal in both cases is to run a tight ship where nothing falls through the cracks and your clients get top-class service.
It’s in the Wording
In my experience, email responses tend to fall into a couple of categories. Firstly, the courtesy email to let the client know their enquiry has been logged. Secondly, an email confirming that a support ticket has been resolved and closed. A common third email is one is an update email, to let the client know you are still working on the issue. Given that most of the wording for these emails will be the same every time, you can use templates. Standard wording, with merge variables embedded, allows you to produce consistent emails that answer your client’s questions.
“Dear $contacts_firstname
We have investigated the issue you reported and resolved it as follows:
$rel_helpdesk_solution
If you have any further questions, please get in touch. Simply responding to this email will reopen the ticket, and one of our team will get back to you”
That last sentence leads me to my next point, the automation of emails…
Automating a Response
Using our email integration – Pop2OpenCRM – when a client sends an email to your support address, it actually does a lot of clever stuff. In addition to your team receiving the email, you can configure OpenCRM to automatically raise support tickets from inbound emails. It will link the sender’s Contact and Company records to the ticket, with the option to create a new Contact if that person does not already exist in your system.
Once the ticket has been created, it is allocated an ID. This ID is tagged into any further correspondence from the ticket, so if you send an email requesting more information, when your client responds, their email gets automatically attached to the ticket. Furthermore, those inbound emails will update the status to “Needs Action”, so you have clear visibility into tickets that need to be progressed.
Sharing the Wealth
When you log an enquiry, you might be an intermediary. You’re asking a question on behalf of someone else, or you need to give multiple people visibility of a problem resolution. With OpenCRM, you can also add Additional Recipients to a ticket. This means they are alerted with any updates or resolution notes. Anyone who needs this important information will receive their news without delay.
Managing Priorities
A Ticket is a Ticket, but no two support tickets are the same. A “system down” situation carries more urgency than a “how-to” enquiry. Similarly, you may have clients paying for a premium service, so you want to roll out the virtual red carpet when they get in touch. These situations can be managed using Service Level Agreements (SLA). They determine how quickly a ticket is escalated.
The Lowdown on SLAs
In OpenCRM, SLAs can be configured in several ways. The simple solution is to use a ticket’s Severity to determine which SLA should kick in. That means a “System Down” ticket will rise to the top of the list much quicker than an enhancement request.
If we think back to the red-carpet situation, that can be managed by basing your SLAs on client Contracts. A platinum client may have a shorter SLA for their tickets than a standard client. When you are charging a premium, you need to justify that, and providing a preferential SLA is a good example.
Another option is to make your SLA times product-specific. If you have certain products that are central to people’s businesses and others that are peripheral accessories, you will want to prioritise problems with the core products.
As you can see, there are various ways the system can help you determine which issues should be addressed as a matter of priority.
Managing more than one Helpdesk
I was going to finish the blog post here, but I’ve just got time to squeeze one more highlight in! If you manage support for various companies, it stands to reason that your emails should be appropriately branded. We have a feature in OpenCRM that determines which template is used based on the inbound support email address.
You don’t need to worry about selecting the right one; the system does it for you. In line with the feature above, you can also set different SLA times for different email addresses. An email sent to “enquiries@” may get a 4-hour response time, whereas an “emergency@” email will trigger a 1-hour response. A simple way of ensuring your communication remains on-brand, regardless of how many brands fall under your umbrella.
Have it Your Way
As you can see, there are many options available for you to design Helpdesk to work how you need it. Getting the most of your CRM means making it nice and straightforward to use.
(If you’d like to read about some ways our customers use HelpDesk to achieve their goals, why not have a read through this blog with a few examples.)
One of the best practises there is to segment your data appropriately. You want all of your teams to find the information they need without searching for a needle in a haystack! Therefore, Helpdesk is the ideal location for storing your client questions and resolutions.
