Why Do Businesses Need Good Customer Support?
Customer service is how a company handles interactions with customers, including any complaints, issues, or inquiries they might have.
This is a very important aspect of managing an organization with a growing amount of consumers.
People who have either a great experience or a very bad experience with a business will usually tell their friends about the company, either to encourage or warn them.
With poor customer support, a company will probably lose customers and turn away leads, overall having a negative effect on the business.
Those who provide excellent customer service, however, will generally benefit from more sales and traffic, since happy consumers are more likely to boast about it to their friends and, more importantly, come back again.
A full-fledged customer support panel will usually provide a space where complaints can be filed, questions can be asked, and feedback can be given through an interactive experience and the opportunity for self-service.
What is Freshdesk?
While customer service can be built through the business itself, there are products that can give an easier solution to providing excellent support.
Freshdesk is a cloud-based product by Freshworks Inc. that offers businesses a customizable and productive approach to customer support.
Freshdesk offers companies a large set of easy-to-use tools that help them help their customers without using up so much time.
When you sign up, you can either assign a URL for your company’s help desk or connect it to an existing preferred domain. Here, you and your team will be able to access your personal, full-fledged customer service platform.
Freshdesk is one of the most established and popular customer support products in its field, alongside other options such as Zoho Desk, Helpshift, LiveAgent, and HappyFox.
Freshdesk Features
Manage Tickets and Resolve Customer Issues
A great customer service panel will always have an exceptional ticketing system. A ticketing system is designed to take in issues as they are requested, file them into customer service tickets, and organize these until they are solved.
With Freshdesk, managing tickets is made simple and can be done through collaboration. All of the agents working on customer service will receive notifications of new tickets through a shared inbox.
You can also set a level of priority to each ticket and assign a specific member to handle each one.
Additionally, you can set up a service level agreement (SLA) and give each ticket due date to give your customers a good expectation of when they’ll receive a response.
Freshdesk even helps you find possible solutions to the issue by analyzing the keywords in each ticket and suggesting them beside the description.
Expand Your Customer Service to Social Networks
Supporting customers over social media can be a much more pleasant experience for some of them who are already spending their time there.
Freshdesk allows you to connect social accounts to your helpdesk. You’ll be notified of any messages or tweets your company receives and be able to respond directly through the Freshdesk platform.
This works for social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
Under the Social tab, you can even create social streams, meaning a set of keywords to monitor on Twitter.
You can use this to keep track of your competitors, any support questions in your field that don’t mention your brand, and otherwise stay on top of the marketing game.
Develop Knowledge Base Portals for Self-Service
Interactive customer support is great, but a lot of consumers might benefit from a simple and quick way to get their answer.
A useful feature in customer support is creating a knowledge base where customers can help themselves, providing a single section for things like frequently asked questions and answers, guides, tutorials, and technical tips.
This kind of self-service helps to minimize the number of tickets you receive, asking basic questions, and helps satisfy your customers with quick answers.
In Freshdesk, you can customize and organize your knowledge base by category, folder, and article/description.
The written articles can be built with custom CSS and HTML if you prefer or edited with easy text formatting, including pictures and GIFs.
Automate Repetitive Tasks for Faster Performance
Handling customer questions and complaints can include a lot of mundane, repetitive tasks. Freshdesk offers automated features for tasks like these to be completed hands-free.
Using the Supervisor tool, you can set rules and time-based triggers, allowing for things such as automatic reminders sent out to waiting for customers and clearing out you’re closed and finished tickets.
In a similar fashion, the Dispatch’s will automatically take care of things like sorting tickets, prioritizing them by time received, and assigning support members to solve them based on expertise.
Finally, if you have a live chat, you can use shorthand codes to save time spent typing generic replies. The same thing works for Canned Responses in support messages.
Increase Your Team’s Productivity with Game-like Mechanics
To make working customer service a little bit more fun, Freshdesk lets your agents solve “quests” like resolving a certain number of tickets.
They can earn points and compete for different virtual trophies and awards to get a game-like experience as they work.
Freshdesk Arcade helps keep your team motivated and productive.
Create Community Forums for Customer Interaction
Forums are a great feature in a website’s helpdesk. They allow customers to help each other and engage their problems and comments amongst themselves through an interactive platform.
Categorize and name your forums by subject, and let your community be built. Customers will share ideas and feedback that your admins can moderate.
Any critical issues that come up in the forums can also be made into separate support tickets.
Generate Detailed HelpDesk and Team Reports
Get an insight into how your site is performing and how effective your customer service team is in satisfying customers.
Freshdesk offers a number of different generated measurements under the Reports tab. This includes productivity reports, performance distribution, how long tickets stay in the rotation, how many tickets are coming in, and more.
You can add satisfaction surveys for your customers to complete and analyze the results later. There are even summaries provided for onsite timesheets and chats.
Support an International, Multilingual Customer Base
With Freshdesk, you can offer your service to customers all over the world, in any language.
Your articles can be automatically translated to a number of languages (such as Spanish, Chinese, French, Portuguese, and more) using third-party partners, e.g. Google Translate or Localise.
Customers will receive emails in their preferred language, and all multi-lingual content performance will be provided in one dashboard.
Add Widgets and Support Channels to Your Site
There are a number of widgets you can add to your customer service pages. A useful one is Live Chat, so your agents and customers can communicate their issues in real-time.
With the Feedback widget, customers can create support tickets themselves. Other widget options include Mobihelp and Facebook and Twitter channels.
Freshdesk even offers a built-in phone channel. For just $1 a month, you can purchase a number and implement a cloud-based call center.
Choosing Easy, Cloud-Based Customer Support
Freshdesk is leading the market in customer service solutions. Right now, there are over 100,000 companies using this product to guide their customers through an easy-to-use and helpful platform.
You’ll want a customer support service that can integrate with different apps, too, like time trackers and CRM services. Luckily, Freshdesk integrates with more than 65 top-rated brands, including various Google Apps and communication networks like Skype and MailChimp.
The best part of all of this is that you can get started with Freshdesk at zero costs. The Sprout plan offers you an unlimited amount of agents and access to all of Freshdesk’s basic tools and channels for free.
For more features, there are four different advanced monthly plans available from $25 to $99 per agent.
I highly recommend you get started with Freshdesk today and take a look at its great features for yourself. You won’t be disappointed!
