At the heart of any major IT company is its customer base. They are the driving force that powers revenue into your company, and their opinions about your products and services can either make or break your brand. That is why it is vital to maintaining proper communication between your company and them if they encounter technical issues with your products in any stage of your sales funnel. This communication comes from a service desk – an indispensable tool in your IT infrastructure.
Let’s take a look at a service desk and how it is used to improve your customer’s experience.
Service Desk: A Brief Description
According to Tech Target.com, a service desk is a communications center that provides a single point of contact (SPOC) between a company and its customers, employees and business partners. The purpose of a service desk is to ensure that users receive appropriate help in a timely manner.
In a nut shell, it is an IT system that is designated to handle incidents and customer requests in real time by connecting your customer base with qualified individuals in your team. This ensures that customer concerns are addressed in a timely manner before they are escalated publicly which can result in damaging your company’s brand. Never forget that bad press spreads quicker and much more ferociously than good press does, and having a firestorm of customer complaints can quickly sink a new product’s launch.
How a Service Desk Improves Customer Experience
When your customers encounter a problem, they want it solved quickly. Unfortunately, patients is not a virtue of an aggravated customer that just handed over hard-earned money for a product that has not lived up to its expectations. Not only do they want the issue solved in a timely manner, they what it done in a way that is convenient to them.
Here are 3 ways that a service desk facilitates this overall process.
Accessibility
Long gone are the days that consumers line up at the nearest service center to have their products fixed. The modern consumer wants a direct portal in which they can address issues directly from the comfort of their own home or workplace that does not add any additional hassle beyond what they are already experiencing. By providing your customers the ability to access a service desk, they can get there issues sorted out in a less stressful way that is convenient to them.
Faster Turn Around Time
As we mentioned before, not only do your customers wants issues fixed, they want it done quickly. There is nothing more frustrating than contacting a company about a faulty product or service only to be transferred from department to department trying to find the right person to address your issue. A properly set up service desk will allow you to quickly funnel your customer to the correct personal that are trained to handle the issue most effectively. But, there must be a framework setup in which problems that cannot be properly handled by that service personnel are easily escalated to an employee with a more advanced skill set.
By giving your customer direct access to the right personnel quickly and efficiently, your overall turn-around time for issues drastically reduces which not only gives them an overall better experience, but also save your company precious resources in the process.
Valuable Feedback
By having a properly set up service desk in place, you are not only able to solve your customer’s issues, but gather valuable data in the process. Customer feedback is key when dealing with reoccurring problems. With this feedback, your company is able to either prevent the issue from ever returning, or if you cannot solve the issue directly, you can have proper protocols in place so that you can address the issue much more quickly when it presents itself again.
This feedback is not only valuable for products and services that have already been purchased by consumers, but also in the buying process. You might not realize that you have a major speed bump in your checkout process that is leading to a huge drop off of customers who just give up trying to buy your products. Customer feedback will show gaps in the checkout process so that they can be fixed properly which will lead to higher conversions, and more sales.
In Conclusion
A service desk is an extremely valuable tool that must be included in your day to day operations. It provides your client base an easy way to directly communicate with skilled individuals that can address their concerns and questions. It greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to fix problems, and it even uproots future problems that are likely to occur. It also provides a forum in which valuable feedback can be utilized in developing strategies and processes for future products launches. It keeps your customer based happy and loyal to your brand while saving your company from wasting resources and reduces bad press. So tell me this – are you properly utilizing a service desk at your company?