The 8 Best Help Desk Software Features for Your Business

It sounds like 90s throwback IT jargon straight out of the movie Office Space–help desk software. It’s also one of the most cutting edge technologies used by online businesses today to help drive online sales and manage customer communication. Help desk software features, typically integrated within or part of a larger live chat product, facilitate customer communication and customer service teamwork, all while deliberately increasing sales.

IT helpdesk software has revolutionized the way businesses service customer needs. The massive shift in technology these past few years has made phone and email virtually obsolete tools for the very complex task of accommodating customers from all walks of life, all interconnected via the internet. Combined with an ongoing desire from consumers to have faster, more responsive, and more effective customer service, it is unlikely that live chat management will be matched or bested by alternative solutions anytime soon.

So, why has help desk software become the in-demand solution for online businesses today? And, what core competencies lie behind these help desk software features? In particular, we will also take a deep look at conversation tagging in Smartsupp, a feature that is essential to organizing your customer chats, and much more.

The 8 Best Help Desk Software Features

Let’s face it–meeting customer demands, making every visitor experience personalized, and ensuring consistent, rapid replies to every chat is very hard work. Most customer service teams endure many daily challenges while trying to resolve tickets as efficiently as possible. Help desk ticketing software makes the daily duress of customer care easier, all while helping webshops increase their conversion rates and sales, making it the most in-demand solution for online businesses today.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at the top 8 help desk software features essential to making the most of your customer care efforts.

#1. Live Chat

Simply put, live chat is the gateway to your customer–no live chat means no direct communication with the people who visit your website to purchase products. It would literally be like having a shop, but no shop assistant. Your customer service team relies upon a sturdy chat solution that comes armed with all the help desk software features you will likely need in order to make the most of your visitor communication.

Also known as customer service chat, help desk software is specialized in customer care, which helps ensure that your visitors have the assistance they need while visiting your website. The live chat portion of online help desk software is primarily used for resolving visitor inquiries via human communication or chatbot support, as well as exchanging files.

In summary, the chat itself is the core communication tool, but without other features, it is likely that serious online businesses will struggle to organize their customer conversations and capitalize on all of the opportunities the live chat delivers.

#2. Chatbots

Need a proper customer care sidekick? Chatbots are the extra agent on your team that you can’t be without, saving you loads of time, resources, and money. How? Simple–your human customer service agents need all of the time they can get to attend to relevant visitor inquiries in order to generate more sales for the business. By correctly setting up your chatbot, you are able to fast-track customer needs through chatbot menu options and even filter visitor questions to identify good sales opportunities so that your agents don’t waste time with small or irrelevant requests.

Within the realm of help desk software features, the chatbot can be seen as a core necessity within live chat solutions. The chatbot is essential as a tool precisely because it helps maximize the great online sales results you can achieve within the chat box, with virtually no extra effort needed.

Simply put, a correctly set up chatbot translates to more sales and better customer service.

#3. Conversation Management

Managing visitor conversations is a necessity within customer service teams. A strong IT support ticketing system should help customer care agents organize every single chat with ease, so that when customer needs arise they are readily available to help quickly and effectively. In particular, Smartsupp offers an excellent feature for this particular task: conversations tagging.

Conversations tagging gives help desk agents the ability to organize messages from customers. Designating tags to conversations empowers agents to analyze customer tickets at-a-glance, and help categorize tickets with in depth subjects so that they never lose sight of important conversations. Don’t forget, a successful online business relies on rapid replies and fast resolution to customer requests – conversations tagging will help you achieve that consistently.

As this is a brand new feature addition within the Smartsupp live chat product, we will have a look at some potential use cases with conversations tagging further below to help us better see the great business functions we can achieve with this particular help desk software feature.

#4. Team Statistics

Tracking your customer service team’s performance is essential to improving your online business. Statistics offered within products like Smartsupp allow agents to see where they can make improvements in their customer care strategy. It also allows managers to set goals for agents and see if they are hitting their targets.

Offering everything from graphs about agent performance, all the way through to conversation rating, response time, online time, and statistics of individual agents, a powerful customer support ticketing system is able to deliver all of the data you will likely need to know about your team’s overall effectiveness. Your agents will benefit from understanding where they can possibly improve certain aspects of their work.

Keeping up with customer support quality via statistical and graphical analysis let’s help desk teams optimize performance, driving better sales and rendering happier customers.

#5. Data and Metrics

If data and metrics were not included as help desk software features within most IT help desk software products, any business would be at a severe loss. Data and metrics about visitors and customers help you better understand who your core audience is on your website, and how successfully you are managing their requests.

In particular, online help desk software provides key visitor insights like name, email address, location, operating system, web browser, number of visits to your site, and browsing history–the basic details that help develop a customer profile of the people on your site.

But, the real powerful metrics can be pulled from the API (Application Programming Interface) where users can program different metrics to track and evaluate. Information like time spent on your site in previous visits, number of orders they made, if they are new visitors or VIP customers, and virtually any parameter that can designate with code on your database, is powerful when put to good use.

Customer information is extremely valuable, and tracking this data within a customized API can be a business game-changer for your customer service professionals.

#6. Website, Email, and Social Media Integration

We live in a digitally interconnected world. Customer care teams need help desk software that connects across multiple platforms. Web chat is a help desk software feature specifically built like a Messenger chat. It should be no surprise that IT help desk ticketing software offers a unified multichannel dashboard from which agents can directly reply to messages sent to your business website, email, and social media accounts like Facebook.

Website as well as Facebook integration facilitate online sales and interaction with website visitors and customers. Email integration with the live chat helps centralize replies to all visitor communication within your dashboard. This ease in communication not only facilitates customer care efforts, it is also a great way to enhance your business.

Staying in touch with your visitors is at least half the battle to driving online sales. As such, integration of website, email, and socials can be considered business-critical.

#7. Visitor Lists

Wouldn’t you like to know who is coming to your website? Smartsupp Visitor Lists allow agents to see all of the visitors that are on your website, how many times they’ve visited, what source they came from, and more.

Organized via a series of different filters, the visitor list help desk feature is specifically designed to help agents visualize and analyze the people and traffic on the website. This is a particularly useful help desk software feature precisely because of the bird’s-eye view it gives agents, but the real value is in being able to engage the visitors on your site.

In the end, every conversation is a sales opportunity, and seeing an overview of your site visitors can help solidify your customer care and sales efforts.

#8 AI Support

Ever noticed how a chat feels different when the tone changes? AI support does just that. But there’s more! It also gives personalized suggestions to visitors based on what it learns from them. This means more chances to turn a simple chat into a potential lead. Personal touches based on data might be the push a visitor needs to become interested.

See the conversational AI chatbot.

Conversations Tagging Use Cases

Conversations Tagging opens new organizational opportunities for IT help desk teams. It also saves time, resources, and even improves sales opportunities. Let’s take a look at a few potential use cases that demonstrate a little bit of what you can achieve with Smartsupp Conversations Tagging:

Sort Conversations with Ease

Customer care professionals, you all know how it is–if you had a penny for every ticket you had to solve each day, you would be “frickin’ millionaires”, right? At the end of the month, the amount of tickets solved can be in the multiple hundreds, and identifying the most frequently asked questions could require herculean effort.

Conversation tagging is a help desk software feature that allows customer service agents to sort tickets with ease. By using tags, teams are able to see what type of customers contact them most regularly, and the types of questions or requests they are most typically answering. In this way, they are able to more effectively reply to general requests and also keep an eye out for the most typical questions they receive.

Sorting conversations with ease optimizes customer care workflow, which translates to saving money and resources.

Optimize Content for Customers

Oftentimes, visitors on your site can come across issues like being lost on a page, not being able to find the specific items they want, and other web layout mishaps that affect their shopping experience. As one would expect, the first thing they will typically do is reach out to customer support.

With conversations tagging, you can make note of all of these instances in order to avoid having to manually reply to these inquiries. If you use a chatbot, you are able to improve the chatbot options offered in the chat box menu and set up replies to these repeat questions. Alternatively, by keeping tabs on all of your tickets, once you realize that a particular issue is very common, you may decide to modify the content or layout of your website so that visitors no longer run into these problems.

Keeping an eye on customer experience is business-critical–with conversations tagging, you can make a note of recurring questions in order to improve the content on your site.

Set Priority Items

As a customer service manager, you have the greatest responsibility of all–stay on top of a whole team of people responsible for assisting valuable customers. Ensuring that your resources are spent wisely is of the utmost importance, and conversations tagging is a brilliant way to stay on top of this.

The tags can be used by managers to mark the different conversations related to various topics. In this manner, it becomes easier to assess where time is not being spent wisely, and how to improve work efforts across the customer care team. In the end, your agents must spend their time wisely, and giving them a chance to work more effectively so that they can go home a bit earlier, while keeping the interest of the business in mind, is truly working smart and not just hard.

Setting priority items will help make your team more effective–save energy for where it counts, your agents and business will appreciate it!

Conclusion

Help desk software features like the ones listed in this article help make the daily work of customer care agents more manageable. It also helps businesses continue to deliver premium customer service while boosting their conversion rates and overall sales. In particular, new features like Smartsupp’s Conversations Tagging are helping live chat products evolve into tools that literally offer every little tool and functionality needed to continue driving online sales, all while building a community of happy return customers.

Want to learn more about Smartsupp? Check out our brand spankin’ new Smartsupp Academy to see how you can take your online business to the next level!