Never Pull another All-Nighter Again with these 4 Helpdesk Automation Tips

As an entrepreneur, you have already created a helpdesk for solving your customer problems. You are also using it to offer assistance to your customers on ways of using your services or products. However, in case your service team and you are doing all the work on your own, your helpdesk is not being utilized to its full capacity. Rather, your helpdesk is only depending on the manual workflows every day and you lose your money and time. The worst part is there could be some issues that you may simply miss out if your helpdesk is entirely on a manual mode. For instance, you could simply forget about a helpdesk ticket accidentally. Or you would have to be awake the entire night trying to sort out some unnecessary problems. The answer to all these issues is going for helpdesk automation. You need not waste any nonessential time at your helpdesk or go through one more all-nighter once again with the following tips on automation.

1. Routing incoming helpdesk tickets and tackling them
In many helpdesks, the system of ticket routing sill looks like a traditional telephone switchboard. There is a dedicated manpower that takes care of every new inquiry and then determines which department or person to send it for taking further action.helpdesk software, tickets can be automatically assigned to the owner along with other details like priority and due date.

Likewise, rules for ticket routing can be established to keep a tab on a variety of parameters like which remote user portal the ticket originated from. From there, the said helpdesk ticket can be assigned automatically to the relevant owners with due priorities and dates.

Automating ticket routing enables the customer service agents of your helpdesk to have the time to concentrate on other important tasks as some of their responsibilities related to allocating and sorting tickets get reduced. The time saved is used by them to work on improving customer experience. Not only can you automate the process of ticket assignments, but you will be also able to automate the follow-ups to be done with your customers. When helpdesk tickets are routed automatically, there is no need for your team or you to sort all of them manually, which is such a tedious process. When you get the best helpdesk software available in the market, your customer service agents can be assigned tickets the moment they come in. You can also tag these tickets and get them sorted automatically according to categories.

2. Helping with the responses to helpdesk tickets from the beginning
It is an era of mobile device today and many helpdesks are no longer based at only one location. Helpdesk tickets will and can come pouring in even when a service agent is not sitting in front of a computer or has logged out of the system. Have you ever wondered what the best means to offer an excellent response in such circumstances is?

Best helpdesk software can enable the administrators to include special commands that are denoted by hash marks/octothorpes. These comments cannot be seen by the recipients of an email but the software can process them automatically.

Plus, automating the responses to the helpdesk tickets can also ensure that even people who are non-admins could also take leverage of many other features of automation so that the tickets can be handled practically from any place. While a helpdesk might not be a literal desk, it can still offer detailed help. The change helps in automating ticket routing, easy anywhere/anytime responses, and ticket routing much easier.

3. Automate ticket follow-ups
Experts have predicted that the popularity of helpdesk automation is on a rise. When follow-ups are automated, customer wait times can e alleviated tremendously. In fact, you can also find out which tickets are pending for a response or overdue. There can be also an option to create reminders so that it is easy for your team to remember about a ticket status always. While some tickets can wait for a while, others should be on the radar as soon as possible.

Plus, automated follow-up rules can be set for all the tickets. Alternatively, pre-defined answers can be sourced from the company knowledge base to give pre-defined answers. An example can be tickets for which there are no responses may be flagged when there is no response for them within 4-5 hours.

4. Using a dashboard to always stay updated
Do you feel that your agents are spending too much time responding to the helpdesk tickets? You would love to see all your top performance metrics like first-time call resolution, average response time, average call handling time and so on in a single location.  

Any good helpdesk software constitutes a dashboard where you can see all the metrics simultaneously. Multiple team members can be given different access level permissions for seeing the reports generated by the dashboard. While admins will see everything, limited or customized viewing permission can be assigned to other users.

When your helpdesk was created, you had good intentions and great hopes. However, the workload that your agents can be facing is actually massive. If you and your team are doing all the work manually, you could lose precious money and time.