Customer service and customer support is a big deal for consumers. 
It is an often overlooked factor that gets pushed well behind pricing as a priority for retailers and service providers. But based on the recent State of the Connected Customer report, 75 percent of shoppers said they expected consistency across customer support channels and 68 percent of shoppers were willing to spend more to get better customer service. 
One way that you can vastly improve your company’s customer service is by integrating the latest help desk software into the business. Leveraging help desk software has been shown to be able to save up to 670 working hours per year, reduce the number of phone calls by 10 percent, and free up 25 percent of help desk resources to be available for priority incident resolution. 
With those types of improvements possible, it’s no wonder that the help desk software market share is projected to reach $11 billion by 2023. And as we enter this new decade,  the key brand differentiator will no longer be competitive pricing and product quality but overall customer experience. 
In this article, we will explore what this means for your company and how you can approach improving your help desk capabilities. 

Focus on the customer experience

Customers are becoming more demanding than ever and are not afraid to voice their opinions about your service. They can easily rate and review your offerings through social media or online marketplaces. This means that customers can talk about your brand, for better or for worse, anytime and anywhere. That’s why today it’s so important to focus on delivering a great customer experience and having a useful and efficient help desk plays a big part in that. 
When considering what kind of help desk software might be right for you, it is worthwhile considering the follow key factors:

• Preferred customer communication channels – people’s preferred methods of communication are changing rapidly. With new text-based and live chat channels now available, there are more ways than ever for companies to communicate and engage with their customers. The 2018 Gladly Customer Service Expectations Survey revealed that the communication channels that customers are more likely to use are voice calls (82%), email (62%), live chat (43%), social media (25%), and SMS (22%).
• Internal CRM / reporting / tracking abilities – more than one third of customers report that they feel more valued if customer support agents are aware of their previous interactions. This is one of the major benefits of help desk software as all previous interactions are recorded and timestamped. This makes it easy to rapidly reconstruct a customer’s interaction history even if different customer service agents are in communication with a customer over time. 
• Which new and existing platforms provide the best help desk experience – There are a number of well-established help desk platform providers as well as a host of new startups entering the space. Some of the most popular platforms include Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Groove, and Freshservice. Each offer a range of capabilities with many featuring a large number of out of the box integrations to immediately supercharge your help desk experience.
• Don’t forget about your help desk workforce – More than 40 percent of shoppers report social skills as being an important aspect of customer support. This response easily surpassed the importance given for other factors such as the number of communications channels supported or the availability of website assistance. 

Help me help you

Help desk software has the capability to transform the level of customer service you offer as well as streamline the workflow of your customer support team. It helps open up new lines of communication, track interactions, and improve the productivity and effectiveness of your staff. But as customer surveys indicate, software alone can’t replace the need for the important human element in customer service. 
Finding the right help desk software for your business will provide a step-change in the level of service you can provide. But to offer truly great service you still need to have great help desk people to operate the software and engage with your customers. This is where Finite can help, as we can connect you with the best help desk people in tech. Get in contact today!

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