How to Actually Solve Help Desk Ticket

As a help desk staff, dealing with angry and frustrated customers all day can be super hectic. Eventually, it feels like a redundant task of dealing with help desk tickets. But understanding that there is an actual person on the other side you are supposed to help is crucial for positive customer satisfaction.

A great help desk software like [Brand Name] can help you with customer satisfaction. However, at the end of the day, customer satisfaction comes down to whether you solved their problem or not. That's why you must focus on the customer, not the help desk ticket.

Focus on Listening

Communication skills are one of the many skills you need for a help desk job, and listening is a crucial part of communication. No one likes to talk with a person who is just pretending to listen. The same goes for the customers. Hence, listening is such an integral part of your help desk job. Listening can actually help you better understand their problems.

Listening involves paying attention to what the customer is saying, the way they are saying it, and the hidden clues in their statements. It requires a decent level of communication skills to handle the customer's frustration, aggression, or disappointment and help them explain to you the actual problem they are facing.

Some of them may yell, some of them may go on for a long rant, and some of them may not even explain their problem correctly. You must have patience and a positive and friendly tone to withstand all that to get to the core problem.

Let the customer know that you understand the problem they are facing and how it's affecting their experience with the product. One way of doing this is by showing empathy, no matter how unreasonable or irrational they act.

A help desk staff must understand that most of these customers are not familiar with the technical aspects of the work simply because they don't need to. Hence, expecting them to understand your problem is the complete opposite of what they want. Another way to better sympathize with the customers is to put yourself in the customer's shoes to understand their struggle.

Over time, better listening skills will result in a better customer experience. There are multiple ways to measure your communication skills, like asking for feedback after the interaction or frequent surveys to identify progress.

Feedback is really important, not only to measure the communication skills of help desk staff but also for the company to identify and solve frequent problems, queries and find out what's working, what's not working, and what's missing. All of it, eventually to make the user experience better.

Set-up a Prioritization System

The ticket prioritization system is now an essential part of every help desk team. It helps you in dealing with customers that need an immediate resolution. However, every customer feels that their problem should be prioritized the most. That's why it's crucial to set up a system that can identify the severity and urgency of the problems and prioritize them accordingly.

There are various strategies and plans that different companies use to prioritize their tickets, and some use a combination of them. A combination of these strategies will always serve your customers the best. Some of the most popular ticket prioritization strategies that companies use include the first-come, first-served, severity and urgency, and customer-type basis.

The easiest and simplest of them all is the first-come, first-served system, which basically means that the tickets will be attended in chronological order as they come. It is easy, simple, and effective only when you're working at a small start-up and not receiving an overload of tickets every day.

When the flow of tickets rises, other systems prove to be more effective, like attending tickets based on their severity and urgency. Surprisingly some companies let their customers decide the severity and urgency of their problem through a rating system.

Another way of prioritizing tickets is on a customer-type basis. It means separating customer complaint tickets based on paid customers, free customers, and VIP customers.

Using a combination of these strategies will help your team to set up a ticket prioritization system that allows you to focus on the most critical cases first, understand what they are facing, and solve them. It will improve customer experience, customer satisfaction, and will help build a better relationship with the customer. One can set up such an arrangement and can solve similar IT problems faster with the help of any help desk software like our [Brand Name].

Focus on Learning and Adapting

Learning is a life-long process, and the same goes for a help desk job as well. In fact, one of the main goals of the help desk department is to identify the most common problems and issues customers are facing with the product, so the company can fix or improve it, which means the company is also learning.

That is why gathering knowledge and experience from others, and then sharing them with the team will not only improve your skills but will improve the entire team's skills, which will eventually lead to better customer service. There are multiple ways of doing this.

Set up a knowledge base

The first way of learning and sharing knowledge is with the help of a knowledge base. A knowledge base in help desk software allows the team to set up pre-written scripts, instructions, commands, or messages for the most common inquiries and complaints.

With the help of a knowledge base, a team can help way more customers in way less time. It has other benefits as well. It takes way less time for the customer to find a resolution, and it gives the help desk staff more time to focus on newer and more vital tickets.

Use analytics and reporting to improve help desk

Analytics and reporting are crucial tools that help your IT manager adjust and set up a better help desk system. There are various kinds of analytics and reporting. There are ones that show the different complaints and inquiries, their frequency, and what solution the help desk is providing. These data can help the company solve the most common issues with their product.

Then there are analytics and reporting collected through feedback and surveys from the customers to improve the help desk operations. These data will show how practical the help desk's approach is to help your team focus on the spheres that need more attention.

The Ultimate Goal is to Solve their Problem

The ultimate goal of the help desk should be to help the customer and provide them a reasonable solution. Sometimes things go wrong or may not go as the customer expects. In such situations, the customer feels neglected and being lied to. Especially when the company does not reveal the true problem, that's why transparency and honesty with customers are essential.

The best approach is to first explain to them the cause of the problem they are facing and why they are facing it. Once again, communication skills will play a huge role in handling the customers, as some will not be ready to listen. Try to avoid explaining in too many technical terms. Instead, use business terms, terms that the customers can easily understand. Once the customer understands what's going on, most of them will calm down.

Another crucial mistake that most help desk or companies make is that they create false expectations for the customers and make fake promises to satisfy the client at the moment. Once again, this makes the company appear scandalous to the customer. Instead, explaining the situation as it is, is a much better approach. Not every customer may leave satisfied, but they will respect and trust you and the company for its transparency and honesty.

This includes telling the customers realistic time frames for their resolution, informing them in advance when systems and processes are down, admitting to mistakes made by you, your team, or the company, and sometimes, why the help desk can't help them.

Focusing on treating the person as an actual person. Sympathizing with them will tremendously help the company to grow, most importantly, its reputation.