You may also like:

• Choosing A Help Desk For Shopify: 10 Best Solutions In 2022
• How Help Desk Automation Rules Can Improve Your Customer Service

Implementing the right tools for your customer service is as important as sincere individual efforts from the team members. You can be the most motivated customer support agent in the entire world, yet you would still find it very difficult to meet the ever-changing needs of today's demanding consumer as your inbox keeps filling up with requests.

As people get more and more comfortable with shopping online, quality customer service is becoming of utmost importance to any e-commerce business. Companies now start using customer service tools, like the help desk ticketing system, to be able to overcome the challenges of increased demand and improve customer support processes overall.

In this article, you will find out what is a help desk ticketing system, how can it benefit your business, boost the efficiency of your customer support agents, and why getting one should be at the top of your to-do list in the upcoming year.

What is a help desk ticketing system and why is it important?

No matter what you call it, be it a help desk software, service desk software, or simply help desk, it all refers to the same thing – a help desk ticketing system.

Help desk ticketing system is a customer service software that is intended to improve the experience for both customers and agents by collecting and centralizing all communications in a single location, giving a clearer image of each inquiry, enabling the use of automation rules and other functionalities that can help to streamline the support process.

Consider this:

• 80% of customers say that customer experience is as important as products and services themselves.
• 74% of customers make their purchase decisions based on how they were treated by the company.
• 61% of customers have stopped doing business with a brand due to the poor customer service experience.
• 57% of customers say that customer service influences their loyalty to a specific business, which brings us to the following…

The development of technology and basically unlimited access to information have empowered shoppers worldwide not to waste their time by giving second chances to the brands that care less than their competitors.

It means that with so many similar choices around, customers tend to be less loyal and do not mind switching companies more carelessly than ever before, making the customer experience one of the most important differentiating factors.

When customer loyalty is at stake, no one can afford to just ignore the processes that lead to it.

And that's where a help desk ticketing system can come in handy.

Why use help desk software?

Let’s go through some e-commerce help desk benefits and the key reasons for equipping your customer support team with a ticketing system.

1. You can keep up with customers' expectations

There are several things that customers expect when they decide to contact a business:

• A convenient way to reach out
• Quick resolution to their problems
• Personalized experience

By allowing to easily access all communications from one dashboard and use various internal functionalities, a help desk ticketing system can help businesses:

1. tame the wild amounts of inquiries, no matter where they come from

and

2. treat each customer as an individual rather than just another request.

Let's start with the former.

As much as businesses would like to take full control of the response times and the channels customers use for contacting them, that's no longer entirely their decision. Again, with so many different choices and so little patience, customers are actually the ones who dictate these conditions. And they demand their answers now via the channel they prefer.

It may sound like an inconvenience for business owners, yet it doesn't mean that customer support agents have to endlessly juggle multiple channels. A help desk software can automatically collect incoming inquiries from different sources and conveniently lay them all out for easy and, most importantly, much faster access.

That provides solutions to two of our problems: customers can use whatever they want to contact a business (be it an email, instant messengers, live chat, etc.), and receive a timely answer. When there's no need to switch channels anymore, the team can not only stay more focused and organized but also meet customers on their terms, which is what they expect.

What about personalization though? This brings us to the next point.

2. You can provide personalized experiences

Personalization is something customers value and oftentimes see as an indicator of how much a specific business values them.

Marketers have noticed that personalized shopping experiences are followed by an average increase of 20% in sales, while 8 out of 10 customers admit that companies that offer such experiences are more likely to win their business.

Without customer service tools, manually personalizing customer service requests sounds simply painful. Not only that, it's probably barely possible.

Usually, different help desk software come equipped with different functionalities that make it easier to organize and filter customers' requests. That can be:

• Possibility to address a customer by the name
• Access to communication and purchase history
• Custom templates
• Auto-responses
• Agent's signatures
• Internal comments, etc.

All of them, in one way or another, help brands build more personal relationships with people who are trying to get in touch. This comes as a cherry on top when combined with a prompt, unified communication experience.

3. You can address customers' concerns on a deeper level

Listen to this – 54% of customers would rather spend their day in wet socks than have to repeat themselves to customer support agents!

This means that when reaching out to brands for at least the second time, customers expect them to already know the context. They don't really want to wait any longer while agents are trying to figure out what a customer is referring to.

In this case, the help desk ticketing system can provide the support team with detailed information on purchase and/or communication history, allowing agents to access all of the most important data concerning past interactions with a specific customer. It helps to quickly get a comprehensive view of each request and provide fast and, most importantly, thorough support, boosting both its quality and customer satisfaction levels.

4. You can improve your team's work

We've been focusing on customers a lot, although what really brings such a positive impact on customer experience is the transparency and organization that help desk software adds to the customer support agents' daily routines.

Not to exaggerate, but a help desk ticketing system basically provides customer support reps with everything they need for keeping the standards high.

Depending on the software, the features vary from automations to tracking the individual progress of each customer support agent.

Some of the most important features to look for in a help desk ticketing system that are directly related to work efficiency could be the following:

• Collaboration. One of the crucial features of any service desk software that allows to see the progress of the whole team and helps to better organize the workflow. It means that different agents can be assigned to different tickets, yet still see who's working on what.
• Ticket automation. Some tasks are repetitive and can basically be considered a time-theft. Help desk ticketing system can automate most of them, letting customer support reps focus on more important issues.
• Ticket tags are necessary for keeping everything more organized. Besides, they can help businesses to spot common issues that their customers are dealing with daily.
• Customizable templates can actually make the process of resolving tickets much faster. There are always things that are common to many customers, so you can prepare the answers in advance by creating a template. Search option. Very simple yet important, the search field definitely improves the navigation through tickets, thus boosting the efficiency of the whole process.

Master customer service with an e-commerce help desk

Today, customer service is at the forefront of the whole online shopping experience and is one of the most important factors that makes a business stand out from its competitors.

To meet the increasing needs and expectations of customers, businesses should implement reliable solutions that help to deal with constantly growing demand.

The help desk ticketing system is a priceless tool when it comes to managing customer support requests. Not only does it help customer support agents to better organize their work, browse through tickets faster, stay more focused and motivated, but also provides shoppers with a better overall experience. It is one of the best ways to keep up with the rising expectations and meet them by giving the customer what it wants – fast, reliable, and attentive support.