How to Provide the Best Internal Support

by

Two weeks ago iMovo and Zendesk collaborated to host a half-day event which drew special attention to how companies can provide great customer service.

At the end of the event we asked all attendees to answer two simple questions to help us understand:

  1. What is their number one customer service issue
  2. What is their number one customer service opportunity

We thus gathered all the feedback and found that one issue was particularly niggling.

The #1 issue is (Drum Roll Please…)

In-house Help Desk Support

(Or as more commonly known – Internal Support.)

Inter­nal cus­tomer ser­vice is the ser­vice pro­vided to col­leagues and other depart­ments within a business, as well as suppliers and any­one else an employee inter­acts with to get their job done.

How internal queries and requests are handled provides an excellent reflection of the service level that is provided to external customers. It therefore makes sense to invest in the necessary tools and procedures to make sure that your internal customers (i.e. employees) are kept happy and satisfied. It is a well-known fact that satisfied employees result in increased productivity and performance, and if internal employees are happy, the likelihood is that the happiness will rub off on external customers as well.

zendesk

We would like to bring you a few tips that may help you at the early stages, when you are setting up an internal support structure:

  1. Create a well-defined service level agreement (SLA) or service catalogue. In this way, the proper expectations can be set from the start.
  2. Focus on giving your agents everything they need to get their jobs done. The help desk should be a place where people come for help not to complain bitterly at agents.
  3. Make sure that agents and employees are armed with all the information they require. An internal knowledge base will mean that firstly, agents have all the information they need at the click of a button and secondly, employees will be able to easily find the answers to their questions, thus reducing the number of queries raised.
  4. Hire the best employees you can find. A happy well-managed team helps increase employee retention. Thus, agents’ skills are improved over time and are able to solve more difficult issues efficiently.
  5. Track issues till the finish line. The ticket process should be transparent – with both the internal user and the agent being able to tell the status of the issue. This helps when an agent needs to jump in knowing exactly where his colleague has left off a conversation with an internal user.
  6. The help desk is there to increase the effectiveness of every user. It should be viewed as a valued partner of every department and not just there to clean up the mess.

By strengthening your internal help-desk support team, you could easily turn the issues you are facing into opportunities, thus increasing the value of your team and ultimately also enhancing your brand image.

If you would like to learn more about Zendesk and how this can help you provide a seamless internal customer service experience, just feel free to contact us by email on [email protected] or on any of our social media channels; facebook and twitter.